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

By: Don Saunders For any parent one of perhaps the most difficult tasks we face is that of teaching responsibility and this is especially difficult when it comes to parenting teenagers. More often than not you find yourself faced with the problem of trying to instill habits into your teenagers which will result in appropriate behavior while at the same time not stifling the need for them to be able to make individual personal choices.

Taking 'responsibility' for something simply means being the agent for some action which produces an effect which can be either good or bad. Instilling a sense of responsibility is therefore 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 other people.

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

This is all well and good but, in practice, it is usually 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 action are that he is likely to graduate from 'soft' to 'hard' drugs, will become addicted and almost certainly start lying and stealing, or perhaps worse, to feed his growing habit. His school work will start to suffer, as will his health, and eventually he will come up against the law and probably end up in jail. But, you try to explain this to a fifteen year old who is convinced that he is totally in control of his life and is more than able to ensure that this does not happen to him.

Now This is perhaps a somewhat extreme example of the difficulties of teaching responsibility and one for which the solution is a bit too complex for this brief article. Nevertheless, it is a common problem these days and one which many parents will be familiar with.

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

For probably the majority of parents the answer to this problem is to withdraw privileges until the room is tidied up. For example, when your teenage boy comes home from schools, dumps his bag and is 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 frequently sets off an argument in which words such as 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads for his bedroom slamming the door behind him.

The problem here is frequently 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 which this creates for you in having to go into his room and sort through 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 small fortune rewiring the house because mice, attracted by the food left in his room, had chewed their way through the electrical cabling.

In short you have inconvenienced your son by restricting 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 to you what state the room is in.

The secret is simply to enlighten him by helping him to make the connection for himself between the state of cleanliness of his bedroom and the inconvenience that a messy room causes for you. Once you have achieved this, withdrawing his privileges and inconveniencing him when he fails to keep his room tidy will suddenly seem to be quite fair.

Whilkst teaching children to connect their actions with their natural consequences is without doubt the key to instilling responsibility in them, you should nor forget that the child has got to be in a position to see the link between his actions and the consequences.

Although it is frequently all too easy for adults to see the connection, a child may not always have enough knowledge or experience to spot 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 want the consequences of whatever it is he is contemplating.

A last point to remember 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 over your children is limited. The best you can often do is to set reasonable expectation and, wherever necessary, to adopt a firm, but not too authoritative, stance. When all is said and done you are rearing an individual with the capacity to think for himself, stand on his own feet and demonstrate self-responsibility.

Demonstrating a good example and pointing out to your children the path to follow is as much as any parent can do. At the end of the day your children will decide for themselves whether or not they wish to follow the path which you have laid out for them.

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