Teaching Responsibility
With Games
I believe teaching responsibility to be one of the most difficult life skills for parents to tackle — especially with two to eight-year-olds. How many times do you have to repeat asking your child or children to pick up their toys or hang up their clothes.
Richard and Linda Eyre are experts on the subject. They are New York Times No. 1 bestselling authors who lecture throughout the world on family related topics.
In their new book,
The Entitlement Trap, they suggest teaching responsibility with games to get little kids to clean up their belongings and laugh at the same time. They said they had tried everything. Getting mad didn't work. They realized that reacting with anger only taught their children how to get mad at their (future) kids.
So, at the suggestion of a neighbor, they got a big laundry bag and Linda sewed some eyes and a nose on it. Then "introduced" it to their children.
"Gunny Bag" (they named it) lives in the top of the hall closet and sometimes (you never know when) comes down and EATS any toys and clothes that are left out. Then he comes back on Saturday morning and "regurgitates" the stuff.
In a family meeting, they all agreed that if their toys or clothes got "eaten" again the next week, their stuff would make someone's day at the local charity store.
The kids formed an immediate love-hate relationship with Gunny Bag. They loved the fun of scrambling to put their things away, but they hated that he might eat their stuff.
The change was nothing short of miraculous. Instead of coming home to the same old pattern of getting angry and lecturing the kids about neatness and spending a half hour supervising their forced cleanup, they now had a fun, new pattern where one of the parents, standing amidst a sea of left-out toys and clothes, put a cupped hand behind one of their ears and proclaimed, "I think I hear some scratching in the closet. I think Gunny Bag is coming."
The kids would run around with both fear and delight, putting all their toys and clothes in the proper places so Gunny Bag could not eat them. They would take Gunny Bag from room to room looking for something to eat. He would cry and cry because he couldn't find anything to eat. This made the kids laugh.
Other times the kids would cry and cry when Gunny got to some item and ate it before they could grab it out of harm's way. Nevertheless, it was a game that everyone enjoyed over and over, and the house became much neater.
Did anyone tell you that, when you became a parent, you had to be creative? To create games for teaching responsibility and other important values? Me either. But we adapt and learn — just like our children do.
