Teaching Our Kids Responsibility

So I'm driving east down highway 6 in Houston,Texas at 11pm. I'm looking for a good radio station. I hit the Dalia show. Let's see. Nice music. Sounds cool. I keep it on. A woman calls and asks for the song "Forever Young". She keeps saying that her son is a good person and that she knows him deep inside. Turns out, she's a single mom and her son, now 20, has gotten into a lot of serious trouble in his young life. Dalia, like me a family therapist with a radio show, asks her some really hard questions.
Yes, the woman admits that as a single mom she always wanted to make things easier for her son. She wanted to do for him in order to ease his way, and that was a huge mistake. Today, at 20, the boy still does not know how to take responsibility for himself or his actions. Having already been in and out of jail, he's learning now, the hard way, what could have been taught to him as a child had his mother toughened up and made him accountable for his actions.

Three weeks later, we are in the Canyonlands National Park in Eastern Utah. It's beautiful here. At the visitor's center we were given this amazing backpack for young rangers. It is filled with an interactive workbook and experiments to do with your kids on the trails; maps, books, binonaurs, and a creative desert survival tool kit. Unreal. Solai, age 6, decided to take this small microscope in her hand and investigate the rocks and algae. Of course, I was thrilled that she was doing so. At the same time, I told her this, "Solai, if you take the microscope on the trail, you are responsible for it. If it gets lost or broken, you will replace it. Do you understand? Do you want to take it with you?" "Yes" she replied.

To make a long story short, she lost it while doing some wonderful desert survival activity, as a monadic family should, from the workbook. Parenting conflict: "let it go, you pay for it, the girl lost it doing something of great value. She is fully experiencing nature and science here. Let it go gabi". OR "use this as a teaching moment. Be empathetic; try to help her find it ,but let her know that she is accountable. Know that you are strengthening her character by letting her rise to the occasion and be responsible".

I won't lie. I did debate it for a bit. Yet, still, silently and with confidence, I picked option B.

Teaching our kids to take responsibility is one of the most valuable lessons we can give them. As adults, when we know how to take responsibility, we stop looking for whom to blame and start searching for solutions. Taking responsibility is a skill, one that comes with practice and time. It is a skill that we must instill in our children, slowly, over the years, and more and more with their maturity and ability to handle it. Teaching this skill requires us, as parents, to seek those moments, those opportunities, which allow our children to expand.

How do we teach our kids responsibility in our hectic, daily lives:

1 - give them chores on a daily basis. Give them something to be responsible for that is theirs (personal hygiene, cleaning their room) and something that is for the home community (clearing the table, sweeping the house). Teach them through action that duty to themselves and to others comes with taking action.

2 - get them to clean up their messes. When a child, as young as two, drops, spills, or messes up something, help them clean up their mess. It does your child no good for you to scold, "look at what you've done!" while you pick up the cloth and start scrubbing. Give your child the cloth. You'll clean it better, later. Let him go through the natural sequence of cause and effect- I caused the mess, I clean the mess. Its natural, logical, and beautiful.

3 - use "I'll do it for you" when life demands it. When you are late for work or you're dying for the kids to go to bed already, you don't want them to 'do it themselves'. You'll probably kill the kid before he finishes wiping, gluing, writing an apology note, or picking up all of the Lego pieces on the living room floor. At moments like these, use "Would you like me to clean it for you?". This let's you get it done at a pace that fits your current needs, but still lets your child know that it is his realm of responsibility.

So, we spent half an hour searching for the microscope to no avail. She was not thrilled about it, but did pay the $4 out of her own money. Though she cried and begged me to go pay the money on her behalf, I let her know that she was the one who needed to take care of the issue until it was fully resolved. We walked into the Ranger Station and Ranger Joanne told Solai this "I am really proud of you for letting us know that you lost something. That takes courage to do. Thank you for paying for it. Now, we can replace it for others kids to enjoy it like you did. Thank you."

Could I give my daughter this precious moment had she not been held accountable for her actions?

Posted in: Nomadic Parenting