Use Choices to Help Your Kids Make Decisions
These parenting tips will help your child learnhow to make decisions through choices. Our parenting expert, Kathy Slattengren, will offer 5 ways, 5 wording choices to use, and 5 examples. By the time you finish reading this article you'll have all the decision-making tools you'll need.
"Providing Control through Choices
One of our parenting goals is to ensure our children have solid decision-making skills and are prepared to make serious decisions by the time they are about 12-years-old. This is critical because when our children become teens, they will start making serious decisions when we are not around.
Choices Allow You To Share Control with Your Children
By giving children lots of choices when they are young, they'll be practicing making decisions and anticipating the consequences of those decisions. Many parents also find that children are more cooperative the more choices they've recently been given.
Using Choices to Give Children Control
1. Only give choices you are comfortable with.
2. Do not give choices that could hurt or irritate someone.
3. Make sure you are willing to let your child live with the consequences of their choice.
4. Use choices that are not threats in disguise.
5. Do not give choices when children are in danger.
If children do not choose fairly quickly, make the choice for them. This gives children an opportunity to make a decision within a reasonable amount of time.
Wording Choices
These ar a few ways you can word choices:
1. Which would you like most______or______?
2. Would you prefer_____or______?
3. You are welcome to______or_____.
4. You can choose to_____or_____.
5. Do you wwant______or______?
Here are some examples of turning commands into choices:
1. Command - Go take your bath.
Choice - Do you want to take your bath upstairs or downstairs.
2. Command - Do your homework.
Choice - Which would you like most: doing your homework before dinner or after dinner?
3. Command - Get dressed.
Choice - Would you prefer to get dressed at home or at preschool?
4. Command - Go practice the piano.
Choice - You are welcome to practice the piano with the door shut or the door open.
5. Command - Brush your teeth.
Choice - You can either brush your teeth or ask me to brush them for you.
Parenting Action Step:
Try giving your children lots of choices and write them down some of the choices you gave them. pages" 19-20
Kathy Slattengren knows how to break parenting concepts into bite-size pieces. She is a well-sought-after speaker, teacher, author, and coach. Her book, Priceless Parenting Guidebook: Ideas for Handling Everyday Parenting Challenges is available on Amazon.
Let's give THANKS to Kathy for sharing her step-by-step parenting tips. Now we have the tools for teaching the best ways to make decisions.
Kathy Slattengren, M.Ed.
Please connect with Kathy at Priceless Parenting
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What are your opinions about this blog post or your suggestions for helping kids learn how to make decisions? Please answer in the comment link below. We want to hear from you.
With warm wishes,
Jean Tracy, MSS
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