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![]() Teach Your Child How to Make Good ChoicesAs children grow so do the number of choices they have to make. The choices will begin just as soon as they start school and will continue to grow in complexity as your child matures. What does it take to make a choice? Making a choice takes a balance of self-confidence and the mental ability to think through the consequences of your decision. Therefore, teaching a child to make good choices will benefit them for years to come and will definitely set your child in the right direction. Children should be eased into decision-making at an early age. Below is a breakdown of each age group and the suggested amount of choices that should or will be presented in their lives. Preschool Once your children get the hang of making decisions for themselves, offer them choices that affect the entire family as well. Do you think we should have rice or potatoes for supper? Or which flowers should we plant in the front lawn, the white ones or the red ones? This gives your child the sense of family contribution and self-worth, their opinion is important to the family unit. Main points to address:
Grades K-3rd At this stage of childhood children will make a number of choices that we aren’t happy with or make us turn the other cheek and wonder if that was actually our child. Allow children to make these choices, good or bad, and when the choice comes up that is not so good this is the perfect opportunity to talk about choices with your child. “The choice you made to spit in the house was not an appropriate decision, let’s talk about choices and how they affect you and the people around you.” Main points to address:
Grades 4th-6th Tell your children the truth about a variety of important issues, especially when they ask. Children that feel as though they are being mislead or lied to from their parents, they don’t feel as though they are important enough or not smart enough to handle the truth. Tell the truth about the effects of drugs and alcohol, one hit from certain drugs can kill you or make you addicted, which leads to worse things in your life, etc. Encourage your child to form positive friendships, see How to Form Positive Relationships on this site, children are more than 50% likely to make the same choices their closest friends make, therefore the friends they have and the choices their friends make will make a huge difference in your child’s decision making. One other very important step is to talk to your children about the affects of negative choices and the affects of positive choices, “If Oprah Winfrey never made the choice to go to college she may not be the highest paid woman in television history. EThe more open you are now with your children, the better and stronger the lines of communication when they get to an age where peer pressure, bad choices and the negativity of the teenanage years will be in abundance. Main points to address:
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