How Do I Know If My Parental Rules Are Good? What I Learned At A School Drop Off Coffee Chat
The foam on my oat latte had already gone flat by the time Sarah pulled her folding chair next to mine at the elementary school picnic table last month. We’d both just dropped our third graders off, and most other parents had already headed to work or carpool for younger kids. She stirred her black coffee for a full minute before leaning in and asking, “Can you tell me if my parental rules are good?”
I wasn’t surprised she asked. I’ve worked as a parent educator for 10 years, but more than that, I’ve been that parent staying up until 10pm arguing with my partner about whether our screen time rules are too strict or too lenient. Five years ago, when my oldest was 8, I printed a full page of 12 house rules, taped it to the fridge, and spent 20 minutes every night yelling about someone breaking one. By the end of that semester, I was convinced I was either raising a habitual rule-breaker or creating a kid too scared to make a mistake, and neither option felt good.
Sarah told me she and her husband have been fighting about rules for six months. He wants zero screens during the school week, no exceptions. She wants 30 minutes after homework, because all their son’s friends talk about Roblox before school, and he comes home upset that he has nothing to add. Last week, they found his old tablet hidden under his mattress, and he’d been getting up at 5am to play for an hour before anyone woke up. “We don’t know if we’re wrong to be strict, or wrong to cave,” she said. “How do you even tell what a good rule is anymore?”
I told her what my pediatrician asked me when I brought this exact question to her back then. She didn’t give me a list of perfect rules, just three simple questions to test any rule I’d made. I started using them, and they changed how we do rules at our house completely.
The first question is: Can your kid restate this rule in their own words, without you getting mad at them for getting it wrong? When I had my big list of 12 rules, one of them was “no screens before homework is done.” That sounded clear to me, until my son got a FaceTime from his friend asking what page the math homework was on. I counted that as breaking the rule and took away his after-dinner screen time. He cried for 20 minutes, because he thought the rule only applied to playing games, not talking to friends. That’s on me, not him. When I asked Sarah if her son could explain her family’s “no lying” rule, she paused. “We got mad at him last week for saying he brushed his teeth when he only wet the brush,” she said. “I guess we never told him the difference between forgetting to brush and lying about something big, like hiding a tablet.” The concrete fix I use now is once a month, I sit down with my kids after dinner and go over our 3 main house rules, and ask each of them to tell me what they think each one means. If they stumble, or we disagree, we reword the rule together right then.
The second question is: Does following this rule require more self-control than a kid this age actually has? My old rule was that all toys had to be completely put away before breakfast. My son was 9, and he’d fallen down a Lego rabbit hole the night before, and all he could think about over breakfast was getting back to finishing his spaceship. Half the time he forgot to clean up, I’d take away his weekend screen time, and we’d start the day fighting. I didn’t get it then, but a 9 year old’s brain isn’t wired to prioritize cleaning up Lego over the thing he’s obsessed with building first thing in the morning. I changed it to a 2-minute quick pick up before breakfast, and full clean up before dinner, and the morning fights stopped almost overnight. For Sarah and her husband, the zero screens rule was the same problem: an 8 year old who wants to play with his friends isn’t going to have the self-control to sit out every single day, no matter how good the rule sounds to an adult.
The third question is: Are you willing to follow this same rule yourself? I had a “no phones at the dinner table” rule for years, and I’d sit there checking work emails and texting my sister about carpool the whole time. I got so mad when my son picked up my phone to look up a Pokemon card fact mid-meal. It took me way too long to see how unfair that was. Sarah admitted she and her husband scroll TikTok in bed after 8pm, when their son is supposed to have zero screens, so of course he thinks it’s unfair that he can’t join. If I can’t follow the rule, I’ve learned, it’s not a good rule for our house. I changed the dinner table rule to “no phones at the table for anyone, unless we’re waiting for an urgent call,” and that’s something we all stick to.
A month after that coffee chat, Sarah texted me. They sat down with their son, rewrote their rules to three clear ones: 45 minutes of screen time after homework is checked, no screens after 7:30pm, no hiding devices. He still goes over by 10 minutes once a week, but there’s been no more sneaking, no more lying. She and her husband still disagree sometimes, but now they test a rule for a month instead of fighting about it before they try it.
We still have rule breaks at my house. Last week, my 12 year old stayed up 30 minutes late reading a graphic novel on his tablet, when our rule is no screens after 9pm. He didn’t hide it, though; he told me at breakfast that he couldn’t put the book down, and he accepted losing 30 minutes of screen time that night. It’s not perfect. I still make up arbitrary rules when I’m frustrated, like “no more cookies for the week” after two kids fight over the last one, and I usually walk those back a few hours later.
Good rules don’t mean your kid never breaks them. They just mean they make sense for everyone in the house, and you don’t spend half your day arguing about them. That’s the only test that’s ever mattered for me, anyway.
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