Teaching Your Teen to Make Wise Choices

One of the most difficult things that we do as parents is to teach our children to make more and more of their own choices as they grow up. Sometimes it is easier to just make the choice for the child and hand down the decision. However, this leads to more and more opposition as the child becomes a teen. Even if the parent encounters little overt opposition, the teen is only learning how to be compliant, not how to be successfully independent, because they don't always understand the "why" behind the choice.

Our sons were both such great kids that my husband and I have no room to complain. However, as they got into those adolescent years, I found myself saying "NO!" to an increasing number of, "Mother may I..." questions. My husband was a psychologist and had an Masters Degreee in School Counseling, but when I was one-on-one with the kids, I found I was making too many of their decidions. When I said "No," they knew it was, indeed, no. But I really wanted to have them realize which things were going to be best for them before they even asked me. Because, let's face it, adolescents are away from us more and more. They make a lot of decisions that are a fait accompli before we even know the opportunity was there. It is one thing to sit down after they have made the mess and say (always with great parental patience <lol>), "What could you have done differently?" But I really wanted to know that my boys were making the right decisions in the first place.

As a school principal, I asked repeatedly, "What did you think was going to happen when you did that?" The most common answer was--You guessed it!-- "I don't know." So I began to read up on studies about the brain and how it developed over time. Through a lot of reading (a list of my favorite books on the topic follows this article), I learned that the development of the frontal lobe, "the area in which decisions are made" is not really complete until late teens or, more often, early twenties. A quick fact-sheet summary of the what is known can be found on the National Institute of Mental Health web site, "Teenage Brain: A Work in Progress". The article explains a bit about the brain developing and might help the parent to be a little more understanding of why their teenager can't seem to make better decisions.

But I also learned that just as the brain learns to help us hit the basket more accurately, drive more automatically, and generally improve anything we practice, it will learn to make better choices the more we practice doing it.  How many times have we heard the "old folks" tell us that people should suffer the natural consequences of their actions so they will learn from their experiences?

One day I came up with method to help the brain practice making good choices. We used with our own two sons so that they would get the practice of making better choices. It also taught them to predict which things I would approve. But most importantly, making decisions this way made them feel more in control of their own lives and more responsible for what they were doing. It worked so well at home that I used with hundreds of sixth, seventh and eighth graders in my eighteen years as a middle school principal. I taught many parents with whom I counseled to use it as well.

Have the child fold a blank paper (usually snatched from the printer tray) into fourths, to make four quadrants. Have the child write

• in the top left quadrant: "Where I want to be in 4 years." The number of years can be variable, but it needs to be fairly short term.
• in the top left quadrant: "Where I want to be in 10 years when I am X years old." Again the number of years is variable, but it is important that they put the age. This helps them visualize that there is life after 16!
• in the bottom left quadrant, "What kinds of things might keep me from reaching these goals."
• in the bottom right quadrant, I have them write, "What things should I do to help me reach these goals."

Usually, teens don't have a good handle on long-term goals because of their immature frontal lobe. Most think of a long term goal is 3 or 4 weeks away. Let them think about it and come up with some ideas before you leap to the rescue. I almost always had to provide some guidance for this the goals part. It needs to be meaningful, but they also need to know that the goals may change as they goal. They may want to say, "Be working in some service profession," rather than saying, "Be a nurse."

After the goals are in place, have the child name some things that are commonly done that messed up someone's life. Add these to the lower left quad. It's also important to add to the list some more subtle things that they may not think of: "Choosing a roommate that just wants to party," "Choosing friends that aren't interested in school.", etc.

After this is filled out, explain to them that this is going to be part of their life now. Ask the child which of the bottom squares what he/she did belongs. If it isn't helping them reach the goal, it is keeping them from it. The teen may say, well it won't help, but I can't see how it would hurt. To this you answer, "Anything that isn't helping you become who you want to be is helping you become something you DON'T want to be--therefore it is hurting you."

In our house, we tacked the charts inside a door in the kitchen where we kept the glasses. At school I had the students on this program tape it inside their desktops or place them inside the front cover of their binder. Every discipline or counseling session with either my sons or my students on the program started with, "Where do you think this goes on the chart? And why?"

My sons, who are now 30 and 33, remember this chart well. Even though they didn't have to use the chart for very long, they do remember that it helped shape the way in which they made decisions.

I recommend parents try this the very next time your kid does something that makes you want to slap your head a aske, "What were you thinking?" Let me know how it works!