How to Help Your Child Take Responsibility for Their work.

You have tried nagging, and that didn’t work!  You have tried bribing, and that only worked for a short time!  You have probably even tried cajoling and threatening, all to no avail!  You still can’t get your child to do their work!

The problem is that you are not letting your child take responsibility for his work.  You are taking on the responsibility of getting him to do the work and letting your child off the hook.  Just what he wants.

But, you say, how will he get his work done if I stop nagging, and I stop bribing and cajoling?

Simple, you make it his problem not yours!

One mother was surprised at the changes in her son when she took my advice and did this.

John (not his real name!) was not doing well in school.  His grades had dropped because he never finished his homework or got his assignments in on time.  His mother knew this was the problem so she tried helping him get his work finished.  She kept reminding him of what he had to do and asking him if he had done it.  She kept score of how long he spent doing homework and became worried when it didn’t look like he had spent long enough to finish his work.  She offered bribes for good grades and threats for poor work.

And nothing changed.

Her son continued to not finish his work and she continued to get more and more frustrated and upset.

She knew that her son could do the work, she just wasn’t sure that he would do it, and do it on  time.

When I talked to her son about this issue he was very clear about the problem.  He did not want his mother bugging him and asking about his work every evening.  He wanted to get on with it in his own way and in his own time.  When I suggested that he had never shown that he could finish his assignments if he did this he agreed.  But he said that he spent so much time trying to avoid being nagged that he had little time left to actually do the work

We came to an agreement.  He would do all his work, on time and to his best ability, if his mother would stop asking him about it!

I don’t know what was harder, him doing his work or his mother not saying anything to him.  All I do know is that at the end of a couple of weeks his grades were going up and his mother was much less stressed and upset.

By making her son take responsibility for his work she had helped him show what he could do and learned to trust him more.

The moral of this tale?  If you want your child to be responsible give them the space to be responsible.