Mistake #1 - Treat them like teenagers, instead of Young Adults

Reference: Leadership Education by Oliver and Rachel DeMille, page 212-213

I should start out by saying that I have three children ages 18, 15, and 13, but I have one teenager and two young adults. My sweet Sam (18) was never homeschooled and attended public schools throughout her education. She is very much a teenager in her views on life and her outlook. As much as I have tried to instill Leadership Education principles in her, she also has lived part of her life with her father (we are divorced) and was not always in our home. These competing parental styles have been confusing for her and so I do not blame her in any way for being a teenager. I simply state this so that readers can understand that I have BOTH and WHY I have both.

"In the modern family, it takes both parents and youth to make a young adult. Only the parent can truly pass on responsibility, and only the youth can choose to fulfill it." - Leadership Education, page 213

I have found this to be profoundly true. If parents coddle their children and never expect and GIVE the youth true responsibility, then how can the youth perform as such? My biggest mistake was in allowing my children to be coddled and not following through with the expectations given them. For a long time I never gave them any real responsibility (just little chores), even now I catch myself wanting to remind my children of what is expected, rather than allowing the natural consequences of their actions to be the guide. I have done much better at this in recent years, but not soon enough for my oldest child.

Over the past two years we have turned over several items of responsibility to our youth:

1. One was complete care of our animals, previously chickens, rabbits, and a dog. We now only have a dog, but they completely care for the animals - feeding, bathing, nail clipping, etc. The consequence of not caring for the dog is the dog may die if not fed, smells is she is not bathed and has to stay outside, and if her nails are not clipped she again has to stay outside so she does not scratch the wood flooring. Their love of the dog usually keeps these items accomplished so she rarely stays outside.
2. Our youth are also assigned zones in which they are to complete a list of daily tasks in that zone. The consequence of not doing their assigned zones is loss of privilege - mostly related to being driven places that are not for the family (friends houses, stores, etc.) and loss of what little electronic privileges they have. They have been told to do these things every day and there have been days when a youth is scrubbing pots at 11pm...the whole family does not need to suffer without pots and pans because of one person.

Consequence

To prove my point on natural consequences, I decided to give my children a taste of what happens when one person in the family fails to do their part. At the time I had responsibility for making the meals in our home. I told the children that dinner would be served at 5:30pm IF everyone had done their jobs. Well, they forgot all about that and went about their day procrastinating. Nobody really thought anything about it until about 6:00pm when someone said, "Mom, where's dinner?" I smiled and kept reading a book. Within 15 minutes everyone was groaning about "starving to death" and how "mom doesn't love" them anymore. Eventually they realized that I had not made dinner because everyone had shirked their jobs (the discussion was quite comical). They completed their jobs and we ate that night about 8pm. The next night we ate at 6:30pm and pretty much every day after that dinner was at the appointed 5:30pm. 

The hardest thing for me was to follow through. Like the quote above, a parent has to do their part in making young adults.