One of the most frustrating and misunderstood concepts in parenting today is accountability. A parent’s view on this can set the tone for much of their experience of parenting for years and yet much of the information regarding parenting gets it wrong.
A simple example of this is a radio advertisement that has been running lately. It makes the claim that if you follow their system that not only will you calmly and methodically parent your children, but that your children will change their behavior and begin responding in certain prescribed ways from that point forward. In other words…..follow these 12 steps and voila…..junior will behave. I wonder; have they met my children? Oh, I think I have great kids but they have free will, and they like to use it frequently….don’t yours?
Accountability is one part of discipline (the training and preparation of our children for adulthood). The current trend is to define accountability as “a method of promoting future behavior change.” It sounds good but has a tragic flaw. This position assumes a secular humanistic stance. In other words, children are neither good nor bad, we are on the same level as the animals, and there is no God. The notion that we are all sinful and this is a fallen world is rejected.
From this Humanistic position it is easy to see that a parenting approach would maintain that imposing specific behavioral strategies of reward and consequence would guarantee a specific outcome of behavior. If you were not getting the desired outcome you were either using the strategy inappropriately or you were using the wrong one. This never ending search for the right application or strategy is what fuels both my profession and the self-help book industry. Just check Amazon for how many books they currently offer on parenting . . . Can they all be right?
This “false logic” leads parents to continue asking …”what can I do to make junior stop doing that?” “What can I take away to make him do this?” It is a never ending cycle of charts, checklists, new strategies, etc. This position will never admit that it is impossible to control a child’s behavior (unlike with animals) and this leaves millions of parents in a constant state of assuming they are failing. No matter how hard we have tried, we cannot prove consistent success with behavioral strategies on humans.
The alternative is to accept that accountability is “an appropriate response to past behavior.” This approach acknowledges that children are sinful (lovingly referred to as little criminals), we have free- will unlike the animals, and that God has a plan in the training and preparation of our children for adulthood . . . the management and enjoyment of his creation.
The practical reality for parents is the truth that other than their location when they are small, we cannot control any of our children’s behaviors. We are set free from the guilt associated with being completely responsible for everything that our children will ever do.
When we acknowledge that our children are both sinful and have free will, we can better accept the role of training them towards the right goal. This training is more about teaching and imparting wisdom than imposing consequences. It is more proactive than reactive and when accountability is necessary, it is understood as a correct response to something wrong or inappropriate.
Please don’t misunderstand; consequences are necessary to demonstrate clearly that something is; right or wrong, good or bad, wise or foolish, etc. But we shouldn’t get hung up on whether or not it immediately generates a behavior change.
Now before anyone starts thinking I am insisting that we don’t have a significant role, we do. Parents can be the most significant influence on the developing child and young adult if we understand what our role was intended to be. We are to train and prepare, not control and perfect.
Yes, this is a huge separation from much of the Humanistic nonsense that is spat at parents today. They have had the last 50 years or so of our attention with regards to parenting . . . and they got it wrong. Free yourself from this nonsense and ask what it really means to “train up a child in the way he should go.”
– Keith McCurdy
