Responsibility – The Fairhaven Scholarship

Taking care yourself is one thing, but taking care of someone else is a completely different situation. We’ve all gone through a long school or work day without eating. We forget about it. Far too often we think that our health is not nearly as important as a deadline for a paper or a work assignment. That’s not the case when you’re taking care of someone else. When they say “feed me” you respond in a different way.

Now, what if you made the choice to take care of that living creature, and what if there were many of them? Also, think about their ability to survive without your help. Finally, taking all of that into consideration, visualize doing it all for a bunch of kittens. It’s a lot of work, but it is rewarding.

Rewarding in what way? In many ways. You’ll feel great about the work you’ve done, but you’ll also develop new skill sets. Organization, cleanliness and time management are probably the abilities that you’ll build the most, in a short amount of time, but also attention to detail and perception. You’ll constantly be looking out for everything that might be going wrong because their health is your top priority.

Depending on the situation, you might need to be extra careful around them based on their health, and if they’re sick, you might even be responsible for providing them medication. You’ll develop some cooking and scientific ability in that, having to use syringes and mix different combinations of food and supplements. If they’re young and without a mother, you’re going to have to bottle feed them.

Kittens are everywhere and plenty live on the street, needing a good home. I’m not telling you to go out there and find some just to build some new skills, but consider fostering kittens to really give yourself a taste of being an adult. If you can take care of kittens from 2 weeks old to 10 weeks old and find them a home in the process, you have a bright future. Your responsibility level will be through the roof if you do it right.

The Best Ways to Learn About Responsibility series is a way for you to consider how to help individuals develop one of the most important skill sets in the world. Responsibility is a core value that nearly every person and society understands and appreciates. It helps you at home, in school, at work and in public. Being responsible is not genetically passed down from generation to generation; it is acquire through certain experience.

While these would be effective for any individual, this series is catered towards teenagers. Why? They’re at an important intersection in their life where decisions now will make a significant impact on their future. Once you’re officially an adult, many would argue that you’re judged less based on your actions since your timeline is more open. As a teen, there are expectations of when to get a job, when to graduate high school and when to go to college.

Unfortunately, if you lack responsibility, it could throw that timeline off and lead to consequences down the road. And, with that being said, if we know one thing, it’s that time is the most valuable resource in the universe and as of right now, there’s no way to turn back the clock or freeze time. We have to use it while we have it.

Keep an eye out for the first entry in the series where we’ll tackle a very interesting topic, or approach to becoming responsible. It’s outside of the box, but the level of accountability is extremely high so it’s very effective. Stay tuned scholars!