For parents one of perhaps the most difficult tasks we face is that of teaching responsibility and this is particularly problematic when we are talking about parenting teenagers. Invariably you find that you are faced with the problem of instilling habits into your teenagers which will result in appropriate behavior while at the same time not stifling the need for them to be able to make individual personal choices. Taking 'responsibility' for something merely means being the agent for some action which produces an effect that can be either good or bad. Teaching responsibility is therefore very much a matter of getting your child to understand that their actions have consequences and that these consequences may affect not only their own lives but the lives of other people. If you are able to get your child to see the connection between his or her actions and the natural consequences of those actions then you will go a long way towards instilling a sense of responsibility. This approach is also a lot better than following the time honored, but often totally unproductive, route of just resorting to telling your teenagers that they can or connot do something 'because you say so'. This is all well and good but, in practice, it is frequently easier said than done. For example, take the teenager who is tempted to start, or has indeed started, to experiment with drugs. The undoubted consequences of this action are that he is quite likely to graduate from 'soft' to 'hard' drugs, will become addicted and most likely start lying and stealing, or perhaps worse, to feed his growing habit. His school work will start to suffer, as will his health, and finally he will fall foul of the law and might well end up in jail. But, you try to explain this to a fifteen year old who feels that he is totally in control of his life and is more than capable of ensuring that this does not happen to him. Now This is perhaps an extreme example of the problems of teaching responsibility and one for which the solution is a little too complicated for this short article. Nevertheless, it is a common problem these days and one which many parents will be familiar with. At this stage however let us look at simpler, but still very common problem - that of getting your teenage boy to take responsibility for keeping his room clean and tidy. For many parents the answer to this problem is to withdraw privileges until the room is tidied up. As an example, when your teenage boy comes home from schools, 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 up his room. This frequently sparks an argument in which words like 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads off to his bedroom slamming the door behind him. The problem in this case is often that the boy has not yet made the connection between his actions in simply dumping his bag in the corner of his room and the inconvenience which this creates for you in having to go into his room and sort through the mess when it comes time to do the laundry. In addition he has not made the connection between the fact that you have just spent a fortune 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 curtailing his freedom but this is not fair because at the end of the day he is the one who has to live in the room and he cannot see why it should matter in the slightest to you what state it is in. The secret is simply to educate him by helping him to see the connection for himself between the state of his bedroom and the inconvenience that a messy room causes you. Once you have done this, withdrawing his privileges and inconveniencing him when he does not keep his room in good order will suddenly be seen as quite fair. Whilkst 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 must be in a position to see the connection between his actions and their consequences. Despite the fact that it is often easy for an adult to see the connection, a child may not always have enough experience or knowledge to make the connection. For this reason it is important to start teaching your child responsibility from an early age so that, when problems of understanding do arise, the child will come to trust you when you tell him that he does not wish the consequences of whatever it is he is contemplating. One 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 over your children is limited. Often the best that you can do is to set reasonable expectation and, wherever needed, to take a firm, but certainly not overly authoritative, position. At the end of the day you are after all rearing a person with the ability to think for himself and to stand on his own two feet and demonstrate self-responsibility. Setting a good example and pointing out to your children the path which they should 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 are going to follow the path which you have prepared for them.
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