Teaching Children Accountability and Responsibility

July 31, 2009

childrenresponsibility Instead of teaching our children to feel bad for their mistakes, we need to teach them to learn from their mistakes. When appropriate, we also want them to be responsible and to make amends for their mistakes.

Some parents are happy to stop punishing or in some fashion making their children pay for their mistakes, but they worry that their children will not learn to be accountable or responsible. This is of course an important consideration.

After all, you cannot learn from a mistake or be responsible to make amends unless you first recognize your mistake. This accountability is certainly essential for adults to self-correct, but this is not the same for children. Children don’t need to be accountable to learn from a mistake. Babies have no sense of self at all, and yet they are constantly learning and self-correcting.

Accountability is the conscious recognition that “I made a mistake.” Children do not develop a sense of self until they are nine years old. Before the age of nine, self-correction occurs automatically without accountability. There is no sense of self who has made the mistake. The innocent child self-corrects, not because he has done something wrong, but to imitate his parents and to cooperate.

When children are held accountable and responsible for their mistakes, it restricts their natural ability to self-correct by means of imitation and cooperation. This self-correction is essential for learning and growing. If you stop to think about it, you realize that life is always a process of trial and error. All of us make mistakes on a daily, if not hourly basis.

A parent’s goal for their child should be developing a sense of accountability and responsibility without making the child feel unworthy or inadequate for making mistakes. After nine years of feeling safe to make mistakes without punishment or the loss of love, children are ready to assume an appropriate sense of accountability and responsibility. When it is really okay to make mistakes, then it is safe for children to recognize their mistakes and consciously learn from them.

In truth, children are hardwired to self-correct automatically after making a mistake. The main reason children or adults don’t self-correct after making a mistake is that they don’t feel safe admitting they made a mistake. This natural self-corrective reaction requires feeling safe to indeed make mistakes.

Anxiety about making mistakes only increases the chances of making them. Punishing or shaming children for making mistakes increase the anxiety and weakens the natural instinct to self-correct, Parents should always remember that just as they are from Mars and Venus, their children are from heaven. Self-correction is an automatic process that occurs primarily by means of imitation and cooperation; and never through punishment, fear, or shame.

________________________________________

Other MVL Parenting Articles:

How an Empty Nest Can Improve Your Marriage

Better Parent-Teen Communication

Infant Language Development: The Gift of Words

Bullying: A New Look at an Old Problem

5 Very Important Things to Say to Your Teen about Sexting

Helicopter Parents: Grounding Your Natural Instincts

Sex Education, Part 1: What Both Parents and Teens Should Know

Sex Education, Part 2: Answering Tough Questions

Your Child’s 8 Different Forms of Intelligences

The Five Essential Messages of Positive Parenting