 When talking about parenting one of the most complicated tasks is that of teaching responsibility. Besides, this is particularly difficult when it concerns parenting teenagers. You always find yourself faced with the dilemma of inculcating habits into your teenagers that will result in proper behavior while at the same time not repressing the need for them to be able to make individual choices.
Being “responsible” for something means simply being the factor for some action that creates a cause which can be either good or bad. Teaching responsibility is for that reason very much a case of getting your child to realize that every action has effects and that these effects may change not only their own lives but the lives of others.
If you are able to teach your child to learn how to make the connection between his or her actions and their natural results then you will be a long way down the path towards teaching responsibility. This method is also far better than following the time privileged, but often completely unproductive, road of simply resorting to telling you teenagers that they must or must not do something 'because I say so'.
Of course, this is all well and good but, in practice, it is often easier said than done. Let’s take for example the teenager who is tempted to begin, or has indeed began, experimenting with drugs. The clear results of this action are that he is pretty likely to shift from 'soft' to 'hard' drugs, will become addicted and almost certainly begin to lie and steal, or even worse, in order to feed his habit. His school results will begin to suffer, as will his health, and finally he will fall foul of the law and probably end up in jail. But you try explaining this to a sixteen year old who thinks that he's completely in control of his life and more than able of ensuring that this doesn't happen to him.
Probably this is an extreme example of the problems of teaching responsibility and one for which the solution is perhaps a little too complex for this short article. It is however a common problem for parents currently and one which many parents will be familiar with.
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