How to teach a 4 year old accountability?

Our little girl is a great kid (of course), but she does not accept responsibility for anything.

Anything “bad” that happens - whether it’s her stubbing her toe, or dropping her cookie, or not finishing an art project before the time’s “up” at preschool - is someone else’s fault.

I have seen how her friends react to this blaming (it’s obviously very off-putting), so I am guessing it is not strictly a 4-year-old thing. I guess I’m wondering how we can help her learn to accept responsibility for something like stubbing her toe - or at the very least, how not to blame the wall!

Any ideas?

Yes. Constant repetitive reinforcement that she needs to take responsibility for her own actions. Both my kids went through the “blame anyone else” stage. I assume this is a completely normal phase.

We just kept up the same consistent response: “No. It’s your fault you didn’t get your homework done, get ready for school, fell off your bike, dropped the plate, etc. etc. etc.” After a couple of years it’ll sink in. :wink:

Simple “if… then” type consequences.

For example, my son is supposed to be sure the light in his room is off before he goes to Kindergarten. For a while he kept forgetting to turn it off. I told him, “When the electricity is on, we have to pay for it. I don’t mind paying if you are using it, but I won’t pay to have the light going while you are gone. So if you leave the light on, YOU have to pay 25 cents for the electricity. Since you don’t have the money, you can pick a bag of weeds to earn the money. From now on, every time you forget to turn off the light, you have to pick a bag of weeds to pay for it.”

Then you’ve got to BE CONSISTENT! That’s the hardest part. After a few rotten days of picking weeds, he now remembers to turn off the light.

Insert your own consequence for whatever unwanted action. But they only learn to be accountable if they are held accountable for things!

I’m not a parent, but I’d avoid saying “It’s your fault …” over and over.

Maybe, “That’s what happens when you …” instead?

Wait a couple of years. Attempting to reason with toddlers is a futile endeavor.

I see no reason to avoid using the phrase “your fault.” Unless of course I’m doing this when it is blatantly NOT the kid’s fault. But what the heck is wrong with telling little Buffy that it was her fault for leaving the hamster cage door open, or for breaking the vase, when in fact it was her fault? It’s not like I’m blaming her for global warming or the roof leaking or anything? :confused:

No. That’s exactly why you need to start NOW and be consistent. It’s not reasoning, it’s telling it like it is: consistently.

Sometimes bad things happen because we’re careless. (Even to grownups.) So we learn to modify our behavior to minimize those occurrences. (Not that bad things stop happening, 100%.)

Harping on somebody’s “fault” indicates there is something very wrong with them.

Who said anything about harping?

Should I say anything about how blaming makes other people feel? Or … not?

(She is also quite a whiner, which is SUPER frustrating … I’m hoping she’ll outgrow that too).

I would probably tell her how it makes other people feel, but that’s just me.

I feel for you - we’re working on the same thing with our son, who will be 4 in May. His problem is that he has a new sister and I’ve gone back to work recently, so he’s been throwing tantrums and hitting at preschool. It’s hard to teach empathy to an aggressive, ticked-off, egocentric kid. But I guess you just have to repeat it over and over and over and eventually they learn. Sure sucks, though.

I’m guessing she will grow out of it - and the whining. Until then, hang in there. It gets better, or that’s what people keep telling me. :slight_smile:

What is she trying to accomplish with the blame game? Or to put it another way, what is the actual payoff for her? Knowing the answer to this question will make ending it much simpler. She is getting something out of it, or she wouldn’t be doing it.

For some kids it really is that they don’t quite get what “my fault” means exactly. For some kids it is very important to be good and to be seen as good. For some kids it is very important that somebody else be seen as bad. For some it is a way to get attention and for others it is a way to deflect it.

Anyway, work out what she is getting when she blames somebody else and change that. For my youngest son it required telling him that whose fault it was, was no longer at issue because he was the one with the problem now. We then focused on solving the problem and avoiding such a problem in future. The fault thing magically went away as soon as whose fault it was became not at all interesting.

The whining is easy. Become partially deaf. You can’t hear whining. At all. Tell her this, that you have terrible hearing problems – you can’t hear whining. It’s the strangest thing but it’s just what happens when you become a mommy. (If you tell her this with a straight face in public you will have to deal with the other moms trying to stifle their laughter). Say it happily. Ask her lovingly to say it again only without whining because you can’t hear her as much as you would love to know what she is saying. Lay this on thick, my kids at least thought it was hilarious and started using it on one another: “WHAT? I can’t Heeeeeeear you”.

You can do all of these things, but don’t expect it to do any good. For one thing, she doesn’t have the ability yet to empathize with other people. So she won’t be concerned about how blame makes others feel. For another, she lacks the ability to have foresight. She can reason out “If I leave the light on, I’ll have to pick weeds later”, but she can’t reason “If I run too fast through the house, I might trip into the wall.” The difference is that the former is a concrete lesson that can be taught and ‘rehearsed’. The latter requires her to reason out things that she’s never previously connected.

As an example, one day at work, Shane (age 3) had his milk cup too close to the edge of the table. I said
“Shane, what do you think might happen if you leave your cup that close to the edge?” Shane stared blankly at me.
I gave a hint: “What happened two days ago when you did that?” Blank stare. He studied my face, searching for an answer in my emotions and expressions, but he couldn’t find one.
“Did the cup fall to the floor?” A subtle nod.
“So what do you think you should do about it?” :confused:
“:sigh: Put you cup in the middle of the table.” He complied quickly, and seemed to wonder why I didn’t just say that straight out.

The problem was that Shane had never connected open milk cup, edge of table, and carelessness with Cup will fall and I’ll make a mess. These variables didn’t mean anything more to him than the fact that the cup was yellow, or round, or it was lunch time, or anything else. Why? For two reasons: His brain isn’t developed enough to think that abstractly, and he hadn’t experienced a spilled cup of milk enough times to notice what variables are associated with it.
So back to your scenario:

She assigns blame to things because it helps her explain the situation to herself. She thinks: “Am I a cookie-dropper? No. Then why did the cookie fall down? Since I didn’t will it, the cookie must have. It’s the cookie’s fault. Stupid cookie!” and she thinks “Since I don’t normally stub my toes on walls, the wall must have desired to be in my way. Stupid wall!”

Now there’s a simpler, more obvious reason this could be going on, as well: Someone in her environment has a habit of blame-shifting. So, seriously, do you or your wife often blurt out things like “Stupid remote control”, “Dumb thermostat”, or “Damn snow”?

To treat the former cause, you have to do two things. 1) Train her to avoid bad scenarios in the first place. Tell her “Don’t run in the house” and “Eat over the table”. Include the consequence you seek to avoid. “…or you’ll fall down.” “…so you don’t drop your cookie on the floor.” 2) Let her grow up. Everyone grows out of this in time. We eventually develop that mental “external view” or situations and act accordingly. This is a common phase, I assure you.

To treat the latter cause, well…that should be obvious. Quit blaming inanimate objects!

Chessic Sense, former preschool teacher.

I have seen a lot of kids do this, too. It’s what I meant by not getting what fault actually means. The thing is, the OP was pretty clear that she is blaming someone else, not something else, and also that her peers have noticed this. This puts it in a different place along the scale, it seems to me.

I think most 4 year olds do not get the connection between their behavior and other people’s reactions (especially other kids’) and I would focus on that rather than on empathy at this moment. Questions about “How do you think that made her feel” are a good long term project, to show kids how you want them to think, but I think your average 4 year old lives mostly in a world of meat puppets and neither knows nor cares how they feel because it obviously does not matter.

But you are blaming her. Just because it’s her fault doesn’t mean she can comprehend that. It’s ridiculously old-fashioned, but I still believe that children can be harmed by having adults repeatedly blame them for things that they are not yet old enough to understand are their fault, which is the OP’s point: teaching the child to understand the connection between her actions and the consequences.

There is no need to blame a child for something she is too young to understand she shouldn’t have done. That merely adds insult to ignorance. Teach the child that actions have consequences first, then teach her that she has to be held accountable.

I interpret the OP as she’s blaming anything and everything…the wall, the teacher, her playmates, the clock, the cookie. The OP says:

I don’t think Stainz meant that the other kids have noticed. I think he/she meant that the child blames her friends, and that hurts their feelings.

It’s not that other kids go “Wow, she blames others a lot”, it’s that they go “Teacher, she says I’m mean, and I’m not!” But this is a very common 4-yr-old thing. My personal nemesis is the phrase “[Do something] or you’re not my best friend anymore!” It’s very hard to combat. This is something that kids must grow out of. It’s impossible to teach empathy to a 4-yr-old. Luckily, she’s right on the cusp of being able to ‘get it’.

Reasoning is not in the cards. Reinforcing the unwanted behavior negatively, and desired behavior positively, is all you can do. Consistency is the absolute key.

First post: “Constant repetitive reinforcement that she needs to take responsibility for her own actions.”

I win the thread. The rest of it is superfluous filler.

As far as whining. . .something that worked really well with all three of my kids (now ages 22, almost-19, and 10) when it came to whining was to say “Oh, my. I can’t understand you when you talk like that. Can you say it differently?”

One thing that helped me was my Mom’s attitude toward the difference between a conscious action and a simple mistake, as we all will make from time to time. Example: I was a bit older than 4, but I dropped a glass and it broke. I was terrified that she would be angry. She helped me clean it up safely and explained that as long as it was just an accident, that it was o.k., but that if I had broken it on purpose or in anger that would be entirely different.

My dad used a different technique for an accidental self-inflicted minor injury, which I copied with my kids and it seemed to work. Child slips and bruises or scrapes her knee. Adult responds, “Hey, what did you do that for? I like that knee!” This accompanied by appropriate washing, etc. as needed.