Parents have an obligation to teach our children how to be accountable and accept responsibility for their actions.

This truth begins as soon as a child is born. There are consequences to certain choices, and the consequence has to be felt - or at least hinted at - before behavioral change can take place. Parents who swoop in to "bail" their child out are only harming the child by depriving them of a learning opportunity. How else will they connect their actions with the repercussions?

As a parent, nothing might be harder than standing by and watching a child make a wrong choice. As the tidal waves of embarrassment, pain, grief, and inconvenience threaten to drown them, our sympathy can sometimes make us lose sight of the fact that our children still need to learn accountability in all areas of life.

Every parent wants to minimize the pain a child faces, but our desire to do so shouldn't trump our mandate from heaven to "train a child in the way he should go" (Proverbs 22:6). To not let them feel the effects of their choices - to an age-appropriate degree - does them a disservice.

When our child sits on the sidelines of a game, we shouldn't teach them to blame the coach. If past a certain age they don't clean up and wash themselves, we don't force them because they need to feel the negative social consequences of poor hygiene. If they get detention at school, we don't accost the teacher in the grocery store.

These types of daily interferences are the easier kind to deal with, but if the action has what we perceive to be a spiritual consequence, it's much harder. Even more so, we don't want to sit back and let them bear what they can bear.

So what can we do? How can we be both comforting and sympathetic to our children as they experience these hardships, especially as they grow older and the consequences grow direr? Here's a few suggestions:

1. Expect and be comfortable with silence. Often times, parents (like some therapists) try to get their children to "talk it out." We demand answers to never-ending questions while they sit there, sullenly looking at us. Sometimes, though, our children just need us to shut our mouths and be there for them. Let them cry and smooth their hair back. Perhaps country music songwriters Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz had it right when they wrote, "You say it best when you say nothing at all."
2. Ask yourself if the consequence is appropriate for your child. Developmentally and emotionally, children are wired to handle stressors differently. Rule of thumb is that the younger the child, the easier it is to know which consequences would be absolutely wrong for them to experience (i.e., walking down the middle of the road). The gray area is when they grow up.
3. Ask yourself what the long-term affect will be if you do or do not interfere. Will your child learn from experiencing the actual threat, or just being faced with the possibility? By interfering, would you be doing your child a favor or a disservice? This one is the toughest calls to make as a parent trying to teach accountability. Best advice I can give is to pray and go with your gut.
4. If you have pertinent life experience, share it, but not in an "I told you so" way. Children respond to disclosure from their parents if and when that disclosure isn't designed to manipulate them into acting a certain way. Make sure you're telling them to grieve along with them or acknowledge their hurt because you yourself experienced something similar, not as an attempt to get them to make the choice you desire for them.

When a child faces learning the lesson of accountability, trust that God will give you the wisdom to know what to do.

Jeannie Campbell is a Christ-follower, wife, mother and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, in that order. She got her masters of divinity in psychology and counseling from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and her bachelors in psychology and journalism from The University of Mississippi. She's a member of the American Association of Christian Counselors and American Christian Fiction Writers. In her spare time, she writes feature articles for magazines and local newspapers and blog posts for The Character Therapist. Email Jeannie.