Coping With the Dilemmas of Teaching Teenagers a Sense of Responsibility
For parents one of the most difficult tasks is that of teaching our children responsibility and this is especially difficult when we are looking at parenting teenagers. In most cases 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 merely means being the agent for some action which produces an effect which can be either good or bad. Instilling a sense of responsibility is accordingly very much a matter of getting your child to understand that his actions have consequences and that these consequences may affect not only his own life but the lives of other individuals.
If you can get your child to see the link between his actions and the natural consequences of those actions then you will go a long way towards teaching responsibility. This method is also far better than following one of the time honored, but usually totally unproductive, parenting tips of merely resorting to telling your child that he must or must not do something ‘because you say so’.
This is all very well but, in reality, it is usually much easier said than done. Take, for example, the teenager who is tempted to begin, or has in fact started, experimenting with drugs. The undoubted 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. School work will start to suffer, as will his health, and finally he will fall foul of the law and may well land up in jail. However, you try to explain this to a fifteen year old who is convinced that he is totally in control of his own life and is more than capable of ensuring that this will not happen to him.
Now This is possibly a somewhat extreme example of the problems of teaching responsibility and one for which the answer is a little bit 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 extremely common problem - that of getting your teenage son to take responsibility for keeping his room clean.
For probably the majority of parents the answer here is to simply withdraw privileges until the room is tidied. For example, when your teenage son arrives home from school, 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 cleaned his room. This normally sparks an argument in which the words ‘not fair’ feature prominently as he heads for his room slamming the door behind him.
The difficulty in this case is normally 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 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 small fortune having the wiring in the house sorted out because mice, attracted by the food left in his room, had chewed their way through the cabling.
In simple terms you have inconvenienced him by restricting his freedom but this is not fair because at the end of the day he is the individual who has to live in the room and he cannot see that it should matter to you what state it 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 for you. As soon as you do this, withdrawing his privileges and inconveniencing him when he does not keep his room in good order will suddenly seem to be quite fair.
While getting teenagers to connect their actions with their natural consequences is clearly the secret to instilling a sense of responsibility in them, it should be remembered that the child has got to be in a position to see the link between his actions and their consequences.
Although it is usually all too easy for an adult to see the connection, your child might not always have sufficient experience or knowledge to spot the link. For this reason it is important to begin teaching your child responsibility from an early age so that, when problems of understanding do arise, the child will have learnt to trust you when you say that he does not want the consequences of whatever it is he is about to do.
One final point to think about is that, like adults, teenagers have a degree of their own free will and, like it or not, the influence that you can exert over your children is limited. Often the best that you can do is to set reasonable expectation and, wherever needed, to adopt a firm but certainly not overly authoritative position. At the end of the day you are after all raising an individual with the ability to think for himself, stand on his own feet and exercise self-responsibility.
Setting a good example and showing your teenager the path to follow is as much as most parents can do. At the end of the day your child will make his own decisions about 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 breeze when you compare it to the subject of teen sex advice.
Posted on: Thursday, February 21, 2008 at 11:04 pm 
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