Why is it so important that our children have real responsibility in their lives? Why do most adults seek it and accumulate so much of it? …
In a word, it’s because responsibility brings out our best. Responsibility is a powerful motivator. It makes us push ourselves harder, perform better and care more. Without responsibility, most people would turn to jelly. …
For the vast majority of us, taking on responsibility is also the only way we have of improving our lifestyles, supporting our families and acquiring the material goods we want. …
Studies confirm what you knew all along: young people can be taught to handle responsibility, and young people who have learned to handle responsibility are more effective in their lives. [Robert Epstein, Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families From The Torment of Adolescence, Quill Driver, 2010, pp. 284-285]
[W]e create our selves, shape our identity, through what we are willing to take responsibility for; … self-responsibility, as well as self-reliance and individualism are essential to the well-being of our society. [Nathaniel Branden, Taking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable Life, 1996, Fireside / Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 16]
[T]here are so many … reasons why we need a concept of responsibility—and why reviving a rich tradition of talking about responsibility can help to enrich our civic life. Without a positive notion of responsibility, we cannot express why it is so important to people that they should have agency over their own lives, nor that they should be seen as having such agency; we could not capture how big a part of people’s identities is constituted by their obligations toward others …
[M]ost citizens cherish the responsibilities that, they feel, give much of the meaning to their lives. … they care for elderly parents or sick relatives, they enter into romantic partnerships that entail mutual support, or they decide to have children. In a similar vein, they devote themselves to causes and projects—political, social, religious, or artistic—because they believe that these hold a significance that extends beyond their own interests. [Yascha Mounk, The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State, Harvard UP, 2017, pp. 169, 188]
You positively need to be occupied with something weighty, deep, profound, and difficult. Then, when you wake up in the middle of the night and the doubts crowd in, you have some defense: “For all my flaws, which are manifold, at least I am doing this. At least I am taking care of myself. At least I am of use to my family, and to the other people around me. At least I am moving, stumbling upward, under the load I have determined to carry.” You can attain some genuine self-respect that way—but it is not a mere shallow psychological construct that has to do with how you are construing yourself in the moment. It is far deeper than that—and it is not only psychological. It is real, as well as psychological.
Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder. That is because you are now genuinely involved in making things better. You are minimizing the unnecessary suffering. You are encouraging those around you, by example and word. You are constraining the malevolence in your own heart and the hearts of others. [Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, Penguin / Portfolio, 2021, p. 134]
[There was] a time when the household was practically the center in which were carried on, or about which were clustered, all the typical forms of industrial occupation. …
We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and of character-building involved in this kind of life: … in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something, to produce something, in the world. There was always something which really needed to be done, and a real necessity that each member of the household should do his own part faithfully and in co-operation with others. …
At present, concentration of industry and division of labor have practically eliminated household and neighborhood occupations—at least for educational purposes. … [T]here is a real problem: how shall we retain these advantages, and yet introduce into the school something representing the other side of life—occupations which exact personal responsibilities and which train the child in relation to the physical realities of life? [John Dewey, The School and Society, 1899, U of Chicago P, 1932, pp. 6-9, https://archive.org/details/schoolsociety00dewerich]
There is no question that listlessness, ennui, and even violence in school are related to the fact that students have no useful role to play in society. The strict application of nurturing and protective attitudes toward children has created a paradoxical situation in which protection has come to mean excluding the young from meaningful involvement in their own communities. … [A]s things stand now in many places, the energy of the young works in opposition to learning; that is, it is an obstacle that schooling must overcome. [Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Vintage, 1995, p. 102]
Growth, like any ongoing function, requires adequate objects in the environment to meet the needs and capacities of the growing youth … until he can better choose and make his own environment. It is not a “psychological” question of poor influences and bad attitudes, but an objective question of real opportunities for worthwhile experience. … [O]ur abundant society is at present simply deficient in many of the most elementary objective opportunities and worthwhile goals that could make growing up possible. …
It’s hard to grow up when there [aren’t] enough … jobs that are necessary or unquestionably useful; that require energy and draw on some of one’s best capacities; and that can be done keeping one’s honor and dignity. In explaining the widespread troubles of adolescents … , this simple objective factor is not much mentioned. Let us here insist on it. [Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, Vintage, 1960, pp. 12, 17]
The “right settings” are ones that offer young people genuine challenges, that require young people to accept genuine responsibility, and that give young people an opportunity to develop skills that they recognize as useful for their future prospects. In the absence of such, skepticism about the core values of work and responsibility quickly takes root. The problem for too many young people today is that the “right settings” for their healthy growth are becoming increasingly unavailable. This is true all over, and especially so in our more troubled communities. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. 54-55]
Today’s affluent societies will likely never go back to the time when children’s efforts were needed to sustain the household economy. But even the wealthiest families can, if they choose, assign their children meaningful obligations, which teach them responsibility and endow them with a sense that what they do matters in the world. [William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, Free Press, 2008, pp. 157-158]
A sense of responsibility is attained by each child through his or her own efforts and experience. … Therefore, it is important to give specific responsibilities to children matched to their different levels of maturity.
In most homes children present problems, but parents find the solutions. If children are to mature, they must be given the opportunity to solve their own problems. [Haim Ginott, Between Parent and Child, 1965, Three Rivers, 2003, p. 88]
Responsibility is fostered by allowing children a voice and, wherever indicated, a choice in matters that affect them. A deliberate distinction is made here between a voice and a choice. There are matters that fall entirely within the child’s realm of responsibility. In such matters the child should have a choice. There are matters affecting the child’s welfare that are exclusively within our realm of responsibility. In such matters the child may have a voice, but not a choice. We make the choice, while helping the child accept the inevitable. What is needed is a clear distinction between these two realms of responsibility. …
Children should be deliberately presented with many situations in which they make choices. The parents select the situations; the children make the choices. [Haim Ginott, Between Parent and Child, 1965, Three Rivers, 2003, pp. 89-90]
[I]f we want children to make good values their own over the long haul—then there is no substitute for giving them the chance to become actively involved in deciding what kind of … classroom or school they want to have. …
Anyone who truly values democracy ought to be thinking about preparing students to participate in a democratic culture or to transform a culture into a democracy, as the case may be. The only way this can happen, the only way children can acquire both the skills of decision making and the inclination to use them, is if we maximize their experiences with choice and negotiation. [Alfie Kohn, “Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide,” Phi Delta Kappan, Sept 1993, https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/choices-children/]
One advantage our boarding-school has over a day school: we can have community self-government where the children make their own laws. In a day school there is nothing to govern about, for the school means lessons. … To me this community living is infinitely more important in a child’s education than all the textbooks in the world.
Democracy should not wait until the age of voting … [A. S. Neill, Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood, 1960, St. Martin’s Press, 1992, p. 23]
[I]f agency and esteem are central to the construction of a concept of Self, then the ordinary practices of school need to be examined with a view to what contribution they make to these two crucial ingredients of personhood. … [T]he granting of more responsibility in setting and achieving goals in all aspects of a school’s activities could contribute—everything from maintenance of the school’s physical plant to a share in decisions about academic and extracurricular projects to be undertaken. Such a conception, earlier so dear to the progressive tradition in education, is also in the image of the constitutional principal that (in a democracy) rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin. If, as I noted at the outset, school is an entry into the culture and not just a preparation for it, then we must constantly reassess what school does to the young student’s conception of his own powers (his sense of agency) and his sensed chance of being able to cope with the world both in school and after (his self-esteem). In many democratic cultures, I think, we have become so preoccupied with the more formal criteria of “performance” and with the bureaucratic demands of education as an institution that we have neglected this personal side of education. [Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education, Harvard UP, 1996, pp. 38-39]
We have known for years that if you treat people, young kids included, as responsible, contributing parties to the group, as having a job to do, they will grow into it—some better than others, obviously, but all benefit. Even old people in nursing homes, if made responsible members of the community with duties to discharge, live longer, get sick less, keep their mental powers longer. … We need desperately to look more closely at what we mean by an “enabling” culture, particularly that part of the enabling culture represented by its schools. [Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education, Harvard UP, 1996, p. 77]
[K]ids and teenagers are much more capable than we give them credit for. If we consider the power of high school student activists, teen artists and musicians, kids with significant work or household responsibilities, and young people with a mission to do good in the world, it’s hard to think that all they can be entrusted to do is go to school and play sports. …
Remember that kids have a brain in their heads and want their lives to work. They almost always step up to the plate when they are respectfully entrusted with responsibility. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home, Viking / Penguin Random House, 2021, p. 39]
[Curtis] Sliwa is best known for founding the Guardian Angels, a group of young people trained in martial arts and sporting red berets who made it their business to protect the innocent on New York subways. … Sliwa took tough young people and transformed them into productive citizens, mainly by giving them meaningful adult responsibilities and a positive mission. … Sliwa’s philosophy should now be familiar: “Empower people to help themselves, build self-esteem and confidence, arm them with responsibility, and you tap into the greatest source of lasting good possible.” [Robert Epstein, Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families From The Torment of Adolescence, Quill Driver, 2010, p. 99]
[T]he idea that we must wait until children are mature enough to handle responsibilities may set up a vicious circle: after all, it is experience with decisions that helps children become capable of handling them. [Alfie Kohn, “Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide,” Phi Delta Kappan, Sept 1993, https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/choices-children/]
The belief that children and even teenagers are incapable of rational decision-making and self-direction is a self-fulfilling prophecy. By confining children to school and other adult-directed school-like settings, and by filling their time with forced busywork, which serves no productive purpose, we deprive them of the time and opportunities they need to practice self-direction and responsibility. And so, children themselves, as well as their parents and teachers, come to think that children are incompetent. [Peter Gray, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, Basic Books, 2013, p. 70]
On your own, you have to face the responsibility for how you spend time. But in school you don’t. What they make you do may obviously be a waste but at least the responsibility isn’t charged to your account. … Once you’re in [school], you may have all kinds of problems but freedom isn’t one of them. [Jerry Farber] quoted by
[Derrick Jensen, Walking On Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution, Chelsea Green, 2004, p. 185]
For a person to feel responsible for his actions, he must sense that the behavior has flowed from the self. [Stanley Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience,” Harper’s Magazine, 1974, https://web.physics.utah.edu/~detar/phys4910/readings/ethics/PerilsofObedience.html]
Today too many students graduate or drop out of school without a single achievement for which they can feel uniquely responsible or justly proud. [Martin Covington, The Will to Learn: A Guide for Motivating Young People, Cambridge UP, 1998, p. 4]
S-chool people talk all the time about “teaching responsibility.” Yet it is absurd to think that an institution that commands and judges every part of a child’s life and thought can make him more responsible. It can only make him less so. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, pp. 185-186]
In our society … there is a great period of delay between the early childhood training and the assumption of responsible adult action. This means that for years the child and youth is forced to abrogate trial-and-error action, and the assumption of his own responsibility. He is simply not allowed to be an uninhibited agent in many areas of experience. The effect of this abrogation is precisely one that will reinforce the limited perceptions of the early learning period. If the youth cannot broaden his awareness by his own responsible coping action, then he must operate completely and unthinkingly under the constrictions of the early parental training, and the continual guidance of the parents, even up to late adolescence. We can see, then, how the society in which one is immersed actually creates neurosis by ushering the child into a limited world view, and then preventing him from broadening this view by his own self-critical and independent action. This is, in effect, a form of forced alienation, which creates the human unconscious. … [T]he greater the period of delay between early training and the assumption of responsible adult action, the greater the unconscious which inhibits free and broad-ranging choices. …
[W]e see the possible effects of long exile from responsible exercise of one’s own powers. Passive withdrawal from responsibility and violent aggressiveness are, it seems, two poles of the same kind of learning. One lacks sure behaviors for self-expression when he has not been able to learn the feel of his own responsible powers. Aggression is an inept attempt at self-affirmation by someone who has been prevented from learning to cope with life in responsible ways. [Ernest Becker, The Structure of Evil: An Essay on the Unification of the Science of Man, Free Press, 1968, pp. 163, 302-303]
[The adolescent predicament] is simply defined as the mismatch between young people’s neurobiological needs for status and respect and the level of status or respect afforded to them by their current circumstances (e.g., relationships, roles, jobs). This predicament is what happens when adults force young people to choose between social survival (and risk to long-term well-being) versus social harm (but better long-term well-being). …
The adolescent predicament can last well into your twenties, even after puberty is done. The reason why is that our society, with its ever-increasing demands for advanced, technical skills, keeps young people in a holding pattern for so long. Consider that some early-maturing youth might be biologically prepared to reproduce by age thirteen, but they might not get a well-paying, full-time job until they are twenty-six, twice the age of biological maturity. That’s a long time to be waiting to be afforded status and respect, and it can raise serious questions in a young person’s mind about their social standing. Because of this predicament, it’s possible for over-twenty brains to still choose behaviors that seem immature from an older adult’s perspective. [David Yeager, 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2024, pp. 45-46]
To gain the skills to [separate from their caregivers, find a mate, and live independently], [teens] scan the savanna, look for danger—especially as it relates to their status—and seek ways to contribute. To secure their place in society, they seek meaningful experiences that win them respect. The key is, we cannot give that respect to them; they have to earn it. Cultural anthropologists call the process of gaining that status “earned prestige.”
As the Age of Achievement increasingly focused on academic proficiency, broader opportunities to earn that prestige were sacrificed. … Kids want experiences and opportunities to contribute, to be social, and to solve problems. Instead, we ask them to study more so that we can rank and sort them. …
Eager for real experiences and unable to make them happen, kids shut down. Academics who study boredom … define it as “the aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.” The problem is not nothing-to-do; it’s feeling helpless to change things. They lack agency to move and explore in directions that make sense to them. The opposite of boredom is not being busy; it’s being interested.
The solution to kids’ boredom is not to ask kids to work harder or jump higher. It’s to give them some choice over how they spend their days—in and out of school. It’s building the self-awareness and skills to pick the goals that matter to them. [Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, Crown / Penguin Random House, 2025, pp. 21-23]
[A]re we altogether comfortable about that artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day? To postpone the acceptance of responsibility to a late date brings with it a number of psychological complications which … are scarcely beneficial either to the individual or to society. [Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” 1948, Education in a Free Society, edited by Anne Husted Burleigh, Liberty Fund, 1973, p. 233]
American teens are among the most troubled in the world, and the teen years are the most difficult that we experience in life. Our teens are difficult to raise, often unhappy at home, overly immersed in a vacuous teen world that’s largely the creation of large corporations, excessively interested in their appearance, overly dependent on drugs and alcohol, unnecessarily careless about sex and excessively angry, violent, moody and depressed—suffering from a preventable condition we might call Extended Childhood Disorder (ECD). The principle characteristic of ECD is a feeling that one lacks control over one’s life … [Robert Epstein, Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families From The Torment of Adolescence, Quill Driver, 2010, p. 142]
[Common sense] suggests that the more restrictions you place on people who consider themselves to be autonomous and competent, the angrier and less manageable they become. …
Teen problems in the United States are caused by two factors related to the artificial extension of childhood: we treat young adults as if they are still children, and we isolate them from adults, trapping them in the media-controlled world of teen culture. [Robert Epstein, Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families From The Torment of Adolescence, Quill Driver, 2010, p. 144]
The schools are the means by which we deprive the young of manhood … and we must not be surprised when they seek that manhood in ways that must of necessity be childish and violent. [Peter Marin, “The Open Truth and Fiery Vehemence of Youth,” 1969, The Cosmos Reader, edited by Edgar Z. Friedenberg et al., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, p. 821]
No wonder, then, that some of our troubled children constantly break out of their play into some damaging activity in which they seem to us to “interfere” with our world; while analysis reveals that they only wish to demonstrate their right to find an identity in it. They refuse to become a specialty called “child,” who must play at being big because he is not given an opportunity to be a small partner in a big world. [Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 1950, W. W. Norton & Co., 1963, pp. 235-238]
Q: Childhood is a wonderful time of life—a time for fun and exploration, when all of our needs are met and nothing is expected from us in return. Aren’t we doing our teens a favor by extending childhood?
A: Driven by evolutionary imperatives established thousands of years ago, the main need a teenager has is to become productive and independent. After puberty, if we pretend our teens are still children, we will be unable to meet their most fundamental needs, and we will cause some teens great distress. [Robert Epstein, Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families From The Torment of Adolescence, Quill Driver, 2010, p. 21]
[S]elf-esteem is a meaningless concept without a firm grounding in substantive achievement. …
One of the special ironies in our misconceptions about children’s development is that the myths often contradict one another. At the same time that we place self-esteem on a privileged pedestal, we communicate to children that they are not mature enough to be given real responsibilities; that it is too much trouble to get them to do something useful; and that they need to spend their free time “cooling out” from the rigors of their busy lives. In this and many other ways, we infantilize our children. This is especially destructive, because it robs them of a chance to acquire useful competence, thereby demolishing any valid claim to self-worth that they might acquire. Perhaps most seriously, the fiction of youth incompetence turns children inward, away from an orientation towards serving others. …
It is a common tendency for parents to want “the best of everything” for their children. Unfortunately, too many parents interpret this to mean relieving their children of duties and indulging them with unwarranted privileges. The cultural Zeitgeist does not support the notion that what is really best for a child is the opportunity to develop a strong sense of personal responsibility. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. 23-24]
The artificial extension of childhood is, after all, a protective mechanism. Those who engineered it … were trying to protect the young from harm; at first it was the harm of the factories, but over the decades, things have gotten out of hand. …
A century ago, we rescued young people from the factories and streets; now we need to rescue them from the schools. …
Schools are supposed to propel young people forward, but they actually hold many back, preventing them from moving forward with work or more specialized training. [Robert Epstein, Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families From The Torment of Adolescence, Quill Driver, 2010, pp. 249, 319-322]
In principle there is no reason why young people should not have the chance to learn directly, hands-on, what it means to be a nuclear engineer, oceanographer, plumber, or physician. But in practice adolescents have become extremely sheltered from adult work. In the nineteenth century children needed to be protected by child labor laws against exploitation by owners of mines, factories, and sweatshops, but it seems that now we have gone too far in separating children from work. We mainly train them to be consumers—of abstract information, entertainment, and mostly useless products—with too little regard for concrete, active engagement with the environment. What is needed is an opportunity for youth to experience the joys and responsibilities of making things happen, without being prematurely drawn into monotonous work. [Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Schneider, Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work, Basic Books, 2000, pp. 219-220]
The young are displaced; there seems no other word for it. They are trapped in a prolonged childhood almost unique.
In few other cultures have persons of fifteen or eighteen been so uselessly isolated from participation in the community, or been deemed so unnecessary (in their elders’ eyes), or so limited by law. Our ideas of responsibility, our parental feelings of anxiety, blame, and guilt, all of these follow from our curious vision of the young; in turn, they concretize it, legitimize it so that we are no longer even conscious of the ways we see childhood or the strain that our vision puts upon us. That is what needs changing: the definitions we make socially and legally of the role of the young. They are trapped in the ways we see them, and the school is simply one function, one aspect, of the whole problem. …
The school is expected to do what the community cannot do and that is impossible. In the end, we will have to change far more than the schools if we expect to create a new coherence between the experiences of the child and the needs of the community. … [W]e will begin to grant greater freedom and responsibility to the young; we will drop the compulsory-schooling age to fourteen, perhaps less; we will take for granted the “independence” of adolescents; … we will discover jobs they can or want to do in the community … [Peter Marin, “The Open Truth and Fiery Vehemence of Youth,” 1969, The Cosmos Reader, edited by Edgar Z. Friedenberg et al., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, pp. 811-812]
The widespread boredom reported by teens could easily be ameliorated if parents, schools, and communities provided opportunities for meaningful work for teens. Jobs, chores, mentoring, and volunteer work all contribute to teens’ sense that they have something unique and important to add to their community. Participation in these kinds of activities helps teens develop competence, independence, connection, and real self-esteem. It gives them a sense of being relevant, and helps them to construct an identity greater and more robust than the sum of their test scores and trophies. [Madeline Levine, Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, HarperCollins, 2012, pp. 173-174]
The idea that once you hand over responsibility, your child will take it up with aplomb is mistaken. As the dynamic changes, it takes time for him—and you—to adjust and develop the skills needed to do things differently. You need to take a long view. And that long view is that he can’t do it perfectly the first time out, or do it as well as you would with decades more experience. Remember that he needs to build competency. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, p. 42]
The policy of freedom has certain consequences we had better be prepared for. … But let [students] be mindful of the fact that they are, indeed, doing the choosing. The choices are theirs to be responsible for. When the full impact of their responsibility comes home to them, in that movement the need for tests and grades and report cards will have disappeared. [Van Cleve Morris, Existentialism in Education: What it Means, 1966, Waveland, 1990, pp. 152-153]
In its most general terms, the task of education can be stipulated somewhat as follows: to provide the occasions and circumstances for the awakening and intensification of awareness. To be more specific and concrete, education must become an act of discovery. But the question is, discovery of what? …
Let education be the discovery of responsibility! Let learning be the sharp and vivid awakening of the learner to the sense of being personally answerable for his own life. …
Let education be the process by which we awaken in each learner the truth that he is responsible for his very desire to flee responsibility … [Van Cleve Morris, Existentialism in Education: What it Means, 1966, Waveland, 1990, p. 117]
Every person needs to learn and experience—incorporate, take into the body—both [freedom and responsibility]. And they’re inseparable. Either without the other becomes a parody, and leads to inappropriate, destructive, and self-destructive behaviors … Responsibility without freedom is slavery. … Freedom without responsibility is immaturity. … Put them together and you’ve got an entire culture consisting of immature slaves. … These parodies may be very good if you’re interested in growing the economy, but they’re very bad if you’re interested in life. [Derrick Jensen, Walking On Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution, Chelsea Green, 2004, p. 194]
Liberty and responsibility are inseparable. …
It is doubtless because the opportunity to build one’s own life also means an unceasing task, a discipline that man must impose upon himself if he is to achieve his aims, that many people are afraid of liberty. [F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960, U of Chicago P, 2011, pp. 133-134]
[This is] the fate faced by too many young people growing up today. Their powers and potentials have been unrecognized by those in charge of them. Their zest for exploration has been curtailed by a stultifying bubble of overprotectiveness. Their self-centered attitudes and habits have been left uncorrected. Their natural desires to gain strength and competence have been discouraged. Their spontaneous interest in the world has been diminished by too much empty experience and too many fearful warnings. They have grown up in a setting devoid of expectation, standards, or guidance, and they have been deprived of a chance to take on real responsibility and to be of real service to others. In all these ways, many children today see little choice but to turn inwards and shut down. …
All of our children are growing up in a culture that has lost touch with what children need in order to forge character and competence. …
It is within our reach to provide [a better] chance for every child in our society. … It will require us to assume a collective sense of responsibility for all of our children. It will require us to build communities—modern villages—that reflect this collective sense of responsibility by providing all the guidelines and educational opportunities that every child deserves. It will also require us, individually as well as in community, to present children with high standards and expectations that can inspire them throughout their lifelong development. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. 240-242]
If, as children grow, all choices and decisions are made for them by adults, if no expectations are held up to them and no responsibilities required, the danger is that they will remain dependent, inadequately individuated, underdeveloped in competencies appropriate to their age, and of course not self-responsible. If too much is expected of children too soon, if they are burdened by demands beyond their capacity, the danger is that they will sink into passivity and feelings of defeat and congenital incompetence and, again, will not properly individuate or learn self-responsibility.
If parents understand that by the design of our natures we are intended to evolve toward autonomy, and if they choose to support and align themselves with this process, then they will want to be sensitive to opportunities for nurturing competence and self-responsibility. They will seek to elicit not obedience but cooperation. … They will create an environment of safety, respect, acceptance, and trust, in which a healthy self can grow. They will look for opportunities to offer their children age-appropriate choices and responsibilities and thus teach accountability. They will assign tasks that allow the child to make some contribution to the running of the household … so that the child gains experience in feeling effective as a family member. … They will honor signs of self-responsibility. They will communicate their belief in the child’s abilities and worth. [Nathaniel Branden, Taking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable Life, 1996, Fireside / Simon & Schuster, 1997, pp. 34-35]
Related:
– What constitutes a successful adolescence?
– What is a “gap year”? How can we incorporate maturing activities into education?
– How are young people prepared for the world of work?
– How can young people be exposed to challenge in ways that foster growth?