Teaching Responsibility

Audio By Carbonatix

I have a simple question for parents today: Are you teaching your children to be responsible? This thought applies to children at any and every age. If you have small children, they can be responsible to help put their toys away. If you have teenagers, they can be responsible to make sure that things around their room are picked up, and they can bring their dishes to the sink after a meal. Obviously, there are lots of other ways responsibility will show up at those different ages, but I’m just wanting to give a couple of examples. Each person reading this knows the flow of life in your own home, so you’re better equipped to come up with age-appropriate responsibilities. But I just wanted to start out by getting everybody thinking of some practical examples. 

You can come up with your own way to help your kids learn responsibility at their age and stage. As you already know, they probably won’t like it! But that’s okay–mine didn’t either. That’s not the point though; this is the process that teaches them to be responsible and that helps them learn what it takes to navigate life as they grow up and gain a combination of responsibilities and freedoms. Because that combination really needs to be in place in order to provide the right balance. Freedom without responsibility will leave them feeling aimless. Responsibility without freedom will leave them feeling discouraged. 

Of course, just like a lot of things when it comes to parenting, this will probably take some tweaking and negotiating. You might find that things are a little too skewed toward freedom or toward responsibly, and then it will be time for some small changes. That’s a normal part of growing and learning, so don’t get discouraged and give up at the first sign that things aren’t going perfectly or smoothly from the beginning. 

In other words, teaching responsibility is a process. And it’s a process that is vital for parents to help our kids learn from. Their lives will be much more difficult if they don’t know how to handle their responsibilities, which is why we need to be actively involved in teaching them how to do it with smaller, less significant things so that they’ll be ready for the bigger, more significant things that they face later in life. 

Make sure you’re there as a parent, you’re involved, and you say the things that need to be said. That’s part of what it means for parents to be the adults in the room. We have to make the hard decisions and the unpopular rules. But we do it because our goal is for our children to grow up to be adults who can handle the things that life will bring their way. We know that they will need to understand and embrace their responsibilities when they’re at their job, or when they’re studying in school, or when it comes time for them to raise their own family. 

As much as it takes extra effort and time for us to help them learn to be responsible, we’re setting them up for a lifetime of success when we do it. I believe that helping them navigate freedom and responsibility will lead to our kids and our families winning more often at home!