Personal Responsibility in Parenting: How Your Choices Affect Your Children

It's common sense. Of course your choices affect your children. Your choice of where to live determines their school. Your choice of how to raise them affects the type of person they grow into.

But a lot of people make really dumb choices, and then must deal with the consequences. They get pregnant while not married. Or they drink and drive. Or they don't learn good work habits and can't keep a job.

These are dumb choices, but they are choices (with rare exceptions). You don't have to have premarital sex. You could give up your keys at parties with alcohol. You can visit organizations like Goodwill or Salvation Army to learn the work habits you didn't learn as a child. You can choose to try.

Not all choices that put you into a bind are dumb, of course. But even the intelligent choices are your responsibility.

• Your choice to move to America illegally and have children who are legal citizens leaves them with a wrenching decision when your illegal status is finally uncovered.
  
  
• Your choice to not marry the father of your child leaves your child unprotected and un-nurtured in a variety of ways (full disclosure: I made this choice not once, but twice. Turned out I was right, but it wasn't any easier on my sons.)
  
  
• You take a chance on house-flipping, just before the market in your area goes soft, and you lose your own house in the process.

Your choices, good or bad, are also your child's choices. A child cannot get away from you. He or she is trapped in your life, and every single decision you make, from whether to buy a leaner cut of meat to whether to move to another country, will have an impact on that child's life.

This means that almost every hardship your child faces until he or she starts making his or her own decisions -- is your fault. Not the state's fault. Not an absent parent's fault. Your fault. The sooner you embrace that, the sooner you can start repairing your life, and making your child's life better.

Making Better Decisions