Responsibility

Responsibility is a crucial concept essential for a child to learn if they hope to arrive to adulthood with a good foundation. The earlier we learn responsibility, the earlier we start being responsible for our own actions. It is responsible to take responsibility to forgive, to share, to help, to not blame, to correct, to improve and to make right what is wrong in our actions. That’s who we are, people who make mistakes, but we have to learn to take responsibility for them. If we are raised in a home where people do not take responsibility for their actions and attitudes, we will do the same, and when there is a problem, we will blame it on someone else. This inability to face up to our own mistakes will wreak havoc on future relationships and especially marriage. It will greatly hinder us in our ability to be good parents.

When a parent teaches a child to be responsible, they are saying to the child, I am responsible for you. Watch me, and you will learn how to be responsible. When I make a mistake, I will admit it and make it right. Growing up in a home like that clears away the chaos and brings clarity. Growing up in a home where parents don’t take responsibility for their actions causes a child to be emotionally out of control. The emotions of anger, frustration, impatience, irritation or resentment all are emotional statements that are being made inside of us. If we don’t have help to understand why we feel this way, we will only become more confused. Those emotions can be like a wild team of horses pulling us in reckless directions. Responsibility pulls those emotions back and learns to control them by doing right by them.

This is precisely why good parenting teaches and models the concept of responsibility. Very early on parents help their children identify their emotions and help them understand where that emotion is coming from. However, they do something else that is essential, and that is they teach their children to own their own emotions and be responsible for them.