4 ms·

Parents want their kid to make the right choice when presented with a good and a bad option. In a prefect world you ease a kid into making choices for their li

Parents want their kid to make the right choice when presented with a good and a bad option. In a prefect world you ease a kid into making choices for their life. You explain the pros and the cons of the options and then sit back while the kid - after sitting patiently and listening to the Socratic brilliance of your description of the choice - does what any rational person would do. What's the alternative? You make sure there's never a bad choice possible? Or that there are bad choices but not super duper bad? Like the dirtbike is on the table but you have to wear a helmet? I didn't like being kid but in a lot of ways being a parent is even worse. I'd like them to not be a jerk, stay safe and maybe be happy but I can't and don't want to run their life for them. At the same time I see this combination of brilliance and poor judgement that just makes me feel tired all over. At least being a kid you could (with even the hazy reasoning available to a child) squint and see that the trend line was in the right direction. As a parent every year is worse then the one before it. All I can see for the future is me being more concerned and having less and less capacity to do anything about my worries.

aidenn0 3y ago
I specifically was thinking of multiple-choice options. "Do you want broccoli or ice cream" followed by "Oh, I'm glad you want broccoli" when they pick ice cream doesn't seem like it's useful. At a certain age, they get to the point where you can point out obviously bad consequences and maybe word that as a choice ("wear a helmet or suffer lifelong brain-damage if you fall on your head"), but that's primarily because they understand that you aren't really offering them a choice, and when they don't understand this it just comes off as cruel. If one of my kids picked "lifelong brain-damage" (and wasn't being obviously sarcastic), I would probably respond with something like "when you're 18 you can make that choice, but until then, I'm responsible for taking reasonable precautions against you getting lifelong brain-damage, so wear the flipping helmet" not "I'm glad you decided to wear a helmet" I got the impression from your first comment that it was more like "ice cream or broccoli" and less like "helmet or brain damage" but that may have been a poor assumption. Also, I want to be clear, I called the action "bad parenting" but I don't want to imply that parents who do this are "bad parents" since all parents occasionally do things that are bad parenting. I could make a list a mile long of my less-than-stellar parenting moments, but, on the whole, consider myself to be a good parent.

aidenn0 3y ago

I specifically was thinking of multiple-choice options. "Do you want broccoli or ice cream" followed by "Oh, I'm glad you want broccoli" when they pick ice cream doesn't seem like it's useful. At a certain age, they get to the point where you can point out obviously bad consequences and maybe word that as a choice ("wear a helmet or suffer lifelong brain-damage if you fall on your head"), but that's primarily because they understand that you aren't really offering them a choice, and when they don't understand this it just comes off as cruel. If one of my kids picked "lifelong brain-damage" (and wasn't being obviously sarcastic), I would probably respond with something like "when you're 18 you can make that choice, but until then, I'm responsible for taking reasonable precautions against you getting lifelong brain-damage, so wear the flipping helmet" not "I'm glad you decided to wear a helmet" I got the impression from your first comment that it was more like "ice cream or broccoli" and less like "helmet or brain damage" but that may have been a poor assumption. Also, I want to be clear, I called the action "bad parenting" but I don't want to imply that parents who do this are "bad parents" since all parents occasionally do things that are bad parenting. I could make a list a mile long of my less-than-stellar parenting moments, but, on the whole, consider myself to be a good parent.