Every single person should live his or her own life. No one – not even parents – should desire to take this away from someone, because everyone has their own ideas and, especially children, are just naturally curious. This leads to self-discovery at any point and, as a parent, you may not be aware of their actions.

Some may think that  parents make decisions for their kids because they gave up their lives to raise their kids or just simply because parents  want the best for their kids. However, some parents can be a little too overprotective and controlling of their child’s life, and not giving kids some type of opportunity to make their own decisions is not  the best way to protect them. In order for most people to learn, they have to make  mistakes to learn from and decision making is part of this process.

Jim Taylor’s article “Parenting: Decision Making Help Your Children Become Good Decision Makers” states, “When they make a good decision, they can gain the greatest amount of satisfaction and fulfillment because they chose it. When your children make bad decisions, they may suffer for it, but they can learn from the experience and make better decisions in the future.”

As Taylor,  a Ph. D who has worked with many groups and individuals in areas related to psychology, stated, with experience comes education. If you’ve been in a situation where your mom told you not to touch a hot stove, but you’re too curious to listen, you end up touching the stove and burning yourself. Since you burned yourself, you know for a fact no to touch it again, and the curiosity is no longer there.  

As a parent you are understandably just trying to keep your child safe and stop him or her from making mistakes you once made or that you see looming on the horizon, but some people go a little overboard. This manner of taking control of all decisions for a child are problematic. Some parents prefer picking their child’s haircut, extracurricular activity, and clothing, and basically they try to establish their child’s whole personality. However, it doesn’t stop there as some parents go on to take it upon themselves to choose their kid’s career, spouse, and home. This may lead to  young people, and even adults, who are not prepared to make important choices themselves when they have the opportunity or are forced to do so. Providing young people an opportunity to make choices early in life means that, when they are presented the opportunity to make an important choice at a later time, they don’t hesitate and make the wrong choice because they don’t have experience with choices and consequences.

Many parents may wonder why their kids don’t put in any effort to do certain activities. It’s because they truly don’t want to do them. For example, when kids have to do chores, they don’t put in strong effort to do their chores because they simply don’t want to do them. This is the case with most activities that kids do that they don’t want to do.  Personally, as a kid myself, I have a lot of freedom to do as I choose as long as it’s reasonable. I am allowed (or have been?) to make choices on simple aspects of my life, such as choosing my clothes and hairstyles at young ages, as well as making more important decisions in my life like my career and schools. This has helped me understand, that no matter what decision I may choose, it’s always important, especially in the long run then I can learn from them in the future. Of course, certain kids can’t handle having the freedom to choose what they want to do under particular circumstances, like having a car at a young age. If that’s the case, then I feel as though parents should make decisions for their kids, but whenever possible they should allow them some control in the choices and decisions in their lives – if that doesn’t happen then at least until they show that they can handle having freedom again; if that never happens then until they’re 18 or move out.