When it comes to parenting one of perhaps the most difficult tasks we face is that of teaching 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 which will result in appropriate behavior while at the same time not stifling the need for them to make individual choices.
Being 'responsible' for something means simply being the agent for some action which produces an effect that can be either good or bad. Instilling a sense of responsibility is accordingly very much a matter 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 individuals.
If you can teach your child to see the connection 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 often totally unproductive, route of merely resorting to telling your teenage children that they must or must not do something 'because you say so'.
Now this is all very well but, in practice, it is frequently easier said than done. Take, for example, the teenager who is tempted to begin, or has indeed started, to experiment with drugs. The obvious consequences of this are that he is quite likely to move from 'soft' to 'hard' drugs, will become addicted and most likely begin lying and stealing, or perhaps worse, to feed his habit. School work will begin to suffer, as will his state of health, and finally he will come up against the law and might well end up in jail. But, you try to explain this to a seventeen year old who believes he is completely in control of his life and is more than capable of ensuring that this will not happen to him.
This is perhaps an extreme example of the difficulties of teaching responsibility and one for which the solution is a bit too complex for this short article. Nevertheless, it is 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 getting your teenage boy to take responsibility for keeping his room clean.
For a large number of parents the answer to this problem is to withdraw privileges until the room is cleaned. For example, when your teenage son arrives home from schools, drops his bag on the floor and is about to rush out to join his friends at the mall, you step in and stop him from going out until he has tidied his room. This normally starts an argument in which words such as 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads off to his room slamming the door behind him.
The problem here is frequently 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 which this causes you in having to go into his room and sort out the mess when it comes time to do the laundry. Similarly he has not made the connection between the fact that you have just spent a fortune having the wiring in the house sorted out because mice, attracted in part by the food left lying around in his room, chewed through the electrical cabling.
In simple terms you have inconvenienced your son by curtailing his freedom but this is not fair because at the end of the day he is the individual who has to live in the room and he cannot see why it should matter to you what state it is in.
The answer is simply to enlighten him by helping him to see the connection for himself between the state of his room and the inconvenience that an untidy room causes you. Once you have done this, taking away his privileges and inconveniencing him when he does not keep his room tidy will suddenly be seen as quite fair.
While getting children to connect their actions with their natural consequences is certainly the key to instilling a sense of responsibility in them, you should nor forget that the child has to be in a position to see the connection 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 sufficient experience or knowledge to make the connection. For this reason it is important to begin 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 say that he does not want the consequences of whatever it is he is about to do.
One final point to remember is that, like adults, children have some degree of their own free will and, whether we like it or not, the influence that you can exert over your children is limited. The best you can often do is to set reasonable expectation and, when needed, to adopt a firm, but not too authoritative, stance. At the end of the day you are raising an individual with the capacity to think for himself, stand on his own two feet and demonstrate self-responsibility.
Creating a good example and showing your children the path that they should follow is as much as any parent can do. Ultimately your children will make their own decisions about whether or not they wish to follow the path which you have laid out for them.
Author Resource:-
Parenting4Dummies.com provides a comprehensive and growing resource of information, advice and articles on many aspects of parenting including a range of parenting tips and also provides comprehensive advice for homeschooling online
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