Family Home Rules Contract Template Page 7

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Home Rules must be clear to all and followed by all living under this roof, including the parents. You
create the rules in conjunction with your children’s input (both for the rules and the correction actions for
not following the rules). These must be written out and displayed for maximum benefit.
HOME RULES CONTRACT
What is the Purpose of a Home Rules Contract?
The primary purpose of a Home Rules Contract is for teens to be held accountable for their behavior while
allowing parents to maintain a reasonable amount of control. A Home Rules Contract will teach teens that there
are consequences to breaking rules, the knowledge of which hopefully will transfer in the teen's mind to school
rules as well as the legal system.
Steps to Creating a Home Rules Contract
1. Identify a maximum of five (5) problem behaviors that you feel need to be improved.
2. Specifically identify what the expectation is for each behavior.
3. Specifically state what the privileges and consequences will be when a teen is either following the rules or
chooses to break the rules.
4. Set a date that the contract may be revised and/or negotiated.
VERY IMPORTANT - Consult with other parental figures to make sure that
ALL ARE IN AGREEMENT AND WILLING TO ENFORCE THE CONTRACT AS WRITTEN.
The items below are only suggestions to get you started. Parents must take their own individual circumstances and
priorities into account when setting up the individual items in a Home Rules Contract. Some items that might be
considered priorities, other than those listed below, might include profanity or abusive language towards other
family members, homework issues for students with poor grades, and violent behavior towards family members,
including pushing, shoving, and slapping.
A list of possible priorities to include
in a Home Rules Contract includes:
1. Curfew
10. Conflict resolution (helpful
when two siblings are at each
2. Chores
other's throats)
3. School behavior and grades
11. Running away
4. Smoking
12. Medication issues and
compliance (for those who
5. Telephone use
take regular medicines, such
as Ritalin)
6. Computer use
13.
Attendance at therapy
7. Use of the car
sessions
8. Alcohol/drug use
9.
Expression of anger or
violence, including profanity
NOTE: For the safety of everybody involved, police should be called for ALL violent episodes that occur on the
part of the teen with the perceived intent of injuring a family member or destroying property that belongs to other
family members. Violence that has no consequences will continue to escalate and could eventually result in a
serious incident, so this type of behavior needs to be halted immediately by allowing the teen to experience serious
consequences for the violent behavior (police, charges and possible court date). It sounds harsh to call the police
on your own child, but it is better to have the teen learn from you that violence will never be tolerated, and that this

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