Parenting Teenagers And The Challenge of Instilling A Sense Of Responsibility - By: Don Saunders

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 we are talking about parenting teenagers. Invariably you find that you are faced with the dilemma of instilling habits into your teenagers that will result in appropriate behavior without at the same time stifling the need for them to make individual choices.

Being 'responsible' for something means simply being the agent for some action that produces an effect that can be either bad or good. Instilling a sense of responsibility is thus very much a case of getting your children to understand that every action has consequences and that these may affect not only their own lives but the lives of others.

If you are able to get your child to make the link between her or his actions and their natural consequences then you will go a long way towards teaching responsibility. This method is also far better than following the time honored, but frequently totally unproductive, route of merely resorting to telling your teenagers that they can or connot do something 'because I say so'.

This is all very well but, in practice, it is normally easier said than done. Take, for example, the teenager who is tempted to begin, or has indeed already started, to experiment with drugs. The clear 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 growing habit. School work will start to suffer, as will his 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 seventeen year old who is convinced that he is totally in control of his life and more than capable of ensuring 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 bit too complicated for this brief article. It is nonetheless a relatively common problem for parents these days and one which many parents will be familiar with.

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

For probably the majority of parents the answer to this problem is to simply withdraw privileges until the room is tidied. 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 frequently sparks an argument in which words such as 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads off to his bedroom 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 throwing his bag in the corner of his room and the inconvenience that this causes you in having to go into his room and sort out the mess when it comes time to do the laundry. In addition he has yet to make the connection between the fact that you have just spent a great deal of money rewiring the house because mice, attracted in part by the food left lying around in his room, chewed through the electrical cabling.

In short you have inconvenienced your son by curtailing his freedom but this simply is not fair because at the end of the day 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 it is in.

The answer is simply to educate him by helping him to make the connection for himself between the state of his bedroom and the inconvenience that a dirty room causes for you. Once you do this, withdrawing his privileges and inconveniencing him when he does not keep his room clean will suddenly be seen as quite fair.

While getting children to connect their actions with their natural consequences is certainly the key to instilling responsibility in them, you should nor forget that the child has to be in a position to see the link between his actions and the consequences.

Despite the fact that it is often all too easy for an adult to see the connection, a child might not always have enough knowledge or experience to spot 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 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.

A 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 are able to exert upon your children is limited. Often the best that you can do is to set reasonable expectation and, when needed, to adopt a firm, but certainly not overly authoritative, position. When all is said and done you are rearing a person with the ability to think for himself, stand on his own two feet and exercise self-responsibility.

Creating a good example and pointing out to your children the path to follow is as much as most parents can do. In the end your children will decide for themselves whether or not they are going to follow the path which you have laid out for them.

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