What do you mean by Choice and Control?
As I pointed out in PART I, a parent’s ability and willingness to control a young child’s environment is absolutely essential for responsible parenting. For the most part, children lack many of the skills necessary to accurately judge a situation in terms of safety and proper behavioral responses. A parent’s experience and mature cognitive abilities form a cocoon around your VERY dependent child. This allows your child to “take risks” and safely explore his world, gradually building up his own experiences and beginning to learn from them. While this process is going on you are providing a “safety net” so that the consequences of your child’s immature grasp of the fundamentals of learning and making new choices springing from those learnings are not too harsh or overwhelming. And, by the way, you will be providing a version of the “safety net” throughout her growing years. Before talking more about this “safety net” (I’ll address this is a future article), let’s re-focus on the reason one needs this safety net in the first place – the development of choice.
Choice is best thought of as one’s ability to focus attention inward rather than depend on information outside oneself. There’s an expression that points out “no one can know you better that you can know yourself.” In a “control-based” system people who are outside of you believe that they need to exert the control and make the choices FOR you. As I pointed out above, children of a certain age need this external control but when a person reaches adolescence the overemphasis of control over choice retards the development of “self” control. This leads your teen to stop paying attention to what they need to do and instead, shift their focus on how to keep from doing what you want them to do. As you might guess, the task of “knowing yourself” gets delayed and even becomes irrelevant. As your teen becomes more adept at “self” control, her choices begin to reflect what she is learning about her “self”. As you can see, then this flows toward more responsibility and accountability. Since a parent can never ultimately be responsible or accountable for your teen, it is clearly to everyone’s advantage to institute a choice-based system in the family.
What is a “Choice-Based System?”
Family life with an adolescent involves, in part, at least, the question of what has my teenager decided to do about this or that? What will he or she pick among several alternatives in a given situation? In a control-based system your teen’s “pick” is supposed to be the correct one according to the adults that are the wise (and correct) guides for their child. In a choice-based system there is no “correct pick” prior to the teen actually picking one thing or the other. The act of picking is the “choice” part of the equation. That choice is almost totally informed by what resides within your teen. How those internal orientations are formed is beyond the scope of this article but I may address this later. For now, suffice it to say, that families that use control-based approaches depend on obedience to teach their teenagers about things like responsibility, whereas choice-based families have respect (not necessarily agreement) for the choices of their children, whatever they may be.
“There’s magic in the doing”
One of the greatest principles brought forth by Morita ( a Japanese – based therapy) is that making a choice and doing what you choose no matter how unsure you are about it will lead you later to a better, more informed choice and, further on, to even more refined choices and subsequent actions. This “doing skill” is best taught in families that support their teen in making choices and learning from them. Control-based systems fail to support decisions and actions that are not “correct”, especially after a person has already been shown “the correct way”. Your adolescent is supposed to think about what is “right and correct” and then make sure he/she does the correct thing even if that decision does not feel right to your teenager.
The disadvantage is that your child never learns to make or trust his/her own decisions in a control-based system.
Does all this mean smooth sailing for us and our teenagers?
I would not hesitate to say that when it comes to relations between teens and parents “smooth sailing” is not a phrase that immediately comes to mind! I have found that in my work with parents it is quite difficult for them to stand by and witness their kids make silly and sometimes perplexing choices. The urge to jump on this is often overwhelming. Parents often ask, “what are my alternatives to just jumping in and correcting the situation?” My response is to use communication with lots of listening as a primary guide point here, because if our kids are to ever learn from and integrate their choices, then these choices should be received as part of them (your child) and parents need to support them in owning what they have chosen.
What we know now
- All families are oriented toward Control or Choice.
- Control is most effective with young children.
- Control merely postpones the adoption of skills such as responsibility and accountability.
- Choice is a lifelong reality, best learned sooner rather than later.
- Giving birth to good choice-making is hard and takes patience.
But my child is making really bad decisions
If you truly believe your child is making unhealthy or dangerous decisions it is important to contact a mental health professional to get support and guidance.
Did you miss the first part of this article?
Click here to read more about choice vs. control.