Customer Reviews

TEACHING YOUR CHILDREN RESPONSIBILITY

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The authors have selected 12 core values that all children need to learn in order to mature into responsible and moral adults. This book suggests that the family select one value a month to discuss and practice thus covering all values after one calendar year. While I have never followed the monthly routine, this book has helped me present different values to my children in ways that they can understand.

For educators who are interested in incorporating values education into their school - this book could be a valuable resource.

I highly recommend it to all parents and others who work with children.

The Eyre's make a great point that parents undo the very heart of what responsibility means when they remind their children to do their responsibilities. Their solution is pure gold! They give ideas on how to restructure your approach. Soon your children will be scrambling to be responsible for their own chores and other responsibilities. It took our family about a month to readjust from "parent reminders" to "self reminding." We've been using this system for 5 years now and our children continue to be self motivated in getting ready for school on time, reporting on chore completion, and excelling in their studies. Their easy-to-tailor-to-your-family system gives another benefit. If you are working together as a family to master perfect love (rather than perfectionism), the natural consequence style this book offers allows for greater parent-child communication, understanding, self-improvement that is guided by the parent with the goals and solutions chosen by the child, and the opportunity to practice win/win negotiation skills. If you are looking to raise pro-active, capable children in an emotionally safe, eager to become more efficient environment then this book is for you. Good communication skills will be a boon. If you struggle with helping your children through their concerns then I recommend reading this book along with I Don't Have to Make Everything All Better by the Lundberg's, Raising Self-Reliant Children in a Self-Indulgent World by Glenn and Nelsen, and A Thomas Jefferson Education by DeMille or another of the Eyre's books called Teaching Your Children Sensitivity, all 5 star reading.

I saw the Eyres on "Oprah" when they were promoting this book & it just made sense. I'm the oldest of nine girls in a house that ran fairly smoothly. I could see that many of the things that had worked for us, they had down but had gone even further to refine the idea. They've helped me realize that I can't wait for my 5-yr-old to get older before I start teaching her these important things unless I want to miss out on prime teaching time with her. They also never sound like they know it all & we must do just as they say. It's been trial & error for them...they just got through more of it than your average sized family. :-)

I have read all of the Teach Your Children...series. The authors approcah is easy to understand and to follow and implement in your own family. I'm glad my sister reccomended these books to me!

Teaching Your Children Responsibility arrived in a timely manner. The condition was as stated. I would buy from them again.

I have been focusing on a lot of personal growth lately, mostly with spiritual growth and self-esteem/psychological growth, and as I found myself reading Nathaniel Branden's Six Pillars of Self Esteem (a wonderful book), I then next went to his book 'Taking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable Life'. Still only 70 pages through it, I decided to sift through my parenting library and found the Eyre's Teaching Your Children Responsibility. I also have their Teaching ... Joy book as well.

Their books are heavy on 'obedience', which as far as I'm concerned can be easily detrimental to a child's well-being. All people need to develop a sense of inner worth and inner confidence to have a healthy self-esteem, and ultimately a sense of compassion and love for others. Fairness towards others and having boundaries is a matter of self-discipline (ie self-control, delaying pleasure, feeling good about moral decisions, etc) and from self-worth. When a child feels good about himself without dependence upon others, THAT is self-reliance only possible through true responsibility. And only with that inner goodness is service and love possible. Until then, much of it is self-sacrifice and self-mutilation, which propagates in further generations through spanking, shame, breaking wills, and other detrimental behaviors that only set the seeds for self-destructiveness/self-hate.

Unfortunately, emphasizing obedience means that how we feel about ourselves depends upon conforming and pleasing others unconditionally. There is no true inner worth possible in that. We all have an inner goodness, not an inner sinfulness, and if we constantly are so obsessed with control, then we'll never find that love we need to save ourselves and this planet. Trying to control others through 'authority' and 'obedience' has been what has made our world so messed up, leaving so many people wounded and living recklessly - the total opposite of responsible.

Obedience is the unconditional following of others, not because they know better, but 'just because'. True self-esteem and happiness and self-responsibility can only be possible when we use our own judgment and be willing to do what we feel is right even when others around us, including 'authority' (our boss, our government, etc), believe differently. Responsibility has nothing to do with obedience - responsibility has to do with doing what's right, and our world is so full of injustices that often doing what's right requires disobedience and non-conformity. Otherwise, women wouldn't have their rights and neither would non-whites.

There seems to be a strong distortion of what 'responsibility' means. From a purely psychological standpoint (ie as Nathaniel Branden, the father of Self-Esteem describes it), responsibility means a willingness to take care of one's feelings, desires, dreams, goals, personal self, and related extensions, such as one's home, one's job, one's family, etc. It means taking care of oneself because it's nobody else's job to. Which is the complete inverse of obedience. Obedience means it's your obligation to follow others no matter what, without question. That only creates resentment in a lot of people and makes people avoid being 'responsible'. Responsibility first and foremost is about taking care of oneself and giving others the freedom to take care of themselves without expecting or demanding that they take care of you. It's independence, the natural process of growing up. It's essential to being truly independent and able to contribute to the world and giving rather than always taking, rather than greed. Only when we live in a world where we take care of ourselves can we possibly give back to the world and learn how to not take as much as we are, not depleting our resources, not overworking most of our population so 5% of the wealthiest can have 95% of the money. It's about knowing what it is that we ought to do, what we ought not do, and giving others that freedom to live and be happy without sacrificing themselves for us. Without proper responsibility, children grow up as codependent adults, with addictive qualities, needy, failing at relationships (only worsening a sense of self-worth). Expecting that others will take care of us is bound to fail because it never works out that way unless we surround ourselves by people with crippled self-worth and a sense of dependence upon others for such. And this book setting the atmosphere that our first priority is obligation towards others, that gives us the false impression that someone, somewhere (maybe our wives or children or subordinates), is obligated to obey and serve us. That's far from responsibility. Nobody is here to serve our needs. AND VICE VERSA. Obedience and obligation are lies, and genuine love and service are by-products of inner happiness that has nothing to do with others or things.

I find it appalling to spend 150 pages on responsibility towards others (which I call 'obligation') and only 30 pages on taking care of oneself. We are not intrinsically flawed as so many Christians would like to believe. Yes, we have our flaws, but that has more to do with growing up in environments where independence, awareness, self-acceptance, etc are not fostered, usually by accident (ignorance of parents), or, better yet, listening blindly (obediently) to the bullcrap that our authorities (government, scientists, doctors, psychologists, etc) SAY we should do. The past generations have proved themselves through terrible advice on how to raise our children and serve our peers that following that advice has made us miserable and thus filling voids with things and selfish acts rather than feeling complete, happy, intrinsically, so we can give rather than take.

In a world where we are so intertwined with others, many of us can 'get by' without ever taking responsibility for our lives, our actions, our decisions, our behavior. Co-dependence, addiction, divorce, mental illness, depression, anxiety etc are worse and worse every year, partly because we fail to take responsibility for our lives and what happens to us. We remain victims, passive, blindly working our jobs with no heart, no passion, no joy, only to come home, watch tv, be sub-par with our family, struggle, and depend more and more upon answers others have, whether books of the month, or tonight's prime time tv show or the next best video game or whatever else can be commercialized. That's what our society thrives on - helplessness. When so much of our role in living responsible lives means doing what others tell us to do, we set ourselves up for self-sacrifice, which only brings a sense of helplessness and thus lack of total responsibility for our lives. Responsibility should mean first and foremost meeting our needs so we can be CAPABLE of giving to others. It also means knowing where I end and You begin. Having boundaries. When people don't have their needs met, they seek it out in others, and in a society of obedience, people become suckers and end up taking care of a select few who don't take care of themselves and don't serve others, and only serve their own needs. That's the nature of our distorted economic system. True responsibility is thinking independently and taking care of oneself above all, recognizing that it's NOT your responsibility to blindly take care of others and others have a certain obligation to take care of themselves. Why do we work so hard at our jobs just to hand over most of the money to our executives who live lavish lives?

Just glancing at the table of contents, after having read good books on self-esteem and self-responsibility and feeling really happy and great and empowered, it just felt like putting our children in a pit, requiring our approval, conditional love, which is far from healthy self-esteem and far from what they need to take care of themselves well.

Of course, if you're already set in your conservative viewpoint, you probably aren't thinking for yourself and thus aren't taking responsibility for your thoughts/beliefs. Just regurgitating what everyone else is saying. And at that rate, all I've said will sound like humanistic heresy, judgmental that ideas foreign to your own are not worth any merit or thinking about, which is about as far from self-responsible as possible.