Adolescence and responsibility are not usually synonymous and therefore, many parents use punitive discipline to educate their teenage children. The results they get, if they get any results, do not last, why?
Well, the answer is very simple, since they are not motivated by themselves to carry out the task, the young people cannot internalize it and since their parents let their guard down… they stop carrying out the activities that are supposed to be their responsibility. How can we help you?
Getting teenagers to learn to be more responsible is very easy if we use positive discipline, in this article you will learn three ways to use it that will inspire you to help your son or daughter over 12 develop their sense of responsibility..
Ask her to re-decorate her room
In this way, you can impress your personal style and probably feel responsible for keeping order and cleanliness so that everyone can appreciate your talent as a decorator.
If you pay attention to teenagers, you will notice that they are very concerned about making a good impression on others, well, everyone except their parents and siblings, right? Well, the objective of proposing this activity is to give him the opportunity to show the world his true personality, printing it in the most important place for him or her: his room.
Please, when it's done, don't make a fool of him and avoid using sarcastic morals and comments like "let's see how long it lasts!"; since you will only manage to throw overboard all the work done. On the contrary, you should celebrate his feat with a lunch, take photos of his room and ask him if you can call his uncles and grandparents to show them his creation. Surely this will motivate you to keep your personal space in order.
The box technique
A strategy that I highly recommend to families who have problems to prevent their children from invading the common areas of the house, leaving pieces of clothing, food scraps, books or magazines lying around, is the box technique. Do you want to know what it is?
Simply put, it is about looking for a very large box and placing it in the area where your son or daughter spends more time after in his room. Once you have placed it, you explain that you are going to use this strategy to help her find her personal objects more easily, but also to remind her of the importance of keeping order.
For the box technique to work, what you must do is put anything that is out of place and that is the work of your son or daughter, in the box. It doesn't matter if it is the remains of an apple, a magazine or your favorite skirt: everything goes to the box.
With this technique, you achieve two main objectives: on the one hand, that your teenager realizes the importance of being clean and orderly; and on the other, avoiding unnecessary confrontations due to their lack of responsibility, since he or she knows that if they cannot find it, they are in the box.
Once again, I ask that you try to avoid expressing opinions about your son or daughter's behavior. If a T-shirt has been ruined for having spent more than three days in contact with a strawberry smoothie, do not take the opportunity to say things like "that's what happens when you don't take care of your things." Instead, help him search the internet for a way to clean strawberry milkshake from clothes and you'll see that he doesn't do it again.
Give it prominence in your studies
Many times, I hear parents complain that their teenage children do not study despite the fact that they do the summaries, they ask the teachers what subject is included in the exams and they are always "defending" their rights as students. These parents do not realize that the problem is that they have their children completely annulled as students and therefore: they are not responsible for their studies.
To change this situation, most of the families decide to let the boy or girl “get blown up”, which is, to withdraw all the supports at once. The funny thing is that later they are surprised to see that things are getting worse. But then what do we do?
Well, the ideal is that we educate the adolescent to acquire more and more levels of responsibility, providing him or her with opportunities to ask their teacher how they are doing in class, what they need to practice or ask for advice to face the exam.
Once a month, we will make an appointment with the teacher to come with us with our son or daughter. To do this, we will ask him or her to prepare the meeting in advance and we will support his position in front of the teacher, although if he points out something that we know that our teenager needs to improve, we will ask for more information about it.
The objective in this case is to show the adolescent that some important information escapes him and that he can count on us to guide him until he controls this situation himself. This implies being tolerant of mistakes and looking at them from a broad perspective, as part of every student's learning.
These three techniques always work for me when I apply them with adolescents, what's more, they usually adopt me right away and then I have a hard time stopping therapy. This is because they see me as an older sister. Well, there are the family shots: let your child see you as an adult with more experience than him, who is a person as well as being his parent.
For an education that fosters personal autonomy.
