"You make a mess, you clean it up!" Would you say that to your children? Is this a modern and correct instruction to give? Perhaps it needs only to be considered as a past event and one used in the 1960s in this example as an excerpt from our featured book “Lois and her Irishness” which appears from time to time on these Company Blogs. Our founder of MomsTribute.com, Tom Henn, is mentioned as a young, energetic and playful boy with two of his brothers in this excerpt. It could be that the thought to take from reading this is that Tom has benefitted from the huge input his parents had on his childhood learning. He wrote the words shown below. He was aware of the great gift of loving care that only parents can give. It was not left entirely to others like his school or church or sports coach to completely give him a well rounded education and moral upbringing. With seven children Lois and Bill could be forgiven for offloading some upbringing to other entities but they did not.

The most important element of his later positive well-being may be his reaction to when his mother and father gave him responsibility: “You make a mess, you clean it up.”

“At home Lois and Bill had another policy for education:  'You Make a Mess, You Clean it up!' This taught the young children to take responsibility for their misdemeanors and to acknowledge ownership of the damage and the need to fix it. One such incident was when three of the boys, Don, Tim and Tom, broke a hole in a living room wall with a bowling ball. It was left to them to learn about patching the hole and painting it. First attempt using Encyclopedia Britannica was a failure, but second time was more successful with the help of correct advice from a hardware store assistant. The boys were praised by their father for their hard work. Such was the enlightened discipline and accountability taught by Lois and Bill.”