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The Lesson of
the Bear:
Helping Kids Become Responsible by
Richard and Linda Eyre
Editors’
Note: This is lesson 3 in the Nurturing series. .
By the time
I (Richard) was in elementary school, my family had moved to a little
town in the Rocky Mountains. In that town there was a legend –
some said a true story – probably a combination of the two
– about a huge grizzly bear known as “Old Ephraim”
or “Old Three Toes” that had terrorized the early settlers
of the community in the nineteenth century. Because of the legend,
and because Grizzlies still lived in the not too distant mountains,
there was a certain level of interest in the huge bears, and I grew
up knowing a little about their size and their ferocity.
Even their name is scary
– “grizzly” in the common vernacular and “ursus
arctos horribilis” in scientific jargon. Grizzlies get as
big as seven feet and 800 pounds, and they have three-inch claws.
Their unique muscle connections give them phenomenal strength in
their jaws, shoulders, and front legs. They can eat 40 pounds of
food per day and can outrun a deer over short distances.
My own personal favorite story about a grizzly bear, however, is
not the old legend, and is actually a funny story rather than a
scary one: Two hikers were walking up a trail high in the Rocky
Mountains one day, and as they came around a bend, they found themselves
face to face with a huge bear. One of the hikers immediately sat
down on the ground, pulled a pair of running shoes out of his back
pack and began putting them on in place of his heavy climbing boots.
The other hiker stared
at him in amazement and asked, “What are you doing? Do you
think you can outrun a bear?”
The first hiker
answered, “I don’t need to outrun the bear; I only need
to outrun you!”
________________________
Now, sorry about the
slightly grizzly implication of the story, but its purpose is to
make the point that we sometimes view our lives with the perspective
of that first hiker, running away or trying to distance ourselves
from difficult situations and pegging our survival on our ability
to outmaneuver or stay ahead of other people who will become victims.
We tend to
ignore the problems of the inner city or of a declining neighborhood
because we don’t live there anymore, we’ve escaped it.
Let someone else get eaten! It’s not our problem.
In our families, if we are not careful, we let our children avoid
accountability in the same way. They don’t clean their rooms
because they can run away from it, someone else will do it. They
don’t earn their own money because we will give it to them.
They don’t have to face up to or fix their own mistakes because
we will bail them out.
And as parents, we have
our own ways of running from or escaping difficult or unpleasant
tasks – of leaving the tough battles to others. We imagine
that we’re on too fast a track to have time for our mundane,
every-day parental duties, so we leave as many of them as we can
to care givers, school teachers, coaches, music teachers, tutors,
camp counselors, and anyone else we can farm our kids out to. We
adopt the “general contractor” method of parenting –
using or hiring “subcontractors” to do the actual work
of “building” or training or teaching our children.
We begin to see our job as just lining things up and then getting
our kids from one place to another.
Like the hiker
in running shoes, we scramble for safer, higher ground, prioritizing
our own comfort and leaving someone else to deal with the bearish
burdens. Valuing extra status or wealth, we’re willing to
sprint ahead with our careers even when it means leaving the “burden”
of a small child with a tender or at day care for extended periods.
Then we let our kids return the favor when they escape from cleaning
their rooms or doing household chores or budgeting their money.
___________________
The lesson of the bear
is responsibility; taking full and complete responsibility for our
family and for each of our children; prioritizing our parental role
above our other roles; teaching our children by that example and
expecting them to accept family responsibilities, too.
It is an important lesson
because responsibility, like a fast, hungry bear, usually catches
up with us. Running from family financial responsibility –
living beyond our means – probably results in credit card
debt that eats us. Running from the direct, everyday responsibility
for small children results eventually in less trust and communication
and often in kids with expanding problems which we may not even
know about. And letting our children run from family and personal
responsibility results in adolescents who are always looking for
the easy way out and who never become truly independent.
Unlike the retreating
hiker, we must face up to the full responsibility of raising a child,
accepting the help of sources from schools to scouting, but understanding
that “the buck stops here.”
Unlike the retreating
hiker, we need to prioritize the challenge in front of us, realizing,
as C. S. Lewis said, that parenting is the ultimate career and the
career which all other careers support.
Unlike the
retreating hiker, our children need to confront responsibility of
their own, from little household chores when they are small to earning
their spending money during their teens.
The beauty of family responsibility is that, as it is faced and
accepted, it becomes a friendly bear, a happy companion that makes
our walk through the woods safer and more enjoyable. It allows us
to keep moving forward on the path rather than running back up the
hill or taking detours off into the underbrush. It becomes our protector
rather than our foe, a loved member of the family rather than something
to be avoided or feared.
I woke up on a Saturday
morning to a knocking on our bedroom door. I opened it to find four
of our kids, ages seven through eleven, demanding their weekly allowance.
Something about it reminded me of a welfare line, and I began to
wonder if something-for-nothing allowances were the best way to
go.
After a little thinking,
a few discussions with the kids, and a lot of trial and error, we
evolved a little family system that emphasizes initiative and responsibility
and that more accurately resembles “the real world.”
Each child had a simple
pegboard with his name on it and four big blocky pegs hanging from
little chains. The first “morning peg” could be put
in if he got up and ready for school on time. The second “chore
peg” went in when he’d done his little assigned household
task and checked the common area of the home or yard he’d
been assigned to. The third “practice peg” could go
in if he finished his homework and music practice, and the fourth
“bedtime peg” was for getting ready for bed and being
in bed by bedtime.
We made a big wooden
“family bank” with a big padlock and a slot in the top
into which the children could put a slip each week night with a
“1,” “2,” “3,” or “4"
on it, depending on how many of their pegs they got in that day.
The slip had to be initialed by a parent or tender.
Saturdays became “pay
day.” The bank was opened by the paymaster (me) and each child
got paid according to how many total pegs he had for the week. For
one thing, it gave me an opportunity to practice the lesson of the
crabs. I would praise a child who had remembered his pegs and got
a lot of money, and I’d try to simply ignore a child who did
poorly.
As the system evolved,
we gave the kids checkbooks (real ones, but they drew only on the
family bank) so they could fill out deposit slips to put money in
and checks to take money out. We adjusted the amounts they could
earn so they could begin to buy their own clothes. (It amazed us
how perceived “ownership” influenced them to hang things
up and put things away.) Essentially the bank included separate
savings accounts and kids started taking a savings percentage out
of each paycheck along with an amount to give to church or charity.
The family bank savings accounts paid high interest on the agreement
that the savings and compounding interest could only be used for
college tuition when the time came.
The best thing about
the system is that it gave us frequent opportunities to talk about
responsibility, self-discipline, and self-reliance.
One family sat down together on a Sunday afternoon and made a simple
list of all the things it took to keep the household going for a
week – buying and cooking food, keeping the yard up, washing
dishes . . . everything they could think of . . . until they had
quite a long list which led to a family discussion about how parents
had most of the responsibilities but how children needed to have
some. Out of that discussion came the assignment of some specific
household responsibilities to each child.
*
* * *
One mother with a similar
notion to our pegboard, made up simple star chart for each child
where each star represented a specific responsibility, such as cleaning
their room or doing their chores. Instead of endlessly reminding
the children to do each task, she could now simply say, “Are
your stars up?” and the children could take the initiative
of trying to remember what each of their daily responsibilities
were. She also tied the children’s weekly allowance to how
many stars each child had put in for the week so that the allowance
was no longer an “entitlement” but a variable, proportionate
weekly reward for the responsibilities that were met.
*
* * *
One couple, somewhat
overwhelmed by the responsibility they felt for their beautiful
but hyperactive twins, made a habit of praying for strength and
guidance in their stewardship for two of God’s children. They
found that thinking of their children as a stewardship for which
they were responsible to God gave them both humility and confidence.
*
* * *
One couple, hopeful
of helping their two elementary-age boys make responsible life choices,
set up a chart for each of them titled, “Decisions in Advance.”
They explained to the boys that many people make bad choices and
then blame them on their circumstances or on the people around them.
They then suggested that the best time to make certain decisions
is in advance, before the pressure comes to do the wrong thing.
Over the next few weeks they helped the boys come up with advance
decisions ranging from “I will not experiment with drugs”
to “I will graduate from college.” The boys listed their
pre-made choices and signed and dated them.
*
* * *
One family
with three basketball-crazy boys was having a difficult time getting
them to remember to check on the part of the house or yard they
had been asked to be responsible for . . . until she started calling
the assigned areas “zones.” The boys knew all about
“zone defense” and all the mom had to say was “Remember,
a good defender doesn’t let anything bad happen in his zone!”
______________________
There are many ways
to approach responsibility within a family, and what methods you
choose are not nearly as important as your commitment to it and
the emphasis that your children see you putting on it. Start with
the positive. Recognize the responsibility your child already takes,
and give yourself some credit for all the responsibility you accept
just by being a caring parent. Then look for ways to build on what
you already have. Start with small steps, be content with small
progress and steady improvement. Remember that parenting is not
a game of perfect.
Remember and remind
yourself of the lesson of the bear. Don’t run. Stay and fully
accept family responsibility and turn it into a joy – the
joy of your life.
Good luck.
And come and visit us at valuesparenting.com.
For more than
a quarter century, as they have written a dozen books and raised
nine children of their own, New York Times #1 best-selling authors
Linda and
Richard Eyre have tried to reach out to parents who really care
--who are willing to put in the effort to create family infrastructures
that fortify and safeguard their children and to undertake fun but
challenging and involving monthly programs to teach their children
values, responsibility, and "joy." More than 100,000 parents, worldwide,
have become members of what they call valuesparenting.com.
Their results, measured in the happiness and success of their children,
have been remarkable.
