Have you ever seen a mother instructing her child? Have you heard the clear instructions?
“You have to eat this porridge!”
“You should not be friends with that boy.”
“You look good only in this hairstyle.”
“I told you to wear the yellow top with these jeans.”
“You are allowed to play only at this hour and you are supposed to do your homework now”!
so on and so forth. We all are culprits of our habits. We love to instruct. We love to play the “know it all superhuman” but the truth is that by giving our children such straight instructions, we are doing more harm than good to them.
According to a research, a human mind makes several thousand decisions every single day and some of these decisions are so crucial that they can impact our lives in a huge way. In spite of that, we parents don’t inculcate this habit or the skill of decision making in our children and sometimes sadistically also derive pleasure in the fact that we still decide almost everything for them.
The power of choice is one of the greatest powers given to man but we don’t empower our kids by giving them this great gift. Decision making is a life skill and children can only develop this skill if they are given the choices early in life.
The power of choice, if given early not only equips them with the ability to see and weigh pros and cons of a situation, compare, analyse but also help them greatly with their confidence, which can eventually help in almost everything in their life.
Now before we start giving them this power, we parents should also take care of few things. We need to be a good role model and start taking the ownership of our own decisions before we start expecting them to do the same. Parents who keep regretting their choices or don’t make informed ones, are not really great role models and affect their kids in not really the best ways.
But after all the reading do we really have some concrete ways in which we can start implementing or giving this power of choice to our kids. Yes! So the key for this power shift lies in recognising the type of decisions we make in our lives. Some decisions like where to take the Mortgage from, which job to take up, what investments to make?, these are some big or ‘Macro’ decisions which can only be taken by you however there are some not so important ‘ Micro’ decisions like which movie to watch or how to incorporate five healthy meals in one week, or when to do their homework, making such choices can let your child help get used to the decision making exercise. In fact children can help you in some important decisions too For example, if you are planning to buy a new car or a phone, you can ask for their suggestions but only after they have done all the reviews and analysis of all the products available within your range and this way you not only make an informed choice but also pave the way for your child to do the same in the future.
So as somebody has rightly said, first we make choices and then our choices make us” let’s try to make a good choice today by giving this life skill to our children.
photo credit:www.inspirably.com
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