Your Ignorance of Your Responsibility

Having explained the early years of discipline yesterday, here is some insight into managing the teenage crowd until they reach the age of consent, majority or whatever you call it when they move the hell out of your house and make it on their own. The following is much easier to accomplish if you have not sheltered your children from the consequences of their own poor decisions. Then they have learned that their decision making abilities are not so keen and that they might need to spend some time thinking about pros and cons of a given choice and its consequences before acting. If you have kept an iron grip on you kids and made all their decisions for them and never allowed them to suffer from their mistakes, then this process will be a little more mistake laden but it is still workable.
















What we have above is the Age vs. Responsibility chart. Obviously, when a child is 5 years old, they have very little, if any responsibility for their own life. You, as the parent, make almost all of the decisions and have almost complete control over what happens to the child. As the child in question grows older you need to allow them to have more and more responsibility or they end up as a clueless adult and wrap their car around a tree or drink themselves to death on their 21st birthday.

For simplicity's sake, there are three lines on this chart: Liberal, conservative and strategic. The liberal (left) line could be the latch-key kid on their own from 2PM until 6PM when Mom and Dad get home from work. There is little if any oversight of activities once the kid leaves the house. You know them. They are their kids best friends and give them responsibility far beyond their years. The kids don't know how to handle it. Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and the tendency to be overly familiar with local law enforcement generally ensue. These kids do, however, tend to be very street smart and get along well assuming they make it to 21 without doing irreversible damage or weighing themselves down with too much baggage.

The conservative (right) line represents the over-protective parent. This kid gets almost no responsibility and is completely sheltered from both decisions and consequences. At some point during the teenage years there is a massive rebellion. The parents realize that their little baby is grown up and go on a crash course in trying to let go of the reins and cram the knowledge and experience into the pour soul. They generally end up on campus with very little adult decision making experience and go through the university of hard knocks. You can see a lot of them on YouTube doing really stupid things while under the influence of alcohol. Their friends, having been raised the same way, film them rather than reining them in and pouring a cup of hot coffee down their throat.

I should note at this point that my son is a walking Christian and that a large number of his friends are from his church group. The power of positive peer pressure cannot be underestimated. Neither neglect the power of a group of kids chanting "Do it. Do it! DO IT!" whilst your teenager stands ready to perform a stupid human trick.

The middle line represents the strategic approach. This is what I am striving to attain. Seek to strike a balance between handing them too much before they are ready and never giving them a chance to fail until they are completely on their own. You start handing over responsibility at an early age, while they are still in grade school. Not too much, mind you, but enough that they can learn what it is to be responsible for your own decisions and actions and to live with the consequences. By the time they learn to drive (16) you should have handed over a great deal of responsibility to the kid (80% by my chart). After all, you are going to turn them loose in a motor vehicle (=lethal weapon) and they will be able to do whatever the hell they want the minute they are out of your driveway. When they are 17 and 18 (last two years of high school) they should have 100% responsibility for their own decisions and actions. You should guide and assist, of course, but they need some practice falling down and picking themselves back up while they are still under your roof. This is very difficult as you will be required to watch your kid get themselves into jams that you could have very easily helped them avoid.

I never said parenting teens was easy. Going at it without a strategy is foolish.