A lesson best learned young: Accept responsibility for your actions
There are an awful lot of lessons parents can teach their kids about the faltering economy. Here’s a simple one even a kindergartner can grasp: Accepting responsibility for your actions is good.
Take the case of Hank Greenberg, the former chief executive of American International Group who transformed the company into an insurance giant by casting its lot with highly risky financial transactions, known as credit-default swaps. In testimony before a congressional committee recently, Greenberg told lawmakers that his leadership had “nothing to do” with the collapse of AIG that so far has cost the American people $182 billion.
Asked point blank if he took any responsibility himself, he replied: “No, I don’t.”
Greenberg pointed his finger at the government, management that came after he departed and ratings agencies. How does a grown man turn out this way? And how can we avoid raising kids who wind up like him?
Somehow I imagine a young boy who blames his parents for his forgotten lunch because they didn’t remind him to grab it off the kitchen counter. And a teenager who blames his parents for his lousy GPA because they didn’t help him study enough.
Before long this boy becomes a young man who blames his parents for his credit card troubles because they didn’t help him out enough. And this young man becomes someone like Greenberg.
I’ve become a huge fan of an approach to raising kids called Love and Logic. Its founders, Dr. Foster Cline and Jim Fay, offer a simple to understand message: Teach kids to accept the consequences for their actions at a young age and they and you will come out ahead. Following that message is easier said than done. It’s not fun watching kids fail. But they learn from those failures.
Cline compares parenting to playing poker. Play when the stakes are low and it can be a lot of fun. Allow the stakes to get out of hand and fun is replaced by high anxiety.
“It becomes frightening,” Cline told me recently.
Lesson for us: Let our kids cope with the consequences of a forgotten lunch or a forgotten vocabulary quiz.
A forgotten lunch will result learning that friends will help each other. And the next time, they’ll likely grab the lunch without being reminded. Failing a vocabulary quiz will result in trying harder on the next quiz or test to make up for lost ground. But none of this will happen if we swoop down and save them from their mistakes.
These are lessons that will serve them and us well for many, many years.
