Handling the Challenges of Teaching Teenagers a Sense of Responsibility
For parents one of the most difficult tasks we face is that of teaching responsibility and this is particularly problematic when it comes to parenting teenagers. In many instances you find that you are faced with the problem 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.
Taking ‘responsibility’ for something merely means being the agent for some action that produces an effect that can be either bad or good. Teaching responsibility is thus very much a case of getting your child to understand that every action has consequences and that these consequences may affect not simply his own life but the lives of others.
If you can teach your child to make the connection between his actions and their natural consequences then you will be a long way down the road towards teaching responsibility. This method is also much better than following one of the time honored, but normally totally unproductive, parenting tips of simply resorting to telling your child that he can or cannot do something ‘because I say so’.
Now this is all very well but, in reality, it is often much easier said than done. Take, for example, the teenager who is tempted to begin, or has indeed started, to experiment with drugs. The clear consequences of this are that he is quite likely to graduate from ’soft’ to ‘hard’ drugs, will become addicted and probably begin to lie and steal, or worse, to feed his habit. Academic work will start to suffer, as will his health, and at some point he will come up against the law and possibly end up in jail. But, you try to explain this to a seventeen year old who believes he is totally in control of his own life and is more than capable of ensuring 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 bit too complicated for this brief article. Nevertheless, it is a common problem for parents these days and one that many parents will recognize.
At this stage however let us take a simpler, but extremely common problem – that of teaching your teenage boy to take responsibility for keeping his room clean and tidy.
For a large number of parents the answer to this problem is to withdraw privileges until the room is cleaned. For example, when your teenage boy arrives home from school, drops his bag on the floor and is just about to rush off to join his friends at the mall, you step in and stop him from going out until he has tidied his room. This usually starts an argument in which words like ‘not fair’ feature prominently as he heads for his bedroom slamming the door behind him.
The problem in this case is usually that the teenager 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 creates for you in having to go into his room and sort through the mess when it comes to laundry time. Similarly he has yet to make the connection between the fact that you have just spent a a considerable sum of money having the wiring in the house sorted out because mice, attracted by the food left in his room, had chewed their way through the electrical cabling.
In short you have inconvenienced your son by curtailing his freedom but this is not fair because when all is said and done he is the one 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 educate him by helping him to make the connection for himself between the state of his bedroom and the inconvenience that a messy room causes you. As soon as you have done this, withdrawing his privileges and inconveniencing him when he fails to keep his room tidy will suddenly be seen as quite fair.
While teaching children to connect their actions with their consequences is obviously the secret to instilling a sense of responsibility in them, you must remember that the child has to be in a position to understand the connection between his actions and the consequences.
While it is frequently easy for an adult to see the connection, a child may not always have enough knowledge or experience to spot the connection. For this reason it is important 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 really does not want the consequences of whatever it is he is about to do.
One last point to remember is that, just like adults, teenagers have some degree of their own free will and, whether you 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, when necessary, to adopt a firm but certainly not too authoritative stance. At the end of the day you are after all raising a person with the capacity to think for himself and to stand on his own two feet and exercise self-responsibility.
Demonstrating a good example and pointing out to your teenager the path to follow is as much as any parent can do. At the end of the day your child will decide for himself whether or not he is going to follow the path which you have shown him. Teaching a teenager responsibility is not too difficult and is a piece of cake when you compare it to the subject of teen sex advice.
