family life | F E AT U R E
Helping Kids Learn to Make Good Decisions written by Christa Melnyk Hines
Ever looked at your child in bewilderment and asked: “What were you thinking?!” Then you know that kids, especially teens, can make some profoundly poor decisions. Luckily, we can help them learn smart decision-making skills and manage mistakes—without helicoptering their every move.
BLAME BIOLOGY. “Understand that your kids aren’t just being stupid and emotional about things. The adolescent brain is very uneven. Some parts of the brain are very adult in their structure and function while other parts are very immature,” says pediatric psychologist Stephen Lassen, Ph.D. The prefrontal cortex of the brain, which handles decisionmaking, isn’t fully developed until around the age of 25. Given the number of decisions kids must make as they move into early adulthood—college, houston family magazine
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October 2020
career, relationships—this “makes for a challenging environment for parents,” Lassen says. While we can’t manipulate biology, we can take steps to nurture thoughtful, independent decision-making.
GIVE CHOICES FROM AN EARLY AGE. Prime the decision-making pump beginning in toddlerhood. Offer your child simple choices that you can live with like: “Would you like to wear the red shirt or the yellow
shirt?” “Would you like to take a bath before or after dinner?” “Giving options like that not only helps them start to think through decisions, make decisions and accept consequences of those decisions, but it also sends the message that kids can do it, which tends to build selfconfidence,” Lassen says.
OFFER AGEAPPROPRIATE DECISIONS. You know best what decisions your child is ready for based
on past history, development and personality. But in general, experts say that teens are ready to choose their own friends, their after-school activities, clothing and hairstyles, and the type of summer job they’d like to get. “Those are totally appropriate decisions for teens to make that don’t have an impact on their safety or potential for a significant long-term consequences,” says pediatric psychologist Christina Low Kapalu, Ph.D. “When decisions do involve their safety or potential for significant
