We Must Take Personal Responsibility for our Choices - No Cop outs, No Excuses, and No Blaming Others

Chapter 3   We Are Responsible For Our Choices

We are all responsible for our personal  choices, no cop outs, no excuses, no blaming anyone else.  We have become a society that likes to blame everyone else for what has gone wrong rather than taking personal responsibility for our choices and the direction we have taken in our lives.  Instead of supporting our teacher’s when they tell parents about a problem the student might be having, a parent wants to blame the school or the teacher. Rather than take personal responsibility for what they need to do to help their children, they want to shift the blame.  Parents use drugs and create unstable homes for their children and then wonder why their child might have an ADD or ADHD problem.  Drugs and alcohol and unstable homes can have a direct effect on children’s behavior and performance in school.  Yet parents don’t want to have to admit how irresponsible they have been with their lives and how it has affected their children.  Parents must learn to take responsibility as parents for what they are doing to their children.

 A teacher I taught with for many years used to live in Azurbazan under the Soviet Union  government.  She told me that one big thing she noticed in teaching in the United States that was very different than the Soviet Union, was the lack of support for teachers when teacher’s spoke about a child’s weak areas.  She told me that parents in the Soviet Union were always very supportive of teacher’s when they told of a child’s problems and went right to the student and asked him why he wasn’t doing the things he needed to do  in school.   They had utmost respect for the teacher’s and the educations system. She was really surprised when she started teaching in American schools the  lack of support for teachers, the education system and teacher’s  efforts to educate and help the students.  She was surprised how seldom they wanted to take responsibility for their child’s problems as well.

We have become a society that blames others, whines, makes excuses, and expects other’s to take responsibility for our lives and the choices we have made way too often.  Time and time again too many people in the U.S.  blame other’s for their poor choices in unwanted pregnancies, drug addictions, dropping out of school, and turning to a life of crime.  Other’s did not make those choices. Each individual that decided to have unprotected sex at an age when they shouldn’t have children, or made the decision to try drugs even though the school and other’s had told them what a dead end street drugs were, or decided to be a criminal and steal and break laws which caused problems in their lives, or decided  to  kill or hurt others  through belonging to gangs and participating in gang activities.

All of society pays when people refuse to take responsibility for their lives and their choices.  We need to
ask ourselves if it is really the healthy part of societies responsibility to take care of people who have made poor choices with their lives?  The answer is a resounding no! It is time for people to wake up and take  responsibility for poor choices and not expect other’s to clean up the mess of their irresponsible choices. 

 To be continued......................................