Discipline tips are extremely helpful when working in preteen ministry. Working with tweens and preteens involves certain levels of craziness. Despite your creativity, programming, and structure, preteens occasionally get out of hand.
When your best attempts to calm things down and regain attention aren’t effective? Then (and only then) it’s time for an escalated response.
3 Discipline Tips To Refocus Preteens
Here are three next-step discipline tips for working with preteens.
1. Say their name.
When subtler attempts fail, you’re forced to interrupt whoever is speaking (you or another student). That’s why this isn’t the intervention of first resort. Simply say the preteen’s name, with the hope of focusing them. You don’t need to launch into a long lecture; just use their name. If that fails…
2. Combine their name with a positive statement of expectation.
Don’t tell the preteen what not to do! That only draws attention to the misbehavior. Point the student in the right direction.
- “I need you to sit up.”
- “You need to look at whoever’s speaking.”
- “Can you put that (game/toy/phone) in your pocket, please?”
3. Separate the preteen temporarily.
You’ve been forced to interrupt class entirely. Everyone knows who the offender is, including the offender. You’ve identified them by name. You don’t have time to launch into a longer explanation of what they’re doing wrong. They either know and don’t care that it’s disruptive. Or they don’t understand what they’re doing wrong and need a fuller explanation.
Either way, you can’t read their mind, and you don’t have time to ask questions. So from this point, it’s good to designate another leader to handle things. The goal is to return the student to your group as soon as possible. But they must demonstrate that they recognize what they were doing, why it was distracting, and how they intend to fix it.
