When it comes to one of perhaps the most difficult tasks is that of teaching responsibility and this is especially difficult when we are talking about teenagers. More often than not you find that you are faced with the dilemma of trying to instill habits into your teenagers which will lead to appropriate behavior without at the same time stifling the need for them to make individual personal choices.
Taking 'responsibility' for something merely means being the agent for some action which produces an effect which can be either bad or good. Instilling a sense of responsibility is thus very much a case of getting your children to understand that their actions have consequences and that these may affect not only their own lives but the lives of other individuals.
If you can teach your child to see the link between his or her actions and the natural consequences of those actions then you will be a long way down the road towards teaching responsibility. This method is also much better than following the time honored, but usually totally unproductive, route of merely resorting to telling your teenage children that they can or connot do something 'because you say so'.
This is all well and good but, in practice, it is frequently much easier said than done. For example, take the teenager who is tempted to begin, or has indeed started, experimenting with drugs. The undoubted consequences of this action are that he is quite likely to move from 'soft' to 'hard' drugs, will become addicted and almost certainly begin lying and stealing, or perhaps worse, to feed his habit. School work will start to suffer, as will his state of health, and at some point he will come up against the law and possibly land up in jail. But, you try to explain this to a seventeen year old who believes he is completely in control of his own life and is more than capable of ensuring that this does not happen to him.
Now This is perhaps a somewhat extreme example of the difficulties of teaching responsibility and one for which the solution is a bit too complicated for this short article. It is nonetheless a relatively common problem for parents these days and one which many parents will recognize.
For the moment however let us consider simpler, but very common problem - that of teaching your teenage boy to take responsibility for keeping his room clean.
For a large number of parents the answer here is to withdraw privileges until the room is cleaned up. For example, when your teenage son comes home from schools, dumps his bag and is just about to rush off to join his friends at the mall, you stop him from going out until he has cleaned up his room. This probably starts an argument in which the words 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads off to his room and slams the door behind him.
The difficulty here is frequently that the boy has not yet made the connection between his actions in simply dumping his things in the corner of his room and the inconvenience which this creates for you in having to go into his room and sort out the mess when it comes time to do the laundry. Similarly he has yet to make the connection between the fact that you have just spent a small fortune rewiring the house because mice, attracted by the food left in
his room, chewed their way through the electrical cabling.
In simple terms you have inconvenienced your son by curtailing his freedom but this is not fair because when all is said and done he is the person who has to live in the room and he cannot see that it should matter in the slightest to you what state the room is in.
The secret is simply to enlighten him by helping him to see the connection for himself between the state of cleanliness of his room and the inconvenience that an untidy room causes you. Once you do this, taking away his privileges and inconveniencing him when he fails to keep his room clean will suddenly seem to be quite fair.
While getting children to connect their actions with their natural consequences is obviously the key to instilling responsibility in them, you should nor forget that the child has to be in a position to understand the link between his actions and the consequences.
Despite the fact that it is often easy for adults to see the connection, a child might not always have enough knowledge or experience to make the link. For this reason it is important to begin teaching your child responsibility at an early age so that, when difficulties of understanding do arise, the child will come to trust you when you tell him that he really does not wish the consequences of whatever it is he is contemplating.
A last point to think about is that, just like adults, children have a degree of their own free will and, like it or not, the influence that you can exert upon your children is limited. Often the best that you can do is to set reasonable expectation and, wherever necessary, to take a firm, but not overly authoritative, stance. At the end of the day you are after all bringing up an individual with the ability to think for himself, stand on his own feet and demonstrate self-responsibility.
Demonstrating a good example and pointing out to your children the path to follow is as much as any parent can do. In the end your children will decide for themselves whether or not they are going to follow the path which you have prepared for them.
Article Source: http://www.upublish.info
About the Author:
Don Saunders
Parenting4Dummies.com provides a comprehensive and growing resource of information, advice and articles on many aspects of including a range of parenting tips and also provides comprehensive advice for choosing a homeschooling program
