by C. Elliot

Created on: July 10, 2008

If only life were as simple as good parenting resulting in good actions by adult children. But, as we see time and again, that is not the case (nor is the reverse true - that bad parenting results in bad actions by adult children). Parents may hold strong accountability for the type of adults they raise; but, that being said, they are not ultimately responsible for how their adult children act.

Actions relate to personal choice. We've all met someone who, in spite of a difficult childhood, overcame obstacles and chose to live a happy, fulfilling life. In contrast, we've all also probably met someone who let a difficult upbringing define the rest of his or her existence. We've met people who had perfectly happy childhoods and, for some reason, could not bring themselves to be happy as adults. A person's parents are perhaps the most influential people in his or her life. But once someone is an adult, that individual is in the proverbial driver's seat. We choose our own courses of action and cannot constantly defer to our past and parentage. There are too many examples of individuals who have done otherwise.

Ultimately, the issue comes down to personal (rather than parental) responsibility. If someone has poor parental modeling but still goes on to make fantastic life choices, we would hardly credit the parents. Similarly, if someone has wonderful parental modeling but makes poor life decisions anyway, we would probably sympathize with the parents and feel that they had done the best they could.

Yet somehow, if someone has good parental modeling and makes good adult choices or has poor parental modeling and makes poor adult choices, we attribute it all to the parents!

Parents should be held accountable for the children they raise. But a person's "growing up" years do not begin and end with his or her parents. They say that "it takes a village to raise a child," which, of course, refers to the hugely important community aspect of child-rearing. Family, friends, environment, current events, and a slew of other things shape the kind of person a child grows up to be. Not every action can be traced back to something a person's parents did or said.

It's true that a good parental foundation can steer someone on the right path. And tragically, there are instances of children seeming doomed from the start. They receive such poor guidance from their parents when they are young - it's hard to blame them for the bad decisions they make as adults. (How could they have known any better?) But even if the parents are at primary fault, there are still others who shirked their duties in helping that child (family members, neighbors, counselors, teachers, friends, and so on). When a person has seemed to be on the wrong track for his or her entire life, it would be so easy just to blame Mom and Dad. But the truth is- even if the parents are predominantly to blame, society failed that individual as well.

Even more fundamentally, there comes a time when adults must be responsible for their own actions - regardless of their parentage. And really, at the end of the day, it would be selling people short to assume that every good or bad action a person took was somehow attributable to his or her parents.

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