Responsibility and blame

My boys have become experts at blaming others for their problems. If they're having trouble getting ready in the morning, it's because someone kept them awake too late the night before. If the homework didn't get done, it's because there were too many distractions around the house. Or my favorite, used recently when a quiz came back with a poor score: "It's the school's fault for not teaching me better study habits when I was younger".

It's easy to find someone else to blame for our troubles. What my boys don't always see is that, even if they're right and someone else is truly at fault, it doesn't absolve them from responsibility. Just because your brother kept you up past midnight, it doesn't mean you don't have to get yourself ready for school in the morning. That's still on you. Going forward, we'll try to make sure the late nights don't happen again, but for this morning, you still need to get moving. And maybe the school did do a lousy job of teaching you study habits. I personally doubt it, but if you think so then you've already identified that you have lousy study habits. What are you going to do about it? Learn some new ones. Fix it.

I sense the blame/responsibility argument will continue in our household for some time but it's not one I'm willing to give up any ground on. There will always be outside forces messing up the perfect plans we have for our lives. If we let these disruptions be an excuse for not accomplishing our duties and goals, we will never really do anything. I want my boys to do things.