Putting Your Child in the Driver's Seat: Why Choice Matters
By Taylor Levesque, MA
Associate Manager, Child Services
Sweet or savory? Mountains or beach? Life is full of choices…some easy, others not so much. Here at Aspire, we leverage choice as a tool to help participants build skills and succeed.
Choices come in many forms in our Aspire programs. From a young age, Child group participants are choosing what activity they’d like to engage in for Free Choice Time while preteens are working together in Hangout Hub to choose how to spend their weekly group budget. At Aspire’s Adventure Camp on Wednesdays, you’ll see campers of all ages walking around the site choosing an activity for their afternoon “Choices” block (extra fishing, rock painting, or a mushroom scavenger hunt?). In Teen and Young Adults programs, Explorations participants are collaborating to choose the next session’s field trip location while Dungeons & Dragons group members choose where to lead their party’s adventure (the dwarven mines or a side quest to the goblin encampment?).
Participant and group choice is prioritized in all we do here at Aspire; but why does choice matter? Allowing children, teens, and adults to make choices in their daily lives builds skills that can be generalized to a host of environments and situations. Participants exercise foundational self-awareness (what are my interests? Ideas? Preferences?) and practice making decisions when given choices. They build self-advocacy skills when provided the opportunity to share what they want and the reason why. All these proficiencies translate into marketable leadership qualities as participants grow older and take new steps in their education and careers. Furthermore, feeling empowered to make choices for oneself only further boosts feelings of confidence and self-efficacy. One other positive outcome of giving choices? When children and teens feel a sense of agency (read: control), their motivation often increases. For example, when we have a child feeling “stuck” on a less-preferred activity at social group, we will collaborate to give them choices about how they want to participate (do you want to play on a team with staff or do you want to be the judge for the first 2 rounds?); this opportunity for choice is often enough to “unstick” even the most rigid of thinkers and create buy-in for activities that may feel less-than-interesting.
How can caregivers build choice into their home routines and environments? Consider the following tips and tricks:
- Make choice a regular occurrence – provide structured choices where and whenever possible in your home (“Will you do homework before or after eating your snack?” or “What book would you like to read before bed?”)
- Be realistic when giving choices – make sure to provide choices only when choices are actually available; certain tasks, chores, and routines are not choices, but we can provide choice around how and when to do them (“Would you like to brush your teeth now or in 5 minutes?”)
- Limit available choices – too many choices (or unlimited choices in the case of open-ended questions) can feel overwhelming and anxiety-provoking for many; instead of offering 10 choices for weekend activities try giving 2 or 3 (“Would you like to go to the park or visit the library today?”)
When in doubt, don’t forget to collaborate with your child and encourage them to join you in the driver’s seat. Happy choosing!