Accountability

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."
- Stanislaw Lec -

My mother never let my brothers and I get away with anything when we were kids. If you broke the rules, you were held accountable. No excuses. No exceptions. She was determined to raise us to be responsible in every which way, and she took this job very seriously.

One clear cut memory of my mother’s commitment to this part of our upbringing was the way she handled the time the younger of my two older siblings got caught with some candy that he brought home from the neighbourhood convenience store that he *cough, cough*  ‘forgot’ to pay for.

Was she angry? Sure. Did she preach? Yup. Yell a little? You betcha. And after she got all that out of her system, did it end there? Nope. She took it one step further.

*Gulp*

To ensure that my brother would never, ever do something like that again, she held him accountable for his actions. She marched him back to the store to return the ‘borrowed’ candy, and to apologize to the shop owner. And she took me along, so that I could ‘watch and learn’.

Perhaps his "self-esteem" suffered a little that day from the humiliation he experienced when facing the store owner, but he did learn a very important lesson, and so did I:
That everything you do in life, every choice you make, has a consequence.

In this case, the consequence was not a good one.

Sure, self esteem is important, but I think sometimes our society goes overboard with it. Parents have become overprotective and unrealistically defensive. They dismiss or overlook bad behaviour and make excuses for their children instead of holding them accountable for their actions.

Was my mother insensitive that day? I’m sure plenty of parents who feel that my brother’s self-esteem should have taken priority will say she was. I personally don’t think so. She was determined to put out that small bonfire to ensure that a forest fire would never break out in the future. As she explained it “If he ‘borrowed’ candy as a little boy and I didn’t teach him this lesson, what would he be ‘borrowing’ as a teenager?”

My brother never ‘borrowed’ anything again in his life. And, unsurprisingly, neither did I.