One of the most challenging parts of being a parent is learning how to let go. Eventually, your kids are going to be fully independent adults, and part of your job is slowly giving them more and more responsibility so that when the time comes they know how to take care of themselves.

An important lesson to teach them is how to take care of their personal safety and home security. Young people often feel invincible, like bad things only happen to other people. But it is important that they develop healthy and realistic attitudes about the threats that exist in this world, that there really are people who would want to do them harm or steal their valuable belongings.

You can help your child learn how to be responsible in this manner by involving them in your efforts to ensure your home security. This will help them see how important the home you live in is to you, and how much you labor to protect it from intruders and thieves. This is an especially important lesson for kids who grew up in contented, middle class backgrounds to learn, because often they can take these comforts for granted, assuming that everyone grows up with a nice 3-bedroom house and a backyard.

The first way to involve your children in home security is to teach them about answering the door. This is something important to talk to them about once you start allowing them to spend time alone in the house. Criminals often target homes where no adult is present, and while you don't want to scare your child with all of the details, you should emphasize that some people do try to take advantage of the young. Tell them not to answer the door if they don't know who it is at all. Tell them any friends or packages that might arrive while you're not home can wait.

Once they get a bit older, you will probably want to give them a key. While some families bestow keys at a very early age because the child needs to let him or herself in after school, families in which a parent or caretaker is always home may never find it necessary to give a key. But by the time the child is in high school, making an extra copy of the key and trusting your child with it can be a way to establish mutual trust and encourage some responsibility. Tell them about how important it is not to lose the key, and that they should never share it with anyone else, lest they threaten your entire family's personal safety and home security. What's more, if they lose it, then they also lose the privileges that come with it, like letting themselves in the house when no one else is home, or after the parents have gone to bed.

A final way to teach your kids responsibility is to show them how to turn on your home alarm system. This is something you should be doing every night, anyways - why else did you make that investment? - and involving your kids can be a way to keep yourself in check! You can show talk to them about how important it is to set the system every night to protect against robbers and intruders, and show them how to enter in the code. You can even develop a rotation for who sets the home security system every night, and keep track of it like a chore. If your kid slips up, you can remind them about how they've endangered your entire family. This will show them that taking proper precautions is actually very simple. It just requires a little bit of forethought and follow-through.