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 trying to instill habits into your teenagers that will result in appropriate behavior without at the same time stifling the need for them to make individual choices.

Taking 'responsibility' for something merely means being the agent for some action that produces an effect which can be either bad or good. Instilling a sense of responsibility is therefore very much a matter of getting your child 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 can get your child to see 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 teaching responsibility. This approach is also far better than following the time honored, but frequently totally unproductive, route of simply resorting to telling your teenagers that they must or must not do something 'because you say so'.

Now this is all very well but, in practice, it is normally easier said than done. For example, take the teenager who is tempted to start, or has indeed started, experimenting with drugs. The clear consequences of this action are that he is likely to move from 'soft' to 'hard' drugs, will become addicted and most likely start lying and stealing, or perhaps worse, to feed his habit. School work will start to suffer, as will his health, and eventually he will come up against the law and might well end up in jail. But, you try explaining this to a sixteen year old who knows that he is completely in control of his own life and is more than able to ensure that this will not happen to him.

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

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

For many parents the answer to this problem is to simply withdraw privileges until the room is cleaned 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 stop him from going out until he has cleaned up his room. This probably sparks an argument in which the words 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads for his room and slams the door behind him.

The problem in this case is usually that the boy has not yet made the connection between his actions in simply throwing his clothes in the corner of his room and the inconvenience that this creates for you in having to go into his room and sort through the mess when it comes to laundry time. Similarly he has not made the connection between the fact that you have just spent a small fortune having the wiring in the house sorted out because mice, attracted in part by the food left in his room, chewed their way through the cabling.

In simple terms you have inconvenienced him by restricting his freedom but this simply is not fair because at the end of the day he is the one who has to live in the room and he does not see that it should matter to you what state the room is in.

The answer is simply to enlighten him by helping him to see the connection for himself between the state of his room and the inconvenience that a dirty room causes you. Once you do this, withdrawing his privileges and inconveniencing him when he does not keep his room tidy will suddenly be seen as quite fair.

While getting children to connect their actions with their natural consequences is undoubtedly the key to instilling responsibility in them, you should nor forget that the child must 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 sufficient knowledge or experience to make the connection. It is important therefore to start teaching your child responsibility at 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.

One last point to think about is that, like adults, children have a degree of their own free will and, whether we like it or not, the influence that you can exert upon your children is limited. The best you can often do is to set reasonable expectation and, when necessary, to adopt a firm, but certainly not too authoritative, stance. When all is said and done you are bringing up a person with the capacity to think for himself, stand on his own two feet and demonstrate self-responsibility.

Setting 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 want to follow the path which you have laid out for them.