For any parent one of the most difficult tasks we face is that of teaching responsibility and this is especially difficult when we are looking at parenting teenagers. More often than not you find that you are faced with the dilemma of trying to instill habits into your teenagers that will lead to appropriate behavior without at the same time stifling the need for them to be able to make individual personal choices.

Being 'responsible' for something means simply being the agent for some action that produces an effect which can be either bad or good. Teaching responsibility is accordingly very much a case of getting your children to understand that every action has consequences and that these may affect not only their own lives but the lives of other individuals.

If you are able to get your child to make the link between his or her actions and the natural consequences of those actions then you will go a long way towards instilling a sense of responsibility. This approach is also much better than following the time honored, but frequently totally unproductive, route of simply resorting to telling your teenagers that they can or connot do something 'because you say so'.

Now this is all very well but, in reality, it is normally easier said than done. For example, take the teenager who is tempted to start, or has indeed already started, experimenting with drugs. The undoubted consequences of this action are that he is quite likely to move from 'soft' to 'hard' drugs, will become addicted and probably start lying and stealing, or worse, to feed his growing habit. School work will start to suffer, as will his state of health, and finally he will fall foul of the law and might well end up in jail. But, you try explaining this to a sixteen year old who is convinced that he is completely in control of his own life and is more than able to ensure that this does not happen to him.

This is perhaps an extreme example of the problems of teaching responsibility and one for which the solution is a little too complicated for this brief article. Nevertheless, it is a relatively common problem for parents these days and one which many parents will recognize.

At this stage however let us consider simpler, but extremely common problem - that of getting your teenage son to take responsibility for keeping his room clean.

For many parents the answer here is to simply withdraw privileges until the room is tidied up. As an example, when your teenage boy arrives home from schools, drops his bag on the floor and is just about to rush out to join his friends at the mall, you step in and stop him from going out until he has cleaned up his room. This more often than not sets off an argument in which the words 'not fair' feature prominently as he heads for his room slamming the door behind him.

The difficulty in this case is commonly that the boy has not yet made the connection between his actions in simply throwing his things in the corner of his room and the inconvenience that this creates for you in having to go into his room and sort through the mess when it comes time to do the laundry. Similarly he has not made the connection between the fact that you have just spent a fortune having the wiring in the house sorted out because mice, attracted in part by the food left in his room, chewed their way through the cabling.

In short you have inconvenienced your son by curtailing his freedom but this simply is not fair because when all is said and done he is the person who has to live in the room and he cannot see why it should matter in the slightest to you what state the room is in.

The answer is simply to enlighten him by helping him to make the connection for himself between the state of his room and the inconvenience that an untidy room causes for you. Once you do this, withdrawing his privileges and inconveniencing him when he fails to keep his room tidy will suddenly be seen as 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 frequently easy for an adult to see the connection, a child might not always have sufficient experience or knowledge to make the link. It is important therefore to start teaching your child responsibility from an early age so that, when problems of understanding do appear, the child will have learnt to trust you when you say that he does not want the consequences of whatever it is he is contemplating.

A final point to think about is that, just like adults, children have some degree of their own free will and, like it or not, the influence that you are able to exert over your children is limited. Often the best that you can do is to set reasonable expectation and, when necessary, to adopt a firm, but not overly authoritative, position. When all is said and done you are after all rearing an individual with the capacity 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 to follow is as much as most parents can do. In the end your children will make their own decisions about whether or not they want to follow the path which you have prepared for them.