For any parent one of perhaps the most difficult tasks is that of teaching our children responsibility and this is particularly difficult when we are talking about parenting teenagers. In most cases you find that you are faced with the dilemma of instilling habits into your teenagers which will result in appropriate behavior while at the same time not stifling the need for them to make individual personal choices.
Being ‘responsible’ for something merely means being the agent for some action which produces an effect that can be either good or bad. Teaching responsibility is accordingly very much a matter of getting your child to understand that every action has consequences and that these may affect not just his own life but the lives of other individuals.
If you are able to teach your teenager to see the connection between his actions and the natural consequences of those actions then you will go a long way towards teaching responsibility. This approach is also much better than following one of the time honored, but usually totally unproductive, parenting tips of merely resorting to telling your child that he must or must not do something ‘because you say so’.
This is all well and good but, in reality, it is frequently easier said than done. Take, for instance, the teenager who is tempted to start, or has in fact already started, to experiment with drugs. The obvious consequences of this are that he is quite likely to move from ’soft’ to ‘hard’ drugs, will find himself addicted and most likely start to lie and steal, or worse, to feed his habit. Academic work will start to suffer, as will his state of health, and at some point he will come up against the law and may well land up in jail. But, you try to explain this to a sixteen year old who is convinced that he is totally in control of his life and is more than able to ensure that this does not happen to him.
This is possibly an extreme example of the difficulties of teaching responsibility and one for which the solution is a little bit too complicated for this short article. It is nonetheless a relatively common problem these days and one that many parents will recognize.
For the moment however let us examine simpler, but very common problem - that of teaching your teenage son to take responsibility for keeping his room clean.
For most parents the answer to this problem is to simply withdraw privileges until the room is cleaned up. For example, when your teenage boy comes home from school, dumps his bag and is about to rush out to join his friends at the mall, you stop him from going out until he has cleaned up his room. This frequently 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 problem in this case is commonly that the boy has not yet made the connection between his actions in simply dumping his clothes 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 to laundry time. Additionally he has yet to make the connection between the fact that you have just spent a great deal of money having the wiring in the house sorted out because mice, attracted by the food left in his room, chewed their way through the electrical cabling.
In short you have inconvenienced him by restricting 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 why it should matter in the slightest to you what state the room is in.
The answer 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 a dirty room causes you. Once you do this, taking away his privileges and inconveniencing him when he does not keep his room clean will suddenly seem to be quite fair.
While teaching teenagers to link their actions with their consequences is clearly the key to instilling a sense of responsibility in them, you should not forget that the teenager has got to be in a position to see the connection between his actions and their consequences.
Despite the fact that it is frequently easy for adults to see the connection, your child may not always have enough knowledge or experience to make the connection. It is important therefore to start teaching your child responsibility at an early age so that, when difficulties of understanding do appear, 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 contemplating.
One last point to think about is that, like adults, teenagers have some degree of their own free will and, like it or not, the influence that you are able to exert upon your children is limited. Often the best you can do is to lay down reasonable expectation and, where needed, to adopt a firm but not overly authoritative stance. When all is said and done you are after all rearing a person with the capacity to think for himself, stand on his own two feet and demonstrate self-responsibility.
Setting a good example and showing your teenager the path to follow is as much as most parents can do. At the end of the day your child will make his own decisions about whether or not he wishes to follow the path which you have shown him. Teaching responsibility is not too hard and is a breeze when you compare it to the subject of teen sex advice.
Tags: Kids & Teens
