I was meeting with a group of mom's the other day, and the issue of "Why can't our teen's just do what we ask them to do....after all, we give give give!" The "ask"at the center of this particular conversation was why can't my daughter just walk the dog when I ask her to, after all she wanted the damn dog! The excuse this daughter gave was: " FINE, but if I walk the dog that I'm gonna flunk my quiz tomorrow, cause then I won't have enough time to study. (Mind you the walk would have taken 10 minutes) And then that will be your fault!" Talk about shifting responsibility.
How many times has this exact conversation gone on in your house, only instead of dog walking, it was trash day, laundry to the basement,emptying the dishwasher etc etc etc. And when you "ask" most likely you get hooked into some kind of argument where you end of defending this request, which by the way requires no defending. My advice to this mom was to give him a shoulder shrug, and a see you in 10 minutes. And if by chance the kid didn't do well on that quiz, I can assure you it had absolutely nothing to do with a 10 minute dog walk.
So that's one strategy, the other one would be to walk the damn dog yourself, and the next time, that afternoon or evening or the next morning when your teen asks you to do something you can say: "you know honey I love doing things for you (like Jeremy's mom did) but since I had to do your job for you yesterday and walk the dog, I don't feel like doing you this for you today. We do for each other in this family, and I'm done out for today!"
