Listen to an audio file of this tool.
Now Is the Right Time!
As a parent or someone in a parenting role, you play an essential role in your 4-year-old child’s success. There are intentional ways to grow a healthy parent
Listen to an audio file of this tool.
Now Is the Right Time!
As a parent or someone in a parenting role, you play an essential role in your 4-year-old child’s success. There are intentional ways to grow a healthy parent-child relationship, and working together to make responsible decisions is a great way to do it.
Responsibility means being able to consider how your actions will impact yourself and others, and making the fair, kind, and safe choice. Responsible decisions that children make when they are young may seem small compared to the major decisions that many teens and adults have to make. However, every decision that a young child makes gives them the opportunity to practice thinking through a problem and how their choices will impact themself and others. They are learning how to think ahead and how to do something that might not have been their first choice but is the fair and kind thing to do. Practicing this skill in early childhood lays the foundation for higher-stakes decisions in the future.
Three-and-four-year-olds are continuing to learn what it means to make a responsible decision, how decisions might impact themselves and others, and how to repair any harm done when they make decisions that are not responsible.1 Three-and-four-year-olds are starting to remember some of the ways that you have taught them to be responsible and will follow them more often than they did in the past (“You cannot touch the toys when we are at a store” or “You can only go in the puddle with your boots on”).
As parents and those in a parenting role, you can support this learning, foster responsible decision making, and help your child understand what being responsible truly means – rather than just complying with rules to avoid consequences. This is a critical time to teach and practice responsible decision making.
The steps below include specific, practical strategies to prepare you in growing this vital skill and build a relationship with your child that includes reliable and unconditional support in making choices.
Children learn about who they are and how they relate to others through sensitive, caring interactions with you. These interactions impact their ability to make responsible decisions that are