Giving Children the Power of Choice

This week’s thought: the more choices you let your child make, the better off you’ll both be!

How does this work?

If our goal as parents is to raise children that are independent, competent and capable of solving problems, then we need to teach them how to make choices. More importantly, we need to teach them how to make “good” choices – choices that will allow them to lead lives that are rewarding, meaningful and that further their individual potential.

The problems are twofold:

1. It is not always obvious what the “good” choices are.
2. Our children’s “good” choices may not necessarily be “good” ones for us.

Making “good” choices

The ability to make choices hinges on being able to understand given information and evaluate the various options that are available.

The good news is that evaluating information is something that comes naturally to children, they all do it, all the time (e.g. who to play with, what to play with, what to eat or read, etc). The challenge, however, is that most of their decisions are based on short-term gain (which is rarely the kind that result in overall life-enhancement). Our task is to help them  understand how to better evaluate information and make choices that enhance their overall life (e.g. in the long-run vs. short-term).

The is first, a matter of guiding your child through her decision-making process (e.g. your five year-old just sat down and ate all of her Halloween candy in one sitting):

• Why did you do this? (because I like candy)
• Why did you have to do this now or in this way? (because I didn’t want my brother to eat it; because I had it with me; because I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow)
• What actually happened and is that what you intended? (I got a stomach ache)
• What other things will happen as a result of this choice? (I might get sick; I might get a tooth ache; I won’t have any candy left for tomorrow)
• Would there have been a better option? (…)

This is not to say that your 5 year-old will all of  a sudden know not to eat all of her Halloween candy in one sitting (as I noted before, rarely will anything we do as parents have immediate results, what is important is that we start building positive and constructive habits) but it will start teaching her how to think through her decisions and about the effect of her choices.

Second, we need to allow them to make mistakes. It is through the failings in their decision-making process that our children will most acutely feel the effect of their choices.  Thus, we need to let them make “bad” choices. I don’t mean dangerous or life-threatening choices; rather, the I-ate-too-much-candy type of choices, those that will impact them (and perhaps even you) in an adverse – although not serious – way.

Central to this, however, is that once they’ve made these “bad” choices, we talk through them and help our children understand why the situations turned out the way they did and what would have been a more productive way of handling it.

By the way – negotiations are an excellent way for children to distinguish good from bad choices.

Making “good” choices for us

Unfortunately, not all of the “good” choices that our children make will end up being “good” choices for us. In other words, we won’t always get our way. For what it’s worth, that’s a small price to pay for teaching  our children how to be capable problem-solvers.

But I won’t leave you with just that. Here’s a little work-around: when we give our children choices (and we should give them choices often), we don’t need to give them the sky. What we do is we present them with options, options that are real choices for them (enticing enough to be worth considering) but also workable solutions for us. Then, we give them a choice.

For instance, the Negotiator needs to practice his violin but he doesn’t want to stop playing Wii. I can fight with him and tell him that he needs to turn of the Wii right now and play the violin but it will probably result in a very unproductive violin practice (which ultimately defeats my goal). So, I give him some options:

(a) you can play for 5 more minutes but then you need to stop and practice, no matter what.

(b) you can stop now and practice the violin, after which you can resume your Wii game for 10 minutes.

In both instances, we both get what we want but he also gets to make a choice.

What I like about this approach is that it gives him ownership over his decisions, his actions and the consequences; it allows him to start distinguishing what is a “good” choice from a “bad” choice on his own (as opposed to hearing it from us); and it gets him in the habit of thinking through his choices before he makes them.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Also, if you like this post, please share it!

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DID YOU KNOW: this is an excellent way to empower children and to develop their multiple intelligences (especially their linguistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and logical-mathematical intelligence).

About the Author: Karla Valenti blogs about parenting on Tot Thoughts, is founder and CEO of NiSoSa (developing resources to empower children through creativity), Creative Director for Rock Thoughts (a global art and collaborative storytelling initiative), and does creative writing as herself and as Nico, a fictional character and host of Nico Knows (creative writing for kids).

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