Colman Noctor: Stepping back so our teens can learn how to make decisions

Child development experts believe a gradual transfer of decision-making power from parents to children is better for children than premature independence or prolonged obedience. According to Washington-based child psychologist Shelly Lundberg, the formal reasoning skills needed to consider alternatives develop rapidly from age nine to 15.

At what stage should we start to offer children the opportunity to practice decision-making?

If we consider our lives to be like a novel, with each chapter representing a year of our lives, then the first few chapters have little opportunity for autonomous decision-making. Our parents make most of our choices, such as where we live, what we wear, and with whom we socialise. As we approach chapters nine and 10, we begin to exert preferences. These might include what we want to do for our birthday party, and what clothes we want to wear on a particular day.

The first major decision we are involved in is often our choice of secondary school. In some cases, the child’s opinion may have been taken on board by the parents, but in other cases, they are regarded as tokenistic, and the parents select the school of their choice. (I have met many young people who remain deeply resentful that their school preference was dismissed years after the decision was made.)

Children need to know their views are being heard, and if they are consistently dismissed, this can lead to withdrawal, where they stop voicing their views, or dig their heels in, becoming oppositional.

Wisdom wasted on the old

As the child develops into a teenager, the opportunity to make choices become more plentiful, whether that is choosing what subjects to continue with into second year, what sports they want to play, or what clothes to wear. This is a pivotal time in the parenting journey as we are asked to relinquish some control over our child’s preferences. This can be a significant parental challenge, especially if their preferences are not the same as ours. As a parent with a number of decades of life experience under your belt, you might understandably believe you are best-placed to make these decisions. However, this may not be the ideal approach.

How you communicate with your child about their decisions is critical. If a teenager voices a preference for something you don’t agree with, your response will shape the development of their autonomy. By dismissing their choices as ‘silly’ or ‘wrong’, we invalidate their decision-making process. By not allowing the child to
explain ‘why’ they want to make a certain choice, we silence their ability to articulate a defence of their decisions.

As parents, we can all be guilty of imposing adult expectations on our children. Most of us have heard the saying ‘youth is wasted on the young’, but it might also be the case that ‘wisdom is wasted on the old’. A teenager is not a mini adult. They will have different world views and priorities than their parents, which is how it is supposed to be. Developing good thinking and analysis abilities is a formative skill they need to learn, and you can only teach that by stepping back.

Many successful people say they learned more from failure than they ever learned from success. This is also true for teenagers. Maximising their learning from mistakes and errors of judgement is an important part of that process.

Rachel Busman of the Child Mind Institute suggests that when children fail, parents should validate their emotions — it is disappointing when things don’t work out the way we expected. Allowing our children to make mistakes is counter-intuitive to our parental instinct, but rather than shielding children from difficult emotions, Busman suggests that we use those painful feelings to give children feedback to help them make better decisions in the future. Perhaps our drive to protect our children disables their ability to make decisions at times. If we want our children to grow up to be creative, innovative, and assertive, we need to allow them space to make mistakes during childhood and adolescence.

In my recent work with young adults, I have found many of them to be more reliant on their parents to make decisions than in previous years. It is not unusual to hear a 23-year-old state that they need to “run that past” their parents before committing to a decision. Also, parents seem to have a growing influential role in teenagers’ choice of third-level education, and this further impacts their independence.

Picking battles

The omnipresence of adults at children’s sporting activities may also be having a negative impact on their opportunities to practice decision-making. For example, if children are informally playing a game of football and the ball goes out over the line, with no adult present, the negotiation about which team gets the throw-in is down to the children to decide. This simple example highlights the micro-opportunities for children to master the skill of negotiation, assertiveness, and knowing when to pick their battles.

I am not suggesting that we allow teenagers free reign over all of their decisions, there are times, as parents, we need to give our children what they need instead of what they want. But there may be incidences where compromise is necessary. For example, relenting on allowing your 14-year-old to get a haircut that you think looks dreadful, and he will regret, but holding firm on him continuing to take a science subject into his senior cycle. Or you allow your child to spend time with a peer group that you deem mildly undesirable but put your foot down when it comes to consuming alcohol. The way you pick your battles is an example of good role modelling.

Teenagers need opportunities to make decisions. As parents, we are responsible for offering advice regarding some of their choices, but we need to step back and allow them some autonomy, even if we believe it is wrong. Teens have different priorities than adults. The more we want them to be more grown-up, the more frustrated we may become. While it is tempting to guide our teenagers through most life decisions, we have to ask if we provide them with enough opportunities to work out their decisions for themselves.

The disruption caused by the pandemic, the increased involvement of adults in children’s activities, and the fact that children’s physical social worlds are shrinking, all inhibit the development of their decision-making skills. Be that as it may, as parents, we need to take stock and ask ourselves if our involvement in their decisions may be giving us short-term relief but creating a longer-term problem.