For any parent one of the most difficult tasks is that of teaching responsibility and this is especially difficult when we are talking about 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 personal choices.
Taking ‘responsibility’ for something means simply being the agent for some action that produces an effect that can be either bad or good. Teaching responsibility is accordingly very much a matter of getting your child to understand that his actions have consequences and that these consequences may affect not simply his own life but the lives of others.
If you are able to get your teenager to see the link between his 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 one of the time honored, but normally totally unproductive, parenting tips of merely resorting to telling your child that he can or cannot do something ‘because you say so’.
This is all well and good but, in in the real world, it is often much easier said than done. For instance, take the teenager who is tempted to start, or has in fact already started, to experiment with drugs. The obvious consequences of this action are that he is likely to move from ’soft’ to ‘hard’ drugs, will find himself addicted and very likely start to lie and steal, or perhaps worse, to feed his habit. School work will begin to suffer, as will his state of health, and finally he will come up against the law and could well land up in jail. However, you try to explain this to a sixteen year old who believes he is totally in control of his own life and is more than able to ensure that this will not happen to him.
This is perhaps a somewhat extreme example of the problems of teaching responsibility and one for which the answer is a little too complex for this brief article. It is nonetheless a relatively common problem for parents these days and one that many parents will be familiar with.
For the moment however let us look at simpler, but extremely common problem - that of teaching your teenage boy to take responsibility for keeping his room clean.
For a large number of parents the answer here is to withdraw privileges until the room is tidied up. As an example, when your teenage boy comes home from school, 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 tidied his room. This usually sparks an argument in which the words ‘not fair’ feature prominently as he heads for his bedroom and slams the door behind him.
The problem here is commonly that the teenager has not yet made the connection between his actions in simply dumping his clothes in the corner of his room and the inconvenience that this creates for you in having to go up to his room and sort through the mess when it comes time to do the laundry. Additionally he has yet to make the connection between the fact that you have just spent a fortune having the wiring in the house sorted out because mice, attracted in part by the food left in his room, had chewed through the electrical cabling.
In short you have inconvenienced your son by curtailing his freedom but this simply 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 to you what state the room is in.
The secret is simply to enlighten him by helping him to see the connection for himself between the state of his bedroom and the inconvenience that a dirty room causes you. As soon as you have done this, taking away his privileges and inconveniencing him when he fails to keep his room clean will suddenly be seen as quite fair.
While getting teenagers to connect their actions with their consequences is obviously the secret to instilling a sense of responsibility in them, you must remember that the teenager has got to be in a position to understand the link between his actions and their consequences.
While it is usually all too easy for an adult to see the connection, your child may not always have enough experience or knowledge to spot the link. For this reason it is important to start teaching your child responsibility at 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 about to do.
A final point to think about is that, like adults, teenagers have a degree of their own free will and, 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 lay down reasonable expectation and, whenever needed, to adopt a firm but not too authoritative position. At the end of the day you are after all rearing an individual with the ability to think for himself and to stand on his own feet and exercise self-responsibility.
Setting a good example and showing your teenager the path that he should follow is as much as any parent can do. In the end your child will decide for himself whether or not he wishes to follow the path which you have prepared for him. Teaching responsibility is not too difficult and is a breeze compared to the subject of teen sex advice.