Recently, I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about parenting. And last week, someone commented to me that I have “3 very responsible boys”. They are currently 25, 22 and 18 years old. I thought a lot about what that meant and why that might be. For anyone who knows my sons, they will know them to be unique and each of them taking responsibility in very different ways. What they do have in common is that they all take responsibility for their own lives, they see them selves as creator of their lives and don’t fall victim to their life circumstance or blame others for what is happening in their lives.
So…being the common denominator as a mother I have thought about how I parented them that may have had some influence on this. My parenting approach was really quite simple. I was conscious in it and it involved 3 very simple but important steps.
The first was that I thought it was my responsibility to share with them my understanding of how I view the world, how the world works, how systems work, how people relate to others and systems and the world in general and see it exactly for what it is. That is the good and bad, healthy and unhealthy, functioning and dysfunctional parts of it all. They learned to just observe life as it was in a conscious and respectful manner.
Secondly, I encouraged them to question everything, including me and how I saw the world. Question to understand for themselves so that they could take responsibility and action in the way that was meaningful to them.
Lastly, I saw my role as needing to listen to them, to understand, not necessarily accept, but understand how they saw their life and their role in relationship to their world and observe the actions that they would choose to take as part of their path whether or not that would have been a direction that I would have chose. Through that listening and understanding I could trust that they were making informed, responsible decisions as they created the life they desired for themselves. I also remembered that it was not my job in life to like what they were deciding but to make sure that they were liking what they were deciding.
What I have found is that these steps create a circle where we cycle around teaching one another, questioning one another and listening to one another as we all try to figure out who we are in relationship to our world and take responsibility for our part in it. As I taught my children responsibility in life, they taught me to be a responsible parent. Teaching, supporting and encouraging responsibility comes through modeling responsibility.
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