When it comes to parenting one of the most difficult tasks we face is that of teaching our children responsibility and this is particularly difficult when we are talking about parenting teenagers. In many instances you find yourself faced with the problem of trying to instill habits into your teenagers which will result in appropriate behavior without at the same time stifling the need for them to be able 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 therefore very much a case of getting your child to understand that every action has consequences and that these consequences may affect not merely his own life but the lives of other people.
If you are able to get your teenager to see the link between his actions and the natural consequences of those actions then you will be a long way down the road towards instilling a sense of responsibility. This method is also much better than following one of the time honored, but normally totally unproductive, parenting tips of just resorting to telling your child that he can or cannot do something ‘because I say so’.
This is all very well but, in in the real world, it is generally much easier said than done. Take, for example, the teenager who is tempted to begin, or has in fact started, experimenting with drugs. The undoubted consequences of this are that he is quite likely to move from ’soft’ to ‘hard’ drugs, will become addicted and very likely begin to lie and steal, or worse, to feed his growing habit. His school work will start to suffer, as will his health, and finally he will come up against the law and may well end up in jail. However, you try to explain this to a sixteen year old who is convinced that he is completely 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 answer is a bit too complicated for this brief article. It is nonetheless a relatively common problem these days and one that many parents will recognize.
At this stage however let us look at simpler, but extremely common problem - that of teaching your teenage boy to take responsibility for keeping his room clean and tidy.
For most parents the answer to this problem is to withdraw privileges until the room is cleaned up. For example, when your teenage son arrives home from school, dumps his bag and is just about to rush off to join his friends at the mall, you step in and stop him from going out until he has tidied his room. This probably starts an argument in which the words ‘not fair’ feature prominently as he heads for his room slamming the door behind him.
The difficulty in this case 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 causes you in having to go into his room and sort out the mess when it comes to laundry time. In addition he has yet to make the connection between the fact that you have just spent a a considerable sum of money rewiring the house because mice, attracted by the food left lying around in his room, chewed their way through the electrical cabling.
In simple terms you have inconvenienced him by restricting his freedom but this is not fair because at the end of the day he is the one who has to live in the room and he cannot see that it should matter to you what state the room is in.
The answer is simply to educate 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 for you. As soon as you have achieved 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.
Although getting children to connect their actions with their natural consequences is undoubtedly the secret to instilling responsibility in them, you must remember that the teenager must be in a position to understand the link between his actions and the consequences.
While it is frequently all too easy for adults to see the connection, your child may not always have sufficient knowledge or experience to make the link. For this reason it is important to begin teaching your child responsibility from an early age so that, when difficulties of understanding do arise, the child will have learnt to trust you when you say that he does not wish the consequences of whatever it is he is contemplating.
A final point to remember 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 that you can do is to lay down reasonable expectation and, wherever necessary, to adopt a firm but certainly not overly authoritative position. When all is said and done you are after all raising an individual with the capacity to think for himself and to stand on his own two feet and demonstrate self-responsibility.
Setting a good example and pointing out to your teenager the path to follow is as much as any parent can do. Ultimately your child will decide for himself whether or not he wants to follow the path which you have laid out for him. Teaching responsibility is not too hard and is a piece of cake when you compare it to the subject of teen sex advice.