Parenting Teenagers And The Challenge of Teaching Them Responsibility

When it comes to parenting one of perhaps the most difficult tasks we face is that of teaching our children responsibility and this is particularly difficult when it comes to parenting teenagers. In many instances you find that you are faced with the dilemma of instilling habits into your teenagers that will result in appropriate behavior while at the same time not 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 which can be either bad or good. Teaching responsibility is therefore very much a matter of getting your children to understand that their actions have 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 connection between his or her actions and the natural consequences of those actions then you will be a long way down the road towards instilling a sense of responsibility. This approach 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 practice, it is frequently much easier said than done. Take, for example, the teenager who is tempted to begin, or has indeed started, experimenting with drugs. The clear consequences of this action are that he is quite likely to graduate from 'soft' to 'hard' drugs, will become addicted and most likely begin lying and stealing, or perhaps worse, to feed his habit. School work will start to suffer, as will his health, and finally he will come up against the law and possibly end up in jail. However, you try to explain this to a sixteen year old who believes he is completely in control of his own life and more than capable of ensuring that this will 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 complicated for this short article. Nevertheless, it is a common problem these days and one which many parents will recognize.

For the moment however let us examine simpler, but very common problem - that of teaching your teenage son to take responsibility for keeping his room clean and tidy.

For most parents the answer here is to withdraw privileges until the room is cleaned. For example, when your teenage boy arrives home from schools, dumps his bag and is about to rush out to join his friends at the mall, you step in and stop him from going out until he has tidied his room. This normally sparks an argument in which words such as 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads for his room slamming the door behind him.

The difficulty here is commonly that the boy has yet to make the connection between his actions in simply throwing his things 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 to laundry time. In addition he has yet to make the connection between the fact that you have just spent a great deal of money rewiring the house because mice, attracted by the food left in his room, chewed their way through the electrical cabling.

In short you have inconvenienced your son by restricting his freedom but this is not fair because at the end of the day he is the person who has to live in the room and he does not see that 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 room and the inconvenience that a messy room causes for you. Once you have done this, withdrawing his privileges and inconveniencing him when he does not keep his room clean will suddenly seem to be quite fair.

While getting children to connect their actions with their natural consequences is obviously the key to instilling responsibility in them, you must remember that the child has to be in a position to see the connection between his actions and their consequences.

Despite the fact that it is often all too easy for adults to see the connection, a child might not always have enough knowledge or experience to make the connection. It is important therefore to begin teaching your child responsibility from an early age so that, when difficulties of understanding do arise, the child will come to trust you when you tell him that he really does not wish 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 upon your children is limited. The best that you can often do is to set reasonable expectation and, wherever needed, to adopt a firm, but not too authoritative, stance. When all is said and done you are after all bringing up an individual with the ability to think for himself, stand on his own feet and demonstrate self-responsibility.

Demonstrating a good example and showing your children the path which they should follow is as much as any parent can do. Ultimately your children will make their own decisions about whether or not they intend to follow the path which you have prepared for them.

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