Parenting Teenagers And The Challenge of Instilling A Sense Of Responsibility

Teaching our children a sense of responsibility is no easy matter, but an understanding of their point of view can help a great deal.

For any parent one of perhaps the most difficult tasks we face is that of teaching our children responsibility and this is especially problematic when it comes to parenting teenagers. In most cases you find that you are faced with the problem of instilling habits into your teenagers that will lead to appropriate behavior while at the same time not stifling the need for them to make individual personal choices.

Taking 'responsibility' for something merely means being the agent for some action that produces an effect that can be either bad or good. Teaching responsibility is thus very much a case of getting your child to understand that their actions have consequences and that these may affect not only their own lives but the lives of other people.

If you can get your child to make the connection between her or his actions and their natural consequences 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 simply resorting to telling your teenage children that they must or must not do something 'because I say so'.

Now this is all well and good but, in practice, it is frequently much easier said than done. Take, for example, the teenager who is tempted to begin, or has indeed started, experimenting with drugs. The obvious consequences of this 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 begin to suffer, as will his health, and finally he will come up against the law and probably land up in jail. However, you try explaining this to a seventeen year old who believes he is completely in control of his own life and is more than able to ensure that this does not happen to him.

Now This is perhaps a somewhat extreme example of the problems of teaching responsibility and one for which the solution is a little too complex for this short article. Nevertheless, it is a relatively common problem these days and one which many parents will be familiar with.

At this stage however let us take a simpler, but still very common problem - that of teaching your teenage boy to take responsibility for keeping his room tidy.

For many parents the answer to this problem is to simply withdraw privileges until the room is tidied up. As an example, when your teenage son arrives home from schools, dumps his bag and is about to rush out to join his friends at the mall, you stop him from venturing out until he has cleaned up his room. This normally starts an argument in which words like 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads for his bedroom slamming the door behind him.

The problem here is commonly that the boy has not yet made the connection between his actions in simply throwing his bag in the corner of his room and the inconvenience that this creates for you in having to go into his room and sort through the mess when it comes time to do the laundry. In addition he has not made the connection between the fact that you have just spent a fortune rewiring the house because mice, attracted by the food left lying around in his room, chewed their way through the cabling.

In short you have inconvenienced him by curtailing his freedom but this simply is not fair because at the end of the day he is the individual who has to live in the room and he does not see why it should matter to you what state it is in.

The secret is simply to enlighten him by helping him to make the connection for himself between the state of his bedroom and the inconvenience that a messy room causes for you. Once you have done this, taking away his privileges and inconveniencing him when he fails to keep his room in good order will suddenly seem to be quite fair.

While getting children to connect their actions with their natural consequences is undoubtedly the key to instilling a sense of responsibility in them, you must remember that the child has got to be in a position to understand the connection between his actions and their consequences.

Despite the fact that it is often easy for an adult to see the connection, a child may not always have enough knowledge or experience to spot the connection. For this reason it is important to begin teaching your child responsibility from an early age so that, when problems of understanding do arise, the child will have learnt to trust you when you tell him that he does not want the consequences of whatever it is he is about to do.

One final point to think about is that, like adults, children have a degree of their own free will and, whether we like it or not, the influence that you can exert over your children is limited. Often the best you can do is to lay down reasonable expectation and, where necessary, to take a firm, but not too authoritative, stance. At the end of the day you are after all rearing an individual with the capacity to think for himself, stand on his own two feet and exercise self-responsibility.

Demonstrating a good example and pointing out to your children the path which they should follow is as much as most parents can do. Ultimately your children will make their own decisions about whether or not they wish to follow the path which you have shown them.

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