Teaching Responsibility

When your children start school, you have many great opportunities to teach them how to be responsible.  As your children get older, you want to make sure they have this value or life skill.  Being a responsible person gives you the edge with so many opportunities in life.  Start your children down the right path.

Help your child to find a place where homework is kept.  When it is completed, remind them to put it in their backpack.  If they dont, and you get a phone call from school the next day, dont go rushing to bring their homework to them.  They will probably lose points in class by not handing it in the first day, but this is a small consequence when you want them to learn to take care of their own homework.

Likewise, do the same thing with other situations involving school.  If they have a certain shirt that they wear on school spirit day, remind them to get it in the dirty clothes basket to be washed in advance.  Dont let their panic on the morning push you to do a quick load of laundry.  Teach them the consequence of forgetting is wearing a different shirt.  You can look for other chances to teach these lessons.

If your children learn this skill while they are young, it will follow them as they get older.  When they begin junior high and high school, they will already know the consequences of forgetting things for school, and they will be better prepared.  As they get jobs, that sense of accountability will show in their performance at work.  Their success in school and at work will be a direct result of the skills they learn when they are young.