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Is Your Child Responsible?

Good afternoon parents. This week, we’re going to be continuing our practice of honesty. And in honesty, we’re going to be talking specifically about taking responsibility. And this is going to take two different paths. And so we want to make sure that you are working on this with your ninja to help them become the best version of themselves possible. First and foremost, everyone pretty much knows taking responsibility when you make a mistake. And having your, your ninja be honest, if they did something wrong, that they fess up to it, raise their hand, say I did it and accept responsibility for it. So that was pretty straightforward. And everybody works on that all of the time. But instead of waiting for your ninja to do something wrong for an opportunity to work on something,

we work on it in a proactive manner. So what we suggest and what we’re working on here at the karate school is have your ninja take responsibility for something around the house. Now, I get it. Everybody says yeah, you know, my ninja does that. And we haven’t responsible for this to that. But we’re going to add a couple of twists to this to help make sure that it’s super successful, both for you and for your ninja. First off, ask them what they want to be responsible for. Right? A lot of times parents will just say, okay, you’re responsible for cleaning your room and have conversation. And that’s okay, it’s your house. You can certainly do that if you want to. But having your ninja offer something that they want to be responsible for, is going to get a lot better results, because it already tells you that that’s something that they’re interested in. And if they’re interested in it, they’re more likely to do a better job at keeping the responsibilities up of that thing.

For example, they might say,

I want to be responsible for feeding the dog,

or I want to be responsible for setting the table,

Whatever it is, they’re giving you the feedback, so they’re taking ownership of it right out of the gate, that is step one, to a super successful result of teaching them to be responsible for themselves and their surroundings. Number two, you want to be able to teach them and show them specifically what it means to be responsible for this.

All too often again, you say okay, you’re responsible for this, you use the dog, again, you’re responsible for feeding the dog, that means that food goes in the bowl, and you’re done with it. And that’s not quite enough, you basically want to guide your child you want to show them for the first week up to say five to seven days, you want to show me exactly what it means to feed the dog. This is where the food’s at, this is how much we give them. This is the time of day. So that way becomes very structured. And that way your ninja knows exactly what to expect, and what’s expected of them to become more responsible. After you’ve shown that to them for several days, and they know exactly what to do. Now you watch them do it for several more days. And you don’t say anything while they’re doing it. You just let them do it. And then if there was a step or something that they missed afterwards, then you can give them a polite correction and say that was a great job. Right? Always start with the positive. I really you liked how you did this another positive. Next time, make sure you do this also. So that way, you’re giving them two positives before you give the correction. All too often again, you’re going to say Well, yeah, yours responsibility, but you forgot to do that. Or you didn’t do that, or you missed that. So right away, pop, you didn’t take that big balloon, your ninja standing, they’re all proud of themselves that they took responsibility. And you pop that balloon with a negative comment right out of the gate. Always start with a polite or a praise, and then give the correction afterwards. Finally, what you want to do is make sure that you create consequences. And this is the one thing I have yet to see anybody do at home, if you’re going to be responsible for setting the table, that means the table must be set before 6pm every day of the week, seven days a week without fail. If it’s not, then whatever your consequences that you want to do, right, you’re going to this privilege, or this will be the penalty. It can be whatever you want. But again, it needs to be stated ahead of time. So then that way you’re ninjas learning true responsibility,

If you’re not being responsible for your things, or you’re not being responsible for what you say you’re going to be, there’s going to be consequences. So we teach that to the ninjas right out of the gate. At our last parents night out. We had a ninja loser issues. It was unfortunate, right, but he didn’t put them in the cubbies. When everybody walked in the door, we said make sure you put your shoes in the cubbies. This particular ninja threw them right in front of the chairs. So then we said, All right, somebody’s shoes are not in the cubbies, you need to make sure you take care of that. waited five minutes. Guys, this is the second time we’re saying this. There’s a set of shoes here.

We are going to take them if they’re not put in the cubbies. Last chance. We waited five more minutes. Nobody came up. We took the shoes. Guess who came asking us questions at the end of the parents night out. I’ve lost my shoes. I don’t know where they are. Well, now again, here’s an opportunity and we treat every opportunity as a learning process. We could have easily just scolded them and said, Well, you didn’t listen, you know, your shoes are gone, we throw them out. That’s not going to give them an opportunity to learn anything.

So instead, we said okay,

well, did you hear us say this?

No.

Did you hear us at the second time?

No,

We know they’re gonna say that. Otherwise, they would have taken care of the shoes.

Okay, so we have a listening issue here. So we need to work on that, to make sure that you’re paying attention when things are going on. We’ve got your shoes back here, because we don’t want you to go home without your shoes. Now, what are we going to do next time to make sure well, I’m going to put my shoes away in the cubbies. Now that’s great. That’s what they were supposed to do. But what else can we do to make sure that we’re always paying attention? Oh, make sure that I listened better, right. So we made this a positive experience. And hopefully now that ninja is a lot more responsible not only with his shoes, but with his listening skills. And that becomes the true essence. So again, give your ninja the opportunity to become responsible at home. But number one, let them pick what they want to be responsible for naturally, as the parent, you’re going to have the final vote, you know, they might I want to be responsible for driving the car. Well, that’s not very realistic. That’s going to happen when you get your driver’s license, right? So you don’t say no, you just frame it in a little different fashion for them. But let them choose. And again, get to something that they want to do. Number two, show them exactly what it means to be responsible for that process. And then finally, number three setup consequences. So that way, if they don’t do it, when they come consequences and forced, there’s no complaining, there’s no arguing, right? You were responsible for this, and you didn’t do it. Therefore, here’s consequence. End of story. Right? That’s right, you’re just going to learn to be responsible, they’re going to learn to be more honest, not only with themselves, but an accepted responsibility for the things that they do, which in turn is going to help make them a super fantastic leader in tomorrow’s world. Now, again, as always, this is just one of dozens of different things that we’re working on with the school and the ninjas here at the karate school. I would love to come and speak to your parent group, to your school, PTO, PTA, church group, Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, I’ve talked to a lot of different groups. So if you guys would like to have me come in and sit down and go over a particular structure or program that I teach here with the kids, I am more than happy to. So please do me a favor. Share the video with you any other parent groups and any other parents let them know. This isn’t really karate. This is a leadership academy. This is basically a life skills program, where martial arts is just the delivery system. We’re going to be enhancing the program even more than we haven’t already, which I’m excited to talk about in the next couple of weeks. So Have an awesome day. If you found this video useful. Please like comment on it.

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