Helpful Hints For Empowering Vs. Enabling

An Excerpt from Positive Discipline for Teenagers

by Jane Nelsen and Lynn Lott

A friend asked me if Positive Discipline was a program to teach parents to manage their children. I said, “No, it is a program to help parents empower their children to manage themselves.”

You may be vividly aware of how skilled most of us are in using enabling responses to our children, and how unskilled we are in using empowering responses. Parents who are used to controlling and rescuing may have a difficult time seeing the benefit of empowering statements.

Before we introduce the empowering actions and statements, we’ll go over enabling actions and statements—just in case you aren’t familiar with them. Our definition of enabling is, “Getting between young people and life experiences to minimize the consequences of their choices.” Enabling responses include: