Our Children, Our Opportunity – Owning Our Responsibility
Parenthood is a wonderful opportunity for us take ownership in our responsibilities. While many of us parents expediently approach home ownership with a passion, we show less passion in parenting our children. The lack of passion may not have always existed. Its development of lack may have been introduced by the challenges in both our lives and the lives of our children.
Life has the potential to be very convincing in its arguments and applications. An example would be, when a parent thinks that they have armed their children with enough knowledge and wisdom to meet the post adolescent challenges that will be offered to them in their lives, their teenage daughter discovers that teenage boys are more interesting than ballet lessons, team practices or school studies.
Though in most teenage minds this is not a challenge, it is actually life taking its natural course. All of that knowledge and wisdom that we have so gladly introduced into their lives is making them feel empowered and unconquerable. While we welcome the confident use of those lessons that we have shared with our children, we also realize that we have only scratched the surface of what our children really need to know about life’s victories and challenges.
Beyond the gaze of teenage companionship exists an array of challenges that supersede holding hands, hanging out in parks together, attending parties as a couple, looking into each others eyes, sharing music on their iPods, experiencing each others friends and telling each other about those secrets or thoughts that most people don’t know about them.
As parents, we know that in our children experiencing a collection of these activities, they are engaging new responsibilities into their lives. These responsibilities are often both filled and requiring of lessons that we may or may not have yet shared with them. In some cases, we as parents may not have even experienced the lessons to come, ourselves.
Though our teenagers may feel as though we are smothering their lives through asking questions and requesting inclusion in the important decisions of their lives, we must keep in mind that without these questions or requests we are allowing life itself to teach our children. Because we all know that what we don’t ask about, in most cases will not be told to us. At this stage of our families lives, surprises are not always encouraging. We also know, that the lessons that other parents have shared with their children are not always the lessons that we would like to introduce into the lives of our own children.
Those untaught lessons will be taught by someone, at sometime and on someday. I am sure that most parents feel as I do, that there is no one that I trust more to care for the development of my children’s lives than their parents. So we should continue to ask our children the tough questions and request our inclusion in the important decisions of their lives. In those efforts we will find that the rewards of these efforts are beyond measure.
It is without doubt that each of our lives will benefit from the overcoming of these challenges. Just think about the growth we can influence, if we all contribute to the ownership of our responsibilities relating our children’s lives with even more enthusiasm than we hold for home ownership.
How do you feel about the importance in taking ownership of your children’s development in life? I’d like to know…
Russell Mosley
Positive Share LLC
http://www.positiveshare.comGreat News – The Positive Share Newsletter is now available on our website. Enjoy a free copy of Positive Share’s Personal & Accountability Development Series’s eBook “Father Not Present” when you sign up for our semi-monthly newsletter. http://blog.positiveshare.com
Positive Share offers a creative approach in Personal and Accountability development through illustrations that encourage those thoughts and ideas that impact life through wisdom and experience.
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Great article Russell! It is important to take and teach responsibility.