Parenting Teenagers And The Dilemmas of Instilling A Sense Of Responsibility

For parents one of the most difficult tasks we face is that of teaching responsibility and this is particularly difficult when it comes to parenting teenagers. More often than not you find that you are faced with the problem of trying to instill habits into your teenagers which will lead to appropriate behavior without at the same time stifling the need for them to be able to make individual personal choices.

Being 'responsible' for something simply means being the agent for some action which produces an effect which can be either bad or good. Teaching responsibility is therefore very much a case 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 get your child to see the link between her or his actions and the natural consequences of those actions then you will be a long way down the road towards teaching responsibility. This method is also far 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 very well but, in practice, it is usually easier said than done. For example, take the teenager who is tempted to begin, or has indeed already started, to experiment with drugs. The obvious consequences of this action are that he is quite likely to move from 'soft' to 'hard' drugs, will become addicted and probably begin lying and stealing, or worse, to feed his habit. School work will start to suffer, as will his state of health, and eventually he will fall foul of the law and may well end up in jail. However, you try to explain this to a fifteen year old who knows that he is completely in control of his own life and is more than capable of ensuring 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 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 extremely common problem - that of teaching your teenage son to take responsibility for keeping his room tidy.

For most parents the answer here is to withdraw privileges until the room is tidied up. For 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 cleaned his room. This frequently starts an argument in which the words 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads for his room slamming the door behind him.

The problem in this case is often that the boy has yet to make the connection between his actions in simply throwing his clothes in the corner of his room and the inconvenience which 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 in part by the food left in his room, chewed through the 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 why it should matter in the slightest 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 room and the inconvenience that an untidy room causes you. Once you have done this, withdrawing his privileges and inconveniencing him when he does not keep his room tidy will suddenly seem to be quite fair.

While teaching 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 got to be in a position to understand the link between his actions and their 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 make the link. It is important therefore to begin 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 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, 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 set reasonable expectation and, whenever needed, to adopt a firm, but not overly authoritative, position. At the end of the day you are raising an individual with the capacity to think for himself, stand on his own two feet and exercise self-responsibility.

Setting a good example and showing your children the path which they should follow is as much as any parent can do. In the end your children will decide for themselves whether or not they are going to follow the path which you have prepared for them.

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