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Teaching Kids About Responsibility

The importance of learning responsibility from a young age

By Jade PulmanPublished 5 years ago 3 min read
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As parents we are given the enormous responsibility of teaching our kids everything they need to know about how to be a good, responsible, and productive citizen as an adult. We start teaching them the correct way to act and live at a very young age. As they grow, we teach them more and more things, and hopefully by the time they are adults we have molded them into the people we want them to be. Let’s look at some ways to teach your children responsibility.

Cleaning Up

It’s important that we teach our children how to pick up after themselves when they are little, so that it will carry over into their adulthood. When they finally meet their spouse as an adult you don’t want them to be messy, or not keep their house clean, because it will cause big problems for them in their marriage. Moms especially like to keep the house nice and tidy, and we often will just clean up the mess ourselves instead of making our children do it, because sometimes it’s just easier and quicker. However, this will do your child more harm than good, because they will never learn to clean up after themselves.

Chores

I don’t know any kids that like to do chores, but giving your kids tasks to do around the house helps to improve their responsibility level. For example, if they are given the chore of taking out the trash every day and they fail to do it they need to know that ants, roaches, and possibly mice are going to appear in the home. Chores are a great way for them to earn money as well. You will be killing two birds with one stone, because you not only are teaching them that they have to contribute to the better good of the household with their chores, but you are also teaching them that when you work, your reward is money. This will plant a seed in the mind as a child, and it will grow as an adult and help make them good, hard, honest workers, because they know that going to work equals money in their pocket.

Give Them Something to Care For

An animal is a great way to teach a kid responsibility, because they will have to make sure that it gets food and water daily. It will also be up to them to make sure that the animal gets a regular bath, gets taken outside to go to the bathroom, and gets daily walks. Fostering a dog is a great way to give them something that they will have to care for on a daily basis. Fostering will allow you to have the dog long enough to teach your kids about responsibility, but it won’t be a forever edition to your family, because the dog will eventually be adopted out to its permanent family. You will be able to see how your children handle having the responsibility of the dog, and if they did a job with it then you can decide if you want to let them get one of their own.

Encourage

All too often we are more critical when we should be encouraging. Children are going to make mistakes every day, but instead of telling them how wrong they are, show them where they made the wrong choice, and then encourage them to make the right choice the next time. It’s not what you do when you fall; it’s what you do when you get back up. Teach them that falling is a part of life, but they don’t have to let it devastate them. Show them how to pick themselves up, and try again until they get it right.

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