Other tips

Teaching Children Responsibility

Making Children more Independent

• May 10, 2007
• Cyrus Dehkan

Children can be taught responsibility at an early age. This article will suggest ways to instill this behavior.

Children need to learn responsibility at an early age. It’s something that can be taught to them by implementing small changes into their routine. These changes will help instill pride and the idea of accomplishment. Once present, they will want to continue this positive feedback, which in turn will teach them responsibility.

Work

One effective way to teach responsibility is to give children chores. The chores should be age appropriate. As the children mature, the chores they receive can become more complicated. These chores should vary, in order to teach the children different skills and to maintain fairness, if a parent has more than one child. By accomplishing their tasks, children will gain self-confidence and responsibility. In addition, there are other advantages to giving chores to children. These include getting the children away from video games, computers and television as well as giving them some physical activity, depending on the chore.

Caring

A nice way to teach kids responsibility is through caring for a pet or plant. By getting them the pet, you teach them that this living creature depends on them to stay alive. You will get the food, supplies and other necessities. The children will be the ones to use these supplies to maintain and to take care of the pet. By successfully administering to their pets’ needs, they will learn to become responsible, which in turn, will enable them to tackle more difficult forms of responsibility in the future. Depending on the age of the child, one may want to start out with smaller pets, such as goldfish. If the children show responsibility with the smaller pets, then larger ones can be purchased as they mature. If pets are out of the question, then caring for a houseplant may be another solution.

Other tips

Here are some other tips for teaching responsibility:

• Let your children deal with their consequences. If they keep loosing their glasses or don’t do their homework, do not help them. Let them learn that glasses cost money and make them pay for it. Let them see first hand that failure to hand in or do homework on time, will result in school demerits.
• Talk about responsibility with your children and show them responsibility by modeling that behavior yourself.
• Give them an allowance at an early age and let them make decisions on how they spend it. Do not give them extra money if they run out.
• Teach them how to save. When recieving monetary gifts, teach them to save half of it. Allow them to spend the other half any way they’d like.
• Make them feel that you feel they are responsible. Children usually don’t want to disappoint the parent and this feeling itself may instill responsible behavior.

There are various ways to teach responsibility. By starting young, you’ll ease your child’s transition into the real world. By teaching them responsibility, you’ll instill a sense of trust, self-esteem and self-reliance. All of these will give them the tools to become successful as an adult.

When parents realize that their children might have either a behavioral or learning problem, the first thing many do is blame themselves. Parents are usually very frightened and worried about their children’s behavior. This fear often manifests itself in negative ways. One of those ways is blame.

As problems continue, they start to externalize the blame to other people or institutions. They blame therapists and teachers who are ineffective in managing their child. As the child gets older, parents blame his friends or the neighborhood or the music he listens to. As the child grows into a young adult, they blame drugs and alcohol, or our culture.