by Hannah Macfarlane

Created on: February 10, 2009

Life necessarily involves choice: which lifestyle, which career, which partner, which priorities... We all make thousands of decisions over the course of our lives. Some of these decisions are based on deep-rooted beliefs and form the larger building blocks of our life story, some are made continually on a day-to-day basis but may still affect our health, wealth or happiness, and others are genuinely trivial with short lived and insignificant outcomes. Some decisions are hard to make and may take much time, soul-searching and energy. Others are made in a heartbeat, with barely a conscious thought given to them. But, whichever type they are, choices have to be faced, and like it or not, the choices we make and the way we handle them define the people we become.

Children therefore need to be given choices. It's not a question of what is preferable. Children are either given choices, or human nature will lead them to find choices they can make for themselves anyway, often with consequences they had not foreseen and may not be able to fully control. This can be scary and potentially dangerous and can leave the child afraid to face decisions again or incapable of making effective ones. It could be the beginning of a loss of control over the direction of their life. Those given the opportunity of appropriate choice have two major benefits. The first is the development of self-worth, allowing them to trust in their judgements, make increasingly tough decisions and, crucially, to accept the outcome of the choices they have made. The second is the development of mutual respect between themselves and the parent or carer who has allowed them to learn the skill, allowing the supportive relationship to continue longer and to be more meaningful.

The skill of making decisions can be taught from a very early age. It is important for young children to learn that there are choices to be made, but also that choices have consequences which can be either desirable or undesirable. In order to learn this, children must be given genuine choice with real consequences. Unfortunately, the first example of choice many children learn takes a similar form to "put on your coat or get back inside", a choice which is given to manipulate the child's behaviour and achieve a predetermined outcome. This is not real choice. The child is strongly biased, not allowing them to make a judgement for themselves, and has no positive outcome. The child either wears the coat reluctantly, or retreats bitterly

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