Parenting Teenagers And The Problems of Passing On A Sense Of Responsibility

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Parenting Teenagers And The Problems of Passing On A Sense Of Responsibility - By: Donald Saunders, Posted on: 2007-09-07

For parents one of perhaps the most difficult tasks we face is that of teaching our children responsibility and this is especially problematic when we are looking at parenting teenagers. More often than not you find yourself faced with the problem of trying to instill habits into your teenagers that 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 that produces an effect that can be either good or bad. Instilling a sense of responsibility is accordingly very much a matter 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 can get your child to make the connection between her or his actions and their natural consequences then you will go a long way towards instilling a sense of responsibility. This method is also a lot better than following the time honored, but frequently totally unproductive, route of just resorting to telling your teenagers that they must or must not do something 'because I say so'.

Now this is all very well but, in reality, it is normally much easier said than done. For example, take the teenager who is tempted to start, or has indeed already started, to experiment with drugs. The obvious consequences of this are that he is quite likely to graduate from 'soft' to 'hard' drugs, will become addicted and probably start lying and stealing, or perhaps worse, to feed his growing habit. School work will begin to suffer, as will his state of health, and finally he will fall foul of the law and may well end up in jail. However, you try explaining 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 perhaps an extreme example of the problems of teaching responsibility and one for which the solution is a bit too complicated for this short article. Nevertheless, it is a relatively common problem for parents these days and one which many parents will be familiar with.

At this stage however let us look at simpler, but extremely common problem - that of teaching your teenage son to take responsibility for keeping his room clean and tidy.

For a large number of parents the answer here is to simply withdraw privileges until the room is tidied up. For 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 sets off an argument in which words like 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads off to his room slamming the door behind him.

The problem here is commonly that the boy has yet to make the connection between his actions in simply throwing his clothes in the corner of his room and the inconvenience that this creates for you in having to go into his room and sort out the mess when it comes time to do the laundry. Similarly 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 in part by the food left lying around in his room, had chewed through the electrical cabling.

In short you have inconvenienced him by restricting his freedom but this simply is not fair because when all is said and done he is the one 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 enlighten him by helping him to make the connection for himself between the state of his room and the inconvenience that a dirty room causes you. Once you have achieved this, withdrawing his privileges and inconveniencing him when he fails to keep his room tidy will suddenly be seen as quite fair.

While teaching 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 to be in a position to understand the connection between his actions and the 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. It is important therefore to start 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 really does not wish the consequences of whatever it is he is contemplating.

A final point to think about 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 upon your children is limited. Often the best that you can do is to lay down reasonable expectation and, where needed, to adopt a firm, but certainly 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 demonstrate self-responsibility.

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

Article Source: http://higradesearch.com

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