Parenting Teenagers and the Challenge 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 particularly problematic when we are looking at parenting teenagers. In many instances you find that you are faced with the problem of trying to instill habits into your teenagers that will lead to appropriate behavior without at the same time stifling the need for them to be able to make individual personal choices.

Taking 'responsibility' for something merely means being the agent for some action that produces an effect that can be either good or bad. Teaching responsibility is accordingly very much a case of getting your children to understand that every action has consequences and that these consequences may affect not only their own lives but the lives of other individuals.

If you can get your child to make the link between his or her actions and the natural consequences of those actions then you will go a long way towards instilling a sense of responsibility. This method is also much better than following the time honored, but usually totally unproductive, route of just resorting to telling your teenagers that they can or connot do something 'because you say so'.

Now this is all very well but, in reality, it is normally easier said than done. Take, for example, the teenager who is tempted to start, or has indeed already started, experimenting with drugs. The obvious consequences of this action are that he is quite likely to graduate from 'soft' to 'hard' drugs, will become addicted and almost certainly start lying and stealing, or perhaps worse, to feed his habit. His school work will start to suffer, as will his state of health, and eventually he will fall foul of the law and might well land up in jail. But, you try to explain this to a sixteen year old who feels that he is totally in control of his own life and more than capable of ensuring that this will not happen to him.

This is perhaps a somewhat extreme example of the difficulties of teaching responsibility and one for which the solution is a little too complicated for this short article. Nevertheless, it is a common problem for parents these days and one which many parents will recognize.

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

For many parents the answer to this problem is to withdraw privileges until the room is tidied up. As an example, when your teenage boy 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 his room. This frequently sparks an argument in which words such as 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads for his bedroom and slams the door behind him.

The difficulty in this case is often that the boy has yet to make the connection between his actions in simply dumping his clothes in the corner of his room and the inconvenience that this causes you in having to go into his room and sort through the mess when it comes time to do the laundry. Similarly he has not made the connection between the fact that you have just spent a fortune having the wiring in the house sorted out because mice, attracted by the food left in his room, had chewed through the electrical cabling.

In simple terms you have inconvenienced your son by restricting his freedom but this is not fair because when all is said and done 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 the room is in.

The answer 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 for you. Once you do this, taking away his privileges and inconveniencing him when he does not keep his room tidy will suddenly be seen as quite fair.

While 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 to be in a position to understand the link between his actions and the consequences.

Although it is often all too easy for adults to see the connection, a child might not always have enough experience or knowledge to spot the link. It is important therefore to start teaching your child responsibility from an early age so that, when difficulties of understanding do appear, 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 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 can exert over your children is limited. Often the best 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 after all bringing up a person with the ability to think for himself and to stand on his own two feet and demonstrate self-responsibility.

Creating a good example and showing 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 intend to follow the path which you have prepared for them.