How to bring up responsibility in a child: 7 reliable ways

What is responsibility
A glance in any explanatory dictionary reveals that responsibility is the ability to understand the consequences of one’s actions and to be responsible for them, to fulfill the obligations undertaken. But dictionaries do not tell us how this ability appears. But psychologists do.

In psychology, responsibility is understood as a social skill which is not given at birth and does not appear after a “serious conversation. It is formed in early childhood.

Many parents dream of bringing up a responsible, collected, punctual child, but at the same time rush to do everything for the baby and quickly correct any of his blunders. How then will he learn that his actions have consequences? How does he or she learn to do things independently?

Responsibility is closely related to independence, although they are not the same thing. In the beginning there is independence – the child learns to dress himself, take the dirty clothes to the basket, to help his mother in the kitchen. Gradually he understands that he has responsibilities.

But responsibility is not independence. The three-year-old enjoys shouting: “I’ll do it myself!” and rushes to pour water into a cup without thinking that the cup will break. The ability to be balanced and bring things to an end will come much later.

Responsibility is not about being diligent. Trying to bring up a responsible child, parents sometimes bring up an obedient one. But an executive person is not always ready to make decisions. He may expect to be told the right thing to do, and if something goes wrong, the one who told him will be to blame.

Responsibility and Freedom
Frederick Perls, a German psychologist and the founder of Gestalt therapy, in his seminars said that responsibility is closely connected with freedom. A responsible person understands that he has different choices of behavior in any situation. He or she consciously chooses how to act, so he or she is prepared to take responsibility for the consequences.

There are times when you have to choose difficulties – like getting up an hour early to walk the dog, or wasting a day off for math class. But when a teenager knows what he or she is doing it for, there is motivation to keep going.

Here we come to the question from the beginning of the article: what’s wrong with a situation where a mom pays her son for tutoring and is angry about his irresponsibility? It’s simple: if there are quarrels, it means that the study is under pressure, not by choice. You can’t educate a child to be responsible for something he didn’t choose. You can talk him into it, or force him into it – if you have leverage. But that has nothing to do with responsibility.

Responsibility and locus of control
Another approach to responsibility was proposed by psychologist Julian Rotter, who coined the term “locus of control. Let us examine what it is.

People with an external locus of control explain their failures by external causes: coincidence, chronic bad luck, presence of enemies, etc. This position is also found in adults who say they did not succeed because they were born in the wrong country or do not have rich relatives.

People with an internal locus of control believe that they are responsible for their own successes and failures. They consider the influence of external circumstances, but try not to go with the flow and rely mostly on themselves. In case of failures, they always see where they could have foreseen difficulties or how they could have fought them.

The question of how to bring up responsibility in a teenager can be reformulated – how to develop an internal locus of control. The personal example of parents helps in this. If adults often say that their troubles are the fault of others, the weather, the bosses, the teenager will also get used to the idea that it is impossible to change something.

It happens that parents inadvertently teach their children an external locus of control from an early age. A typical example is given by modern psychologist Anna Bykova: A little boy stumbles on a stump and cries, his mother calms him, “Let’s scold the stump, that’s how bad he is, we’ll punish him. And she knocks on the stump with her spatula. It would seem a trifle. But the words program thinking, and with each such case, the child gets used to thinking that anyone is responsible for his “falls”, but not him.

Three principles of forming responsibility
The personal example of parents. Our weaknesses are copied by children more often than strengths. If parents don’t keep their promises (even if for a good reason), the child learns to do the same and considers his reasons important.

The right to free choice. In order to take responsibility for his or her actions, the child should choose his or her own deed and understand why he or she is doing it this way and not that way.

Patience and a conscious approach. You can’t bring up an independent and responsible child in one day, having told him/her: “From now on you do your homework by yourself and pack your bag to school”. This is a long way, which starts with small steps.

In the beginning you will have to remind, look for incentives (“Do your homework, and then we’ll go to the movies”), assign small tasks (“Collect notebooks for tomorrow, iron your school shirt”), and only after a while he/she will become responsible.