Parenting Teenagers And The Problems of Instilling A Sense Of Responsibility

For any parent one of perhaps the most difficult tasks we face is that of teaching our children responsibility and this is especially problematic when we are talking about parenting teenagers. In most cases you find that you are faced with the dilemma 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 make individual choices.

Being ‘responsible’ for something simply means being the agent for some action that produces an effect that can be either good or bad. Instilling a sense of responsibility is therefore 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 are able to teach your child to make the link between her or his actions and their natural consequences then you will be a long way down the road towards instilling a sense of responsibility. This method is also much better than following the time honored, but usually totally unproductive, route of simply resorting to telling your teenagers that they can or connot do something ‘because you say so’.

Now this is all well and good but, in practice, it is normally easier said than done. Take, for example, the teenager who is tempted to start, or has indeed started, to experiment with drugs. The clear consequences of this are that he is likely to move 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 start to suffer, as will his state of health, and finally he will come up against the law and may well land up in jail. But, you try explaining this to a sixteen year old who knows that he is completely in control of his life and is more than capable of ensuring that this will 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 short article. It is nonetheless a common problem for parents these days and one which many parents will be familiar with.

At this stage however let us take a simpler, but very common problem – that of getting your teenage boy to take responsibility for keeping his room clean and tidy.

For probably the majority of parents the answer here is to withdraw privileges until the room is cleaned. As an example, when your teenage son comes home from schools, drops his bag on the floor and is about to rush off to join his friends at the mall, you step in and stop him from venturing out until he has tidied up his room. This normally sparks an argument in which words such as ‘not fair’ feature prominently as he heads off to his bedroom slamming the door behind him.

The problem here is often that the boy has yet to make the connection between his actions in simply dumping 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. 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 by the food left lying around in his room, chewed their way through the electrical cabling.

In short you have inconvenienced your son by curtailing his freedom but this 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 secret is simply to educate him by helping him to make the connection for himself between the state of cleanliness of his bedroom 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.

Whilkst teaching children to connect their actions with their natural consequences is obviously the key to instilling responsibility in them, you should nor forget that the child has to be in a position to understand the link between his actions and their consequences.

Despite the fact that it is frequently all too easy for an adult to see the connection, a child may not always have enough experience or knowledge to make the link. For this reason it is important to start teaching your child responsibility at an early age so that, when difficulties of understanding do arise, the child will come to trust you when you say that he really does not wish 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 are able to exert over your children is limited. Often the best that you can do is to set reasonable expectation and, whenever necessary, to take a firm, but not overly authoritative, stance. At the end of the day you are bringing up an individual with the capacity to think for himself and to stand on his own 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 make their own decisions about whether or not they intend to follow the path which you have laid out for them.

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