Encouraing Your Child to Take Responsibility

These quotes are from the Five Love Languages of Children, by Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell. They were such great gems, coming from a “mainstream” source, I just have to share them with you.

You can help your child to be responsible (and therefore motivated) in two ways. The first is to patiently observe what your child is drawn to; that is, what your child enjoys, appreciates, or likes to do. Then you can encourage him in that direction. If you see an interest in your child in studying music, you can encourage that. But the key is to let the child take the initiative. When parents take the initiative to convince a child to take music lessons, the results are seldom positive.

A second way to help your child be motivated is to remember both you and your child cannot take responsibility for the same thing at the same time. If you wait and allow your child to take the initiative, she may then be motivated because you have allowed her to take responsibility. If you take the initiative and try to convince her to do something, you are assuming responsibility. A child is seldom motivated when this happens.

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Helping a child to be well motivated by permitting her to take both initiative and responsibility for her own behavior seems to be a well-concealed secret today. Most children are placed in a position where a parent or teacher takes the initiative and then assumes responsibility for her learning. Adults do this because they genuinely care for the children and mistakenly believe that the more they take initiative and responsibility, the more they are doing for the children. However, this is a serious mistake.

The lesson to be learned here, in my opinion, isn’t that we should let our kids take all of the initiative. Certainly, our society tends to err on the side of pushing our kids to follow adult ideas of what they are supposed to do, and then we wonder why kids spend so much time “worthless” activities. But going to the opposite extreme of being hands-off is no better.

No, the lesson isn’t that we should stop trying to introduce new things and just let the kids do whatever they want, such as many parents who try “unschooling” think they should be doing. What we, as parents, learn from Chapman and Campbell, is to acknowledge that when we take the initiative, we are taking responsibility for our children’s learning. This means, that when we are directing them and telling them what they should be doing, they aren’t thinking or learning how to be responsible. They are being put into a passive position of knowing that they no longer are responsible, because mom/dad/teacher is in control.

So what’s the point of taking the initiative then? Because, there are indeed times when the kids benefit from us take the reigns. They benefit only if, after we step up and take initiative to get things going, we back off, then let them be free, to decide for themselves what, and when, the next step is, even if the next step they decide isn’t the one we expected them, or wanted them, to take.

Educating our kids is an alternating of us taking responsibility; first it’s our turn, then it’s their turn, then it’s our turn, then it’s their turn. It can also start with the kids taking a turn first. It doesn’t matter who goes first. The important thing is that it’s not totally up to us to “get” them to take responsibility. And kids aren’t in a vacuum. They want to know what we can show them too.

Learning how to know when it’s our turn is part of the deschooling cycle. It not always our turn. And it’s not always our turn when we want a turn. We can play around with taking our turn to take initiative and responsibility, then letting go. By trying this out, we can watch our kids’ reactions. Do they resist us? We’re probably taking too much responsibility away from them. Are they begging us to show them one more time how to do it? We might need to step up a little more and be a model of educational motivation.

Motivation never comes from us, parents. We cannot ever motivate children. That has to come from their souls. If we spend too much time taking responsibility for our children’s learning, we’ll be upset if they aren’t motivated, because we feel that their motivation is somehow linked to our desires. But it’s not. Their motivation belongs to them, not us. That’s why it’s important to give our children many opportunities to take initiative, not just when we expect them to.