Adolescence
How Parents Can Teach Adolescents Responsibility
Accountability can be hard to teach and hard to learn.
Posted July 19, 2021 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- Adolescents keep pushing for more freedom, while parents need to teach them more responsibility.
- Teens who learn that there are consequences to their decisions are better prepared to handle adulthood.
- Making mistakes is a natural part of growing up and can be helpful as long as adolescents learn from them.
The dynamic for assuming personal responsibility is simple. Responsibility is assuming ownership of the Choice/Consequence Connection in one’s life:
- “I am in charge of making my own choices.”
- “I am obliged to cope with the consequences of these decisions.”
Reality of responsibility
Responsibility is costly. You have to direct yourself and deal with the outcome. No wonder that last-stage adolescents (18-23) can feel mixed about undertaking the responsibilities of independence—they may want the freedom but not necessarily the answerability. “I like being my own boss, but it can be hard facing the fallout.”
The responsibility that comes with making the choice/consequence connection can sometimes feel good when decisions turn out well. Declares a studious teenager: “I worked hard and made my grades!” And now, a positive result feels affirming.
Other times, however, an impulsive adolescent, eager for freedom with peers, might object to facing the upshot of an unwise social choice. “But we didn’t know this could happen!” Replies the parent: “Now you do. Maybe next time, you’ll choose differently.” And innocent mischief has a price to pay.
Readiness for responsibility
A healthy adolescent pushes for more freedom to grow; healthy parents restrain this push out of concern for safety and responsibility, and this conflict of interests unfolds over the course of adolescence.
Since parents want increased freedom to come with commensurate responsibility, they have to decide when their teenager is ready to make and own more discretionary choices. Years ago, I suggested that parents might offer a “freedom contract” to their adolescent that describes what the young person needs to give them before they are willing to provide or to permit more running room.
The six articles of the freedom contract read like this. Believability: “You give us adequate and accurate information.” Predictability: “You keep your promises and agreements.” Accountability: “You take care of business at home, at school, and elsewhere.” Mutuality: “You live on two-way terms, doing for us like we do for you.” Availability: “You are willing to discuss our concerns when they arise.” Civility: “You communicate with courtesy, caring, and respect.”
“When you are living up to these responsibilities, we are more likely to consider new freedoms you want. However, if you lie, break promises, neglect obligations, act like only your needs matter, are not available to talk, and act rude or hurtfully when you do, then we will be less likely to allow the freedom that you want.”
Preparing for responsibility
An adolescent is just an adult-in-training, and the primary trainers are parents. For example, consider the parents' curriculum for their teenager who has just entered high school. Now parents have just 48 short months to prepare their teenager with enough self-management capacity to support more functional independence after graduation day and moving on. Preparation is a parental responsibility.
With their entering freshman, parents might think ahead about empowering their teenager with necessary exit skills that support independence. They can ask themselves: “Over the next four years, what grown-up competencies to rely on can I teach my teenager so she or he will have the smallest next step to independent functioning upon leaving home?” So, for example, they decide when during the high school years they are going to start teaching money-management skills like earning, saving, charging, buying, budgeting, banking, and bill paying.
High school is for independence training.
Non-evaluative correction
Sometimes an adolescent will fear taking responsibility for a mistake or misdeed because the parental response to such behaviors is a severely critical one. “What’s the matter with you anyway? At your age, you should know better!” Impatient or intolerant of errors, the parent can resort to criticism to discourage repetition. In doing so, they can make responsibility more risky for the teenager to take: “I’d rather not try than get put down when I mess up.”
In general, when teenage errors occur, it works best when parents don’t attack character but just take issue with decisions by using non-evaluative correction instead. “We disagree with the choice you have made, this is why, and after hearing everything you have to say, we’ll decide what needs to happen next.”
Mistake-based education
An adolescent who fears the responsibility of admitting mistakes can feel they are to be ashamed of, like having something to hide. Parents can provide a different perspective. They can talk about mistake-based education. They might say something like this:
“Everybody makes mistakes. A mistake is a choice people would make differently if they could do it over again. People don’t make mistakes because they want to; they make mistakes because they didn’t know any better or didn’t think more clearly at the time.
"All mistakes are costly, but they can be worth the expense if they are used to inform and instruct. A bad mistake can teach a good lesson. Making a mistake is not a failing; not learning from a mistake is a failing. It is ignorant to make a mistake, but it is stupid to repeat a mistake. Sometimes people have to repeat the same mistake a number of times when there is something hard they don’t want to learn, before they finally stop acting senseless and wise up.
"The smartest people are not those who never make mistakes, but those who use mistakes to make better choices the next time around. The stupidest people are those who are unable or unwilling to admit mistakes out of the mistaken belief that no one should ever make mistakes.”
Finally, consider the 17-year-old, head hung low, in counseling with his father, sad about having "screwed up again." He was feeling like a failure in the man’s eyes. Then his dad said a helpful thing.
“Son, as far as I’m concerned, if you’re not making some mistakes, that just means you’re not trying hard enough. As someone who continues to fumble his way through life, I believe the main thing is to take responsibility when you slip-up. Don’t beat up on yourself; just learn the hard way, and then carry on knowing more than you did before.”
