Choice
When you consider the amount of choices and potential temptations available to young people in today’s world, the challenges are clear.
Children must learn about choices, options and outcomes and building effective decision making skills early can help children grow with purpose and confidence and build their intuition and empowerment.
Every choice has an outcome and by not choosing, we learn that we are also making a choice. While we can’t choose all the events that happen around us or to us, we can choose how we respond to situations and to the actions and behaviour of other people empowering ourselves to live life full of self-direction, joy and positive focus.
Ideas for applying the PLS Choice concept at home:
• Helping children begin to make their own decisions and problem solve from an early age can really support them throughout their whole lives. How you start is relative to their age. You could start with simple choices of drinks/foods/colours giving them opportunities to choose from 2 or 3 options and then as they develop you can help them to consider the outcomes of each option.
• As children build their ability to make their own choices/decisions you could increase the importance of the decisions they make, e.g., what extracurricular activity they would like to pursue; a choice of times for them to go to bed etc. Everyone wants to feel some autonomy in their lives.
• As they are learning and growing, children lack experience and perspective, so they tend to make impulsive decisions to gain immediate gratification. Discuss what happened as a result of the choice and how they might approach the situation next time and encourage the development of skills to delay gratification.
• When a child has made a choice to act in a way that hasn’t turned out really well, ask them how they could have made a different choice in hindsight. Consider the outcomes of the choice – how might/did others feel? What was the impact? How would the child feel if this outcome affected them? This develops empathy and forethought.
• Ask your child questions prior to them making decisions, e.g., Why is this important to you? How will it help you? How will it help others? This will help your child connect what motivates their decisions and with outcomes.
• You might want to relate current scenarios that are happening around your family to your child to help them build their skills. For example, ‘if that situation happened to you, how do you think you’d respond?’
‘What would you do if your friends were teasing another child or if a friend wanted you to do something that you know wouldn’t have a good outcome?’ Help the child put themselves in the position before they are faced with it.
• Engage in discussions with your child after they have made a decision/choice asking them was it a helpful or supportive decision for them? If so why/why not?
• Children will be faced with conflicting motivations. They may know that doing something might have negative consequences yet they may feel peer pressure to do it anyway. Setting up a well-learned sense of what’s right and wrong and clear consequences can help prevent your child from getting into dangerous situations.