It’s always good to have a back-up plan. When your defiant teen surprises you with out of the box behavior, you should be ready with a proper response or plan of action. After setting your house rules or guidelines and their corresponding penalties, you should go over each one and think of all the ways things may mess up. It’s always good to be prepared.

Here are other issues with examples of questions you can consider when trying to think ahead of your troubled teenager:

Substance Abuse
• If I sense that my teenager may be trying drugs or drinking alcohol, what then?
• If I find out that my teenager has a drug or alcohol habit even if he himself is not aware of it, what then?
• If my teenager won’t get himself tested for drugs or elevated alcohol levels, what then?
• If my teenager goes into relapse and won’t try to get better again, what then?

Hostile Behavior
• If my teenager makes threats of physically abusing another, how will I react? What then?
• If my teenager exhibits hostile behavior or violence, what then?
• If upon calling for help like the police, they  do not provide me with the support I need, what then?
• If my teenager lies to the authorities and says that I was the one abusing him instead, what then?

Teenage Depression and Suicide
• If a counselor and I monitor my teenager, yet he remains to be threatening to commit suicide or engage in self-harm, what then?
• If I don’t have time around my working schedule to properly monitor my teenager, what then?
• If my teenager performs a suicide attempt, what then?
• If my teenager needs to be hospitalized because of his attempted suicide, what then?

In order to make the most of these “thinking ahead” questions, you must try and put yourself in your teenager’s shoes. Try and think like a teenager in order to predict his moves. After going through these questions, try and think up possible back-up plans for individual cases. But it is important that you keep these plans to yourself. As much as possible you only want to resort to using them when the situation absolutely calls for them.