Parenting Strategy 5:
Teach Responsibility and Respect
BY ARLENE F. HARDER, MA, MFT
NOTE: Four of my first six strategies for confident and practical parenting are central to discipline problems parents often have with their children:
 Listen, talk and guide with love: Communication that works
Distinguish between your child’s needs and wants
Teach responsibility and respect
Discipline as consistently as possible
Notice that discipline comes last, since it is much easier after the other strategies have been put in place.
Boy reading newspaper: "According to this article, pressure from the athletic system's gonna make me use steroids! . . . and pressure from the academic system's gonna make me cheat on tests! and peer pressure's gonna make me take drugs! . . . and fast food ads are gonna make me obese! All of which is pretty depressing. On the other hand, imagine how much worse I'd feel . . . if any of this stuff was gonna be my fault!"
— Cartoon "Mallard Fillmore" by Bruch Tinsley, April 24, 2005
A young man sits in a therapist’s office and the therapist says, “Okay, let’s take a look at who is responsible for your problems." On the table is a dart and on the wall is a dartboard divided into large sections labeled “Mother,” “Father,” “Society,” “Teachers”—and a very narrow slice of “Me."
— Unidentified cartoon
Twenty-year-old: "I don’t understand why Paula Abdul ["American Idol" celebrity judge] is in trouble for not stopping after sideswiping that car. It wasn't that big of a deal."
Forty-year-old: "She was fined $300 and given two years probation because she hit a car and left the scene of the accident."
Twenty-year-old: "But she didn’t know the person. Why should she have stopped?"
Forty-year-old: "Because it's the law! Because she did it and therefore she was responsible! That’s why!"
— Overheard conversation
It amazes me that anyone could view responsibility the way this young woman did. It shouldn’t. The news is filled with stories of people who don’t take responsibility for their own actions and don’t feel responsible toward anyone else.
However, if we want to have a safer, less corrupt, more tolerant and more peaceful world, we have to start recognizing our responsibility to others as well as to ourselves. We have to respect our differences and honor similarities between people.
And if we want our children to become resourceful, resilient, and compassionate adults, parents will have to teach their children responsibility for their actions and respect for the dignity of all human beings.
What is the most important factor in teaching your child to be responsible? Live responsibly.
I have just finished reading The More You Know by Bill Mitchell, a private detective, on how to catch your spouse when he or she is cheating on you. He notes that in America 50-60 percent of all marriages end in divorce and that within the last decade, incidents of adultery have risen at the alarming rate of as much as 50-70 percent. He also believes that, “100 percent of extramarital affairs take their toll on biological and stepchildren.”
This conviction is one I can affirm from my experience. Some of the most bizarre and interesting couples I’ve counseled are ones in which there is a man who is married to someone else and a woman who is his mistress. While the woman wants a more permanent commitment from the man, he's trying hard to have his cake and eat it too. In every case, it is clear that even though his children may not be directly aware of his infidelity, they’re deprived of seeing their parents model love, respect for one another, and responsibility toward their marriage vows.
As I say throughout the Childhood Affirmations Program, you can’t teach your children what you don’t practice. Hopefully, your children will discover, somewhere along the road to adulthood, the importance of a committed relationship, how to manage money, how to run a household effectively, how to persevere and achieve their goals without doing harm to others. They need to learn these lessons from someone. Why not from you? (See Live Your Values, Express Your Highest Qualities.)
Okay, let's assume you're responsible in everything you do. You pay your bills on time, you don't lie, you are faithful to your partner, you do what you say you will do when you say you will do it (most of the time, anyway). How do you deliberately translate the modeling of your behavior into similar behavior for your child?
Since responsibility and respect (which is discussed in the sidebar) are abstract concepts, they are hard for young children to understand without concrete experience. Saying, "Be responsible," doesn't mean much to a four-year-old. There are, however, a number of ways you can help your child apply responsibility to her life so that she will know its importance when she is an adult.
1. Don't Allow Your Child to Play the Blame Game
Every teacher has a story about a child who’s a terror in the classroom. When his parents are called, once again, because he’s gotten into trouble, the parent is quick to blame everyone but the child. It’s the teacher’s fault because “she just doesn’t like my son,” or “she just doesn’t know how to teach.” Also blamed will be friends and society at large.
At one time, when a child got in trouble at school, he could definitely count on trouble at home. No one but the child was blamed. Today we recognize that sometimes teachers may take out their frustrations on certain kinds of children who rub them the wrong way. A few teachers are not as competent as we would like. But the reality is that the vast majority of teachers are dedicated, hard-working, and underpaid. Today we know that the neighborhoods in which children live contribute to all kinds of behavior and drug problems. We also know that many children in those same neighborhoods are able to rise above their circumstances. That is, they do when their parents stress concepts like duty, responsibility, obligation, contribution to family and society—and when parents place the greatest degree of responsibility for behavior on the child himself.
When your child gets into trouble, whom do you blame? What excuses do you accept as reasons for missed homework, for socially irresponsible behavior like fights, and for not completing chores?
Here is where the responsibility rubber meets the parenting road. All children get in trouble now and then. All children make mistakes. It isn’t even a matter of who might have encouraged a particular behavior, or that your child simply forgot to do work he was asked to do. It is, however, a matter of teaching a child the simple words, “I did it.”
I did it. How refreshing. Not, “I didn't mean to." Not, "I wasn't the only one." Not, "Well, yeah, I did it but I shouldn’t have to take the consequences for what I did.” Just “I did it.” Teach your child to acknowledge his mistakes and help him figure out what he can do to prevent making that error in the future—and then he and you won’t need to spend so much time deciding who or what is to blame.
When you place the responsibility for your child’s actions onto anyone else than your child, or when you pick up your child’s clothes or do their chores for them, or when you drive to school with their lunch because they forgot it, you deprive them of the consequences of the fact that they are responsible for their own actions. If they don’t have practice making their own decisions, and their own mistakes, and if they aren’t helped to recognize their mistakes are simply paths to learning how to make decisions more effectively the next time, they are likely to spend a lifetime shifting responsibility for their own actions onto someone or something else. (See Discipline as Consistently as Possible.)
2. Keep Your Hands (Mostly) Off Homework
This suggestion is short and sweet. Homework is your child’s responsibility, not yours. You can, and should, be aware of what she is required to do and how well she’s doing it. You need to provide a safe and quiet place for her to do her homework. But you don’t do her any favors if you do the work for her. After all, if you take on the responsibility for getting the work done now, when will she learn to do it herself?
See Instill in Your Child a Love of Learning and Teach Your Child How to Think Clearly and Solve Problems to learn how you can help your child without stepping in and doing her homework for her.
3. Require Your Child to Do Daily Chores
There are so many pressures on children today that parents often find it easier not to require many household chores. After all, if there is a lot of work required around the house, when will the homework get done—or TV shows watched, or video games played, or parties attended, or shopping at the malls, or any other childhood activity that takes time.
Let’s assume, however, that you expect your child to sacrifice some of the time when he would rather be doing activities he prefers in order for him to contribute his fair share of the work that every house needs done—that is, if it is to function without placing an unnecessary burden on one or both parents or on other members of the family. But if we set aside the benefit to the household by making him responsible for daily chores, what does the child get out of it?
George Vaillant, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, reported on a classic study of inner-city males who grew up in the Depression of the 1930s and who were interviewed periodically throughout their lives. The study indicated that those who were happiest and most successful in every respect—financially, psychologically, in terms of family relations, and even health—were the ones who had been required to perform chores regularly while growing up. This pattern was consistent despite different ethnic backgrounds, education levels, income and family circumstances.
What seemed most important was that when these men were young, the confidence they gained from having success in accomplishing small chores gave them the courage to attack more challenging tasks as they grew older. Each new triumph and skill they learned gave them the ability to accomplish more and more difficult things—building a foundation for motivation to reach for ever more difficult jobs.
The “Parade Magazine” columnist, Marilyn Vos Savant, has written a wonderful book Growing Up: A Classic American Childhood. It includes over one thousand activities, skills and experiences for kids from three to eighteen, of what she thinks kids should learn before they leave home. While you may not agree with all her suggestions, what struck me when I read the book was how practical skills are bond to be learned if a child is required to help around the house. For example, here are four skills your child will need when she's out on her own:
Be able to add an aerator to a sink spout and know how to fix a leaky spout or faucet with a washer.
Know which cleaning agents can damage which surfaces or have fumes that are dangerous for you or your pets.
Be able to cook (not just open and pour!) a traditional breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Be able to tighten a loose doorknob before it falls off in your hand and you find yourself stuck inside a room with no other exit.
4. Teach Your Child to be Responsible for Her Own Clothes
Does your child like the latest fashions? Most kids do. Does she take care of her own clothes and see they are washed properly, folded and put away so they won’t get soiled before they're even worn? I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t. Most kids are more than willing to let their parents take care of their clothes. After all, they’re busy doing important “kid” stuff (see comments above about doing chores).
Imagine, however, how much less you would spend on clothes if you gave your child a clothes allowance for the year—and if you then followed through on making sure she had to stretch her clothes budget for that entire time. She may discover that a pair of $150 jeans wasn't worth it.
Imagine how much easier your life would be if your child was required to either help with the laundry or do it herself. You would be spared having to give her lectures about taking better care of her clothes, and she would be spared having to listen to them.
5. Teach Your Child to be Responsible Toward the Environment
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average American uses 90 gallons of water a day. A European uses only 53 gallons; a sub-Saharan African, 5 gallons. What does your teenager learn when he gets to take a half-hour shower? Well, he doesn't learn much about the world’s diminishing supply of fresh water.
When the average American uses 33% more of the world’s resources than the average person in a third-world country, it is time we taught our children that we are not the only ones on this earth. As we have seen in recent years, those who are unable to achieve anywhere near the affluence and wealth they see exhibited on TV and in movies are more likely to be attracted to fundamentalists who use their discontent with that disparity as a reason for terrorism. Our overuse of world resources, while not the direct cause of world instability, is certainly a contributing factor.
6. Teach Your Child About Money and Finances
Did you know much about handling money when you became an adult? Most people don’t. Today’s youth, spoiled with “premature affluence,” as Jerald G. Bachman, a University of Michigan social psychologist, calls it, enter adulthood unprepared for navigating the perils of credit cards, rent, utilities, clothes, transportation and food, let alone saving and making investments for a “retirement account” needed in the far-distant future.
Fortunately, the more you can give your child information on how money makes the world work—and how it can also create a tremendous burden if handled poorly—the more you have set your child on the road to success.
In addition to giving a child an allowance (see Should You Give Your Kids an Allowance?), you help your child learn about money and build confidence when you allow them, indeed when you encourage them, to work part time. As they see their employment options expand, they come to realize that work contributes to society, and that they are part of that society.
Once they have money, the next step is guiding them in spending some of it wisely and saving some of it for later. This is especially important since, being the instant gratification souls that they are, most would spend it all the day it came in. Here is how one parent used shopping as a learning experience. She took her son, who was six, on a treasure hunt to three stores. They were looking for the best price on a radio for the boy’s father. The boy “earned” the difference between the highest and lowest prices, $10, clear evidence that bargain hunting pays off.
Now that you’ve read the “responsibility” part of this article, I recommend you read the “respect” section in the sidebar.
© Copyright 2005, Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT
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