Mark Goulston, M.D.: How America Messed Up Its Kids... And How We Can Fix Them

Mark Goulston, M.D.: How America Messed Up Its Kids... And How We Can Fix Them: [It] "might be helpful is to reach a consensus between parents and their children as to what terms related to personal responsibility mean. Here are ten terms that come to mind for me:

1. Commitment: the level of dedicated action(s) you continue to take after your enthusiasm for an enterprise stops.
   
2. Accountability: taking full responsibility for your actions by owning up to the negative or failed results, taking action to make up for it to the person(s) you let down, and learning what you did wrong so that it doesn't occur again.
   
3. Maturity: how well you are able to resist an irresistible impulse and instead have and exercise judgment and do the reasonable thing. In the brain we refer to this as exercising one's executive function.
   
4. Honesty: this is simply telling the truth according to the facts as you understand them. You know honesty best, when you tell a lie. Pathological liars lie whenever they are trying to get their way and take advantage of a situation. Compulsive liars lie both when the are trying to get their way and when they are trying to get out of facing the consequences of their actions.
   
5. Forthrightness: this is coming forward and telling the truth and revealing untruths that you become aware of. It's believing and following Justice Louis Brandeis words: "Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant."
   
6. Character: what you do when you are frustrated, angry, annoyed, afraid and/or bored and nobody is watching and your chance of getting caught is close to nil.
   
7. Sacrifice: what you do unto others who will not (immediately) be able to pay you back by doing unto you.
   
8. Compassion: what you feel unto others who will not be able to do more than say, "Thank you."
   
9. Thinking ahead and planning: overcoming the aversion to anything that causes you to forego immediate gratification.
   
10. Listening: and then pausing to consider what you've heard before rejecting it, tuning out or competing with it (a skill every generation needs to learn)."

Mark Goulston, M.D.: How America Messed Up Its Kids... And How We Can Fix Them

Mark Goulston, M.D.: How America Messed Up Its Kids... And How We Can Fix Them: "...consider that at the exact moment that you as a parent bail out your child from facing the consequences of their screw-ups and taking full responsibility for them, literally millions of children in this world the same age as your child are taking full responsibility for their actions and becoming smarter, stronger and wiser. Within the next 10 to 20 years, those children (from China, India and elsewhere) will become your child's boss, and they won't bail out or accept your child's excuses."