Teaching Responsibility to Your Kids

Responsibility is one of the most important values that parents must instill in their children. It is also one of the hardest to teach. After all, the concept of responsibility is often an elusive one for toddlers and young kids, and our desire to raise them in a nurturing and caring atmosphere often precludes the trait from being adequately taught until the child is grown. How can this be corrected? How can responsible values be appropriately taught, even at a young age?

As a mom with children of my own, I have asked myself these questions numerous times over the past couple years. While I haven’t in this span found a perfect solution to my queries, I’ve still been able to devise methods and approaches that, hopefully, will ultimately serve to make my kids more responsible people in the long-run. Here’s what I’ve been trying to do:

Instill Healthy Eating Habits

We go to the grocery store for a variety of reasons: we need eggs, we want to stock up on organic makeup, or perhaps the bathroom has run out of toilet paper. And, when our kids are still young, we will likely bring them along each and every time. I think this makes for a great opportunity to teach both responsibility and healthy eating habits. I’ve devised a system: I tell my kids they can buy four food items of their choosing. These products need to hit certain nutritional requirements for fiber, calcium, and vegetable content, but otherwise they are free to make their own decisions. While my kids will always select one unhealthy food among the four, the requirement have made them more aware, discerning, and hopefully responsible. They have even found healthy foods that they enjoy.

Give them Jobs

Some parents give their kids chores and expect them to be done without any sort of compensation. Other parents won’t assign chores, but will instead try to teach responsibility by handing out a regular allowance. While you should certainly stick with whatever approach works best for your family, I’ve found that a combination of chores and compensation (i.e. an allowance that is paid after chores are complete) is a great way to teach responsibility. If my kids don’t feel like doing chores, that’s ok – they just won’t get paid. Conversely, if they want to buy a new toy, they might need to do more chores in order to gain the appropriate finances.

Let Them Fail

We certainly never want our kids to fail, and there are areas in which we will work hard to insure that they don’t. But there are other times where a failure has consequences only as a learning experience for a child. Sports and extracurricular activities are a case in point. If your kid doesn’t show up to practice or doesn’t prepare appropriate for the dance recital, there are real (although not harmful) repercussions, and there will often be an outside authority figure who gets angry at them. As a parent, I’ve decided to let my children fail – and, in the process, learn from their mistakes – when such situations are in play.

These are just a few ways that you can endeavor to teach responsibility to your child. None of these approaches are particularly difficult, but since the trait is a particularly challenging one to master – even for adults – its’ always good to make a concerted and consistent effort in following these techniques through.

This article is a guest post.