Friday, November 16, 2012

How to Help Kids Make Decisions

Letting kids make their own decisions was something I thought was easy to do, show them their choices and go from there! Right? Nope, it can never be that simple! 

 Telling a kindergartener to go to their closet and pick out something to wear isn't as easy for them as it is for us. Actually, it's as frustrating for everyone and teaching the kids to make a decision early in life helps with the bigger decisions later.

 I take only two outfits out for them to choose from, if they really wanted to wear something that wasn't my idea, I take the third item out and only hold two of them up. The kids pick one of the two, the one they don't want goes back in the closet. Then I take the last two outfits and hold them up. The one not chosen goes back in the closet and even if I don't like an outfit or think they should wear something else,they feel like they have done something important for themselves. 

The older the kids get, the bigger the decisions get. They love choosing what to get to pack their lunches with but tend to want everything instead of a just a few things. I help them with the process until they are old enough to understand that they can choose one kind of cookie instead of four kinds of cookies for their lunch. They have to choose something healthy and what kind of lunch meat they want. Lunch box or paper bag. 

Later the bigger decisions start coming and they seem to know what they want and know how to make a better decision instead of them getting frustrated and saying "I don't know what I want!" and just going along with someone else's choices that might be bad for them.

No comments:

Post a Comment