If you don’t choose, someone else will do it for you
Recent social events have highlighted the deep divisions in our society. Yet, as ironic as it sounds, a sizeable minority did not exercise its right to choose; leaving a very slim majority to decide on a significant course of event that will have impact to us all for years to come.
We were at a fancy restaurant having a fancy dinner when the fancy waiter suggested to my daughter a soufflé for dessert. But it had to be ordered ahead of time. For one reason or another, she had something else in mind and declined. Dinner came and went and when she decided she wanted to try the soufflé for the first time, not only had she missed the requisite pre-order, the kitchen had run out of the ingredients to make it. She was very disappointed and wound up settling for another dessert.
The opportunity to recover from this decision is based on my willingness to take her to another fancy restaurant in the future. She assured me that she would order dessert first next time. She also realized a very important lesson in that if she didn’t make a decision, she could wind up without a choice.
Making choices shouldn’t be based on an Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe rhyme, but rather deliberate and maturing thought processes.
At this age, children need the opportunities to make decisions and to see what consequences flow out of those choices. My daughter has had many disappointments in this area. She’s didn’t get first picks on her colored jell-o dessert. She forgets her jacket so I wound up picking a rarely worn one from the closet, one she doesn’t like. She’s had to fall in line to play a game her friends had already started. And so on. When things don’t go her way, she has to adapt and develop new strategies. She learned that there are consequences to taking time to deliberate unnecessarily. So, she’ll have to find friends, form alliances, negotiate and trade up. All of these are very useful social skills. Obviously the challenges have to be quite benign and easily recoverable so they incrementally gain experience and successes. Making choices shouldn’t be based on an Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe rhyme, but rather deliberate and maturing thought processes.
As my daughter engages in a game of ‘truth or dare’ with her friends at school and they explore the relationships between words and actions, I hope that she continues to hone her skills so that these games do not evolve into ‘spin the bottle.’ My hope is that she grows up to make increasingly better decisions on her own rather than rely on the random dictates of things and of others. I also hope that if my daughter decides not to make a decision, it is not because of indecision or a lack of opportunity; but one of decided action not to act and that she is truly okay with whatever outcome emerges.
Perhaps if each of us had more practice and truly thought about the consequences we wish to live with, the current events would have been decided more convincingly to all parties.