Parenting Teenagers And The Difficulties of Instilling A Sense Of Responsibility

For parents one of the most difficult tasks we face is that of teaching responsibility and this is especially problematic when we are looking at parenting teenagers. In most cases you find that you are faced with the dilemma 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 choices.

Being 'responsible' for something merely means being the agent for some action which produces an effect that can be either good or bad. Instilling a sense of responsibility is thus very much a case 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 teach your child to make the link between his or her actions and their natural consequences then you will go a long way towards teaching responsibility. This approach is also much better than following the time honored, but frequently totally unproductive, route of simply resorting to telling your teenagers that they can or connot do something 'because I say so'.

This is all well and good but, in practice, it is usually much easier said than done. For example, take the teenager who is tempted to start, or has indeed already 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 worse, to feed his habit. His school work will begin to suffer, as will his health, and eventually he will come up against the law and could well end up in jail. But, you try explaining this to a sixteen year old who feels that he is totally 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 complicated for this brief article. Nevertheless, it is a common problem these days and one which many parents will be familiar with.

At this stage however let us take a simpler, but still very common problem - that of teaching your teenage boy to take responsibility for keeping his room tidy.

For a large number of parents the answer to this problem is to simply withdraw privileges until the room is tidied. As an example, when your teenage son comes home from schools, drops his bag on the floor and is just about to rush off to join his friends at the mall, you stop him from venturing out until he has cleaned up his room. This probably sets off an argument in which words like 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads off to his bedroom and slams the door behind him.

The problem here 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 to laundry time. Similarly he has not made the connection between the fact that you have just spent a a considerable sum of money rewiring the house because mice, attracted by the food left in his room, chewed their way through the electrical cabling.

In simple terms you have inconvenienced your son by curtailing his freedom but this simply is not fair because when all is said and done he is the individual who has to live in the room and he cannot see that it should matter to you what state the room is in.

The answer 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. Once you have achieved this, withdrawing his privileges and inconveniencing him when he does not keep his room clean 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 should nor forget that the child has to be in a position to see the link 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 link. For this reason it is important 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 say that he really does not wish the consequences of whatever it is he is about to do.

One last point to remember is that, just 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. Often the best you can do is to set reasonable expectation and, where necessary, to adopt a firm, but not overly authoritative, position. At the end of the day you are rearing a person with the ability to think for himself, stand on his own two feet and demonstrate self-responsibility.

Creating a good example and showing your children the path that they should follow is as much as any parent can do. At the end of the day your children will make their own decisions about whether or not they are going to follow the path which you have laid out for them.

Article Source: Main Articles

Parenting4Dummies.com provides a comprehensive and growing resource of information, advice and articles on many aspects of parenting including parenting teenagers and also provides comprehensive advice for choosing a homeschooling program

This article may be reproduced wholly or in part without written permission provided the byline, resource area, and any hyperlinks remain in order to give proper credit to the author.

Internet search engines and directory listings are imperative to your sites existence and success. Submit Your Website to the Searchen Networks directory and search engine to achieve authoritive inbound links.

Please Rate this Article

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5