How can I make or rather encourage my 10 year old daughter more responsible?

Question

I understand that she is young but she acts more like a 7 year old than a 10 year old and in fact my 7 year old daughter is more responsible than she is. She forgets her things at school. She lies all the time. She's just an all around mess. I'm a single mom and I try my best to be supportive and helpful and anything else she needs but she is just not returning the favor.

Answer 1

Sounds like you daughter doesn't feel good about herself. Kids act irresponsibly and lie when they are suffering from low self-esteem. That's good that you see the signs but you must help her to feel better about herself. Here are some tips to help your child improve her self-esteem.

1. Avoid the negative feedback. If you want to point out an inappropriate behavior choose your words carefully to not put your child down. Take on the role of teacher and mentor.

2. Be generous with offering positive feedback and praise even with the smallest things. Be overly generous.

3. When your child says bad things about herself get her to say 3 good things to counter the bad things. Reinforce to her all the wonderful things about her.

4. When she makes a mistake, don't criticize. Let her know mistakes are a normal part of growing up. Sit with her and she her how she could avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

5. Get your child involved in activities and hobbies she can pursue and feel good at.

6. Find time to play and just chat with your child. Listen to what she has to say without making too many comments.

These are just some ideas where you can begin to help your daughter. Best to you

Answer 2

I agree with the one lady on talking ot her at bed time of anything she did wrong or etc.

I say you should have a talk with her on being more responsible. Explain to her just how it is in real life when you're responsible and get things done you get rewarded by achieving your goals or sometimes a promotion in a job. But also being irresponsible can make you un successful. If she's forgetting her school work she she might be like me, while I do have an awesome memory and I'm in school at the end of the day I'm gathering my books and thinking what I need. I always get the feeling where it's like I know i needed something for homework or a book or something. But I forgot about it at the last minute. So if that's her problem maybe you can get her like a planner or tell her every day in school to write down her school assignments or homework and also make sure she writes down if she needs any certain books like english or something. That way she won't forget it because she'll have it written down.

The lying thing just explain to her how it hurts you when she lies and that if she keeps on lying she loses her trust. Which is very hard maybe even impossible to gain back. Or maybe you can teach her a lesson by "lying" to her. Some kids don't learn from something like this unless it actually happens to them
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That's all I can think of also encourage her whenever she does good, cause when you do it motivates the child more into wanting to do even greater than she already can. When she does bad don't really yell at her cause it might make her not have any motivation to do anything. When she does something bad or wrong like this just talk to her on what she did wrong and how you guys can fix the problem. You know make a deal.

That's all I can think of, hope I helped.
blondie.

Answer 3

Well, when I ran into difficult situations with my daughter, instead of getting angry with her, I would wait until bedtime and give her a talk to let her know that I was disappointed etc and gave her ideas or instruction on what to do next time....this worked very well.

I also ALWAYS made it clear to her that she is responsible for her own actions and that every action on her part resulted in some sort of reaction, positive or negative....
Since she could hold even the most remote conversation, I allowed her to make her own choices when it was appropriate and let her deal with the consequences of her actions on her own and later explained, often at bedtime what had happened and why. This started to really sink in and stick.

If she's always leaving things at school--do not rescue her by going to get them for her, but instead give her a consequence to deal with and when she remembers her things, reward her with lots and lots of praise.

Also, give her some easy things to do at home everyday--like maybe helping you with the dishes and simple things like that--kids really respond positively to structure and consistency in the home environment..

Sometimes kids tend not to care too much about things subconciously because they need attention and any attention they get whether it's good or bad is good. This also happened with my daughter when she was about the same age as yours.

She has no siblings and was always a responsible, well behaved child up until this point...I think something happened in her head that made her think that we don't care about her because we both work and her other friends' had mothers who didn't work and small things like that....We were quite simply too busy and didn't notice that she wasn't really along for the ride anymore...so we made sure that we did things together more often and went out of our way to include in her in things that we were doing everyday, like making dinner, helping clean, deciding on meals etc...and after a few months she seemed to get back into the swing of things.... She also by the way, started menstruation at the age of 10 and it certainly explained a lot of the moodiness and attitude she was suddenly displaying from time to time along with her less than ideal behaviour.

I would recommend making a point of making her and her alone feel special and important without her younger sibling which she probably believes you favor.

I hope this helps.

Answer 4

This is a tough one... and I have been in your shoes... Although not a single parent.

My children are about the same in age difference as yours and the oldest one had some of the same issues as your daughter...

I dealt with by not allowing him to forget. You calmly keep reminding, reminding, reminding..

You refuse to accept the lies. You tell her you know the truth and so her lying about it is not going to help...

As a parent you just keep plugging away at the issues.

Answer 5

speak to a councillor and let her Guidance councillor at he school know about this and council her.