If I have figured one thing out, as both a father and a teacher, is that one of the most important things we can teach children is personal responsibility. This is also one of the most difficult things to teach. It is difficult because we want our children and our students to be successful. We want to help them through their challenges and their struggles. We want to be there for them and we want to have fun with them. Teaching personal responsibility usually involves consequences, lectures, punishments, and usually anger, at least in my house. We have to be the “bad guy”, the person who dispenses the consequence, the one who hold them accountable. It isn’t easy to teach personal responsibility but it is important. Our children need us to teach them this “lesson” or they won’t know how to function when we aren’t around to help them and they won’t be able to make good decisions if they never experience consequences.
I have come to realize in these first couple weeks of school that this is the most important “lesson” my oldest son will learn this year in fifth-grade (I shared my fears about the fifth-grade a couple of weeks ago). My son isn’t a “homework guy”. He doesn’t like homework, he gets easily frustrated when working on his homework, and he tries to delay homework every chance he gets. Now that he is in fifth-grade though and the amount of homework he receives each night has increased significantly, he simply doesn’t have time for the delays and the complaining. Unfortunately, he is learning this the hard way.
Although we are only a few short weeks into the school year, my wife and I have already been given every homework excuse under the sun, from I forgot my planner and don’t know what to do to I forgot my folder with my worksheet in it, too I don’t really have any homework. None of these excuses matter though because my wife and I are standing firm in our quest to teach him personal responsibility. Gone are the days of calling a classmate to find out what math problems need to be done. Gone are the days of running over to a friend’s house to make a copy of a missing worksheet or to borrow a forgotten text book. It is time to learn the lesson of personal responsibility.
Now this process has been painful for both my son and for me. I want to see him succeed and I want him to get good grades. I don’t want to see him get points taken off for turning assignments in late. I don’t want him to have to go to study hall after school to finish his homework from the night before. More importantly, I don’t want to be the one who has to give him additional consequences for low grades (don’t get me wrong, he won’t get consequences for a low grade if he is giving 100% effort, which at the moment he isn’t). I don’t want to take away extra-curricular activities and I don’t want to make him miserable. This is the role I have to play right now though! Even though he gets mad at me and thinks I am being unreasonable, I have to do it because he has to learn the lesson now or things will only get worse when he enters middle school.
Fortunately, my wife agrees with me, as does my son’s teachers. Fifth grade is going to be a difficult for my son, but he will learn the importance of personal responsibility.