For parents one of perhaps the most difficult tasks is that of teaching our children responsibility and this is especially difficult when it comes to parenting teenagers. More often than not you find that you are faced with the dilemma of instilling habits into your teenagers that will result in appropriate behavior while at the same time not stifling the need for them to be able to make individual choices.

Taking 'responsibility' for something means simply being the agent for some action that produces an effect which can be either good or bad. Teaching responsibility is thus very much a matter of getting your children to understand that their actions have consequences and that these consequences may affect not only their own lives but the lives of other people.

If you can teach your child to make the link between her or his actions and their natural consequences then you will be a long way down the road towards instilling a sense of responsibility. This method is also much better than following the time honored, but usually totally unproductive, route of merely resorting to telling your teenage children that they can or connot do something 'because I say so'.

Now this is all very well but, in reality, it is frequently easier said than done. For example, take the teenager who is tempted to start, or has indeed already started, to experiment with drugs. The clear consequences of this are that he is quite likely to graduate from 'soft' to 'hard' drugs, will become addicted and most likely start lying and stealing, or perhaps worse, to feed his habit. School work will start to suffer, as will his health, and eventually he will come up against the law and may well land up in jail. But, you try explaining this to a seventeen year old who believes he is totally in control of his life and is more than able to ensure that this does not happen to him.

This is possibly a somewhat extreme example of the problems of teaching responsibility and one for which the solution is a little too complex for this brief article. Nevertheless, it is a relatively common problem for parents these days and one which many parents will be familiar with.

For the moment however let us take a simpler, but very common problem - that of getting your teenage son to take responsibility for keeping his room tidy.

For probably the majority of parents the answer to this problem is to simply withdraw privileges until the room is tidied. As an example, when your teenage boy comes home from schools, dumps his bag and is about to rush off to join his friends at the mall, you stop him from venturing out until he has tidied up his room. This usually sparks an argument in which the words 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads off to his room and slams the door behind him.

The problem here is often that the boy has not yet made the connection between his actions in simply dumping his bag in the corner of his room and the inconvenience that this creates for you in having to go into his room and sort out the mess when it comes to laundry time. Similarly he has not made the connection between the fact that you have just spent a a considerable sum of money having the wiring in the house sorted out because mice, attracted in part by the food left in his room, chewed through the electrical cabling.

In simple terms you have inconvenienced him by curtailing his freedom but this simply is not fair because at the end of the day he is the one who has to live in the room and he cannot see that it should matter to you what state it is in.

The answer is simply to educate him by helping him to make the connection for himself between the state of cleanliness of his room and the inconvenience that an untidy room causes you. Once you have achieved this, taking away his privileges and inconveniencing him when he fails to keep his room tidy will suddenly seem to be quite fair.

While teaching children to connect their actions with their natural consequences is without doubt the key to instilling a sense of responsibility in them, it should be remembered that the child has to be in a position to see the link between his actions and their consequences.

Although it is often easy for adults to see the connection, a child may not always have sufficient knowledge or experience to spot the link. It is important therefore to start teaching your child responsibility at an early age so that, when problems of understanding do appear, the child will have learnt to trust you when you tell him that he does not want the consequences of whatever it is he is contemplating.

One final point to think about is that, like adults, children have some degree of their own free will and, like it or not, the influence that you can exert over your children is limited. The best that you can often do is to lay down reasonable expectation and, wherever necessary, to take a firm, but certainly not too authoritative, position. When all is said and done you are rearing an individual with the ability to think for himself, stand on his own feet and demonstrate self-responsibility.

Demonstrating a good example and pointing out to your children the path that they should follow is as much as most parents can do. Ultimately your children will make their own decisions about whether or not they are going to follow the path which you have prepared for them.

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