Teaching Personal Responsibility 

Of all the success principles you can teach your homeschooler, this might be the most important: High Achievers take personal responsibility for their own success and happiness.

You must teach personal responsibility to your children.

What is Personal Responsibility?

Personal responsibility is the knowledge and acceptance that you control your actions, reactions, thoughts, feelings, beliefs and decisions; therefore you are responsible for your results.

You don’t make excuses or blame anyone or anything else when things go wrong. You are not a victim.

You know if you aren’t happy with your life, you can do something to change it.

Why is Personal Responsibility important?

When your children take personal responsibility for their own success and happiness, they will feel a greater sense of control over their lives. They will believe life happens for them, not to them.

If they choose to hold a victim mindset, they are more likely to drift along in life, waiting for someone else to rescue them because they won’t think anything they do makes a difference.

Blaming everyone and everything else for your problems is a sure way to misery. One of the worst feelings in the world is the feeling that you don't have control over your own life. The feeling of lack of control is one of the main reasons people distract and numb themselves from their real lives instead of working to change their lives.

Your children are much more likely to become high achieving adults if they truly believe they are responsible for creating their own happiness.

What Personal Responsibility is NOT

Personal responsibility is taking ownership of your own life, but it is NOT the same as the belief that you create your own reality. You’ll find this idea among some law of attraction proponents, but I don’t personally agree with it.

There will always be things outside of your control. The key to personal responsibility is to understand and accept that you have full control of your reaction to whatever happens.

How to teach Personal Responsibility to your children

The first thing you should do is model personal responsibility. When things go wrong, don’t make excuses or blame others. See what you can do to make things better, and do those things.

Discuss these types of things with your children. Let them see that you have choices and you are making a conscious decision about what to do.

As your children are growing up, you’ll have many opportunities to discuss their own reactions to things that happen in their lives. You may have to help them see what their choices are, or what they could have done differently in a specific situation.

I know of a child who was running in the house, tripped over a chair and hurt himself. A well intentioned adult blamed the chair and encouraged the child to kick the bad chair for hurting him. A better response from the adult would have been to remind the child not to run in the house because when he does, he might run into chairs. Another option would have been to show the child that he could move the chair out of his path. It’s a small thing, but each little thing helps build big concepts.

In my own home, we have a lot of discussions about how nobody else can “make” you feel a certain way or do a certain thing. One child in particular would often say things like “look what you made me do!” or “I HAD to do (insert naughty behavior here) because of (insert silly excuse here).” This child needs many, many reminders that he controls his own actions, reactions, thoughts, feelings, beliefs and decisions.

My children’s karate teacher expects personal responsibility from his students at a very young age. For example, many times a young student will forget his belt and will try to tell Sensei that his mom forgot it. Sensei will always say, “Is it your mom’s belt? No? Who’s belt is it? It’s your belt, so it’s your responsibility to remember it.” It doesn’t matter to Sensei if the child is 6 or 16, the response is the same.

Taking Personal Responsibility for your education

Your children also need to learn that their education is their own responsibility. They can start taking responsibility very early.

For the youngest child, this might simply be letting them be responsible for getting out and putting away their own books and supplies each day, or they could choose what subject you begin with each day.

Older children can be expected to complete certain work independently. For example, one year my children worked on improving their handwriting. Each day they were expected to complete one sheet of copy work without being reminded.

They needed to get the book, complete one page, and turn it in. They got to decide if they wanted to do it first thing in the morning or later on after we'd done our other work. I didn’t care when they do it, as long as all their work was done for the day before they started watching videos or playing.

By high school, your children could easily be doing the majority of their work on their own, with minimal coaching and supervision from you. Part of doing high school level work should include time and project management, which will strengthen their understanding of personal responsibility.

In our homeschool, students are not allowed to say they didn't finish their daily work because they didn't have time, nobody reminded them to do it, they couldn't find a pencil, or any other excuse. It's human nature to want to blame everyone but yourself, so they have to keep practicing until they automatically take accountability for their own choices.

Conclusion

My goal as my children’s educator for them to become independent adults who are successful and free to live the lives they want. To do this, the most important thing I can teach them is how to take responsibility for their own success and happiness.