Tara's Take - Parenting, Education & Life With Kids

Giving Children More Choices Might Make Your Power Struggles Worse

February 27, 2023 Tara Gratto M.S.Ed, MA, OCT Episode 34
Tara's Take - Parenting, Education & Life With Kids
Giving Children More Choices Might Make Your Power Struggles Worse
Show Notes Transcript

"When there's power struggles over choices, it's often a sign that our children (and sometimes us) can't handle the uncomfortable feelings that go with those."

If you've found yourself following the advice about giving children more choices and discovered this only worked for a short period of time, or possibly never worked at all this is the episode for you.  

In this episode I dig into the idea that giving more choices probably isn't the solution to your underlying problem and how brain science isn't being applied consistently to explain children's behaviour.

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The music for this podcast is written and produced by Jazlyn B with the guidance of Sabine Ndalamba

Note: This podcast is created for educational purposes only. Any references links, resources or content are not intended as a substitute for medical or professional mental health advice.

*this transcript has not been edited for accuracy*

Tara Gratto  0:00  
When there's some power struggles over choices, it's often a sign that our children and sometimes us can't handle the uncomfortable feelings that go with those. 

Tara Gratto  0:10  
Hello and welcome. I'm Tara, the founder of raising resilient children. As a longtime educator, former preschool owner and parent, I have been working with caring adults and children for over 20 years. In that time, I've been asked a lot of questions and provided a lot of support and feedback. Through this, I built a system for navigating the hard and messy parts of parenting with clear paths that will support you and your unique family's needs. My expertise is in social emotional well being and I'm a big fan of using picture books. I even wrote one to support teaching children about emotional regulation called The Adventures of Team Brain. I know there is no cookie cutter approach to parenting and the information can be overwhelming. Let's tackle some of this by having some important conversations and digging into some different topics. 

Tara Gratto  0:56  
Today's episode, I'm gonna be talking about children and choices. It's a topic that's been coming up a lot. I mentioned it in my podcast episode with Tara Stewart, about how I would sort of dig into another layer around choices. I wrote a blog on this topic a little about a year ago. And one of the things that I found in the work that I'm doing is that when we have sort of information around giving children choices, and what that looks like, it can really help us navigate some of the more trickier moments in parenting. So the blog I wrote was called are we giving children the right kinds of choices? Because one of the most challenging things I see on social media is advice around managing tricky situations by giving children more choices. So this advice is presented in a way that simultaneously says things like children don't have fully formed prefrontal cortexes. And they really struggle with navigating things like executive functioning. So that's the front of your brain that's responsible for planning decision making emotional regulation, right? Handling disappointment, understanding how to make choices, sort of all kinds of layers, and the more we know about executive functioning, and the prefrontal cortex is that it's, it's a long trajectory for growth, right, we're looking at that not being fully developed until into our 20s. So when we're thinking about that, as a skill building process, very young children definitely aren't on that trajectory. So we're thinking about something that takes 20 years to develop there in the very early stages of development. So I find this advice really contradictory. And, you know, at the root of the strategy is that it's teaching you to avoid power struggles. And anytime we avoid something, the truth is, we aren't building skills. And when you're not building skills, it often comes back to bite you. And this is where I get a lot of phone calls. And people will say things to me, like I've been doing XYZ and I'm exhausted, and I'm constantly losing my cool. My child is now physically too strong for me, my child has started to refuse going to school, my child won't eat anything. So I'm making three separate meals, right? This idea that we've given so many choices from such a young age, that kids think everything is a choice, and the reality of the world is you and I know, that's not actually true. But when you're being taught that as sort of the truth of your world, you do think everything's a choice. So one of the things I put out into the world is the idea that the solution to your power struggles is actually not giving more choices. It's fostering an understanding of when children can make choices. And when adults need to make choices and why those two things are actually quite distinct. Because at the core, at the core of this concept is that giving children choices is really important. I don't disagree with that part of the advice. However, how we do it is equally important. So one of the things that I'm noticing in sort of the messaging that's out there, and sort of I talked about this in my my episode on a cautionary tale, how parenting advice is really driven by marketing, fast fixes, right, we are a fast fix culture. So people who are giving advice are trying to grab your attention by giving you a fast fix so that you can feel that quick win. However, there's a lot of nuance missing. And one of the nuances missing from giving children choices, is that a lot of the sort of advice around giving choices isn't age appropriate. Or we're giving so many choices, simply because we live in a highly consumer driven society that we can't sort of function I mean, the amount of choices we have, even as adults in the world right now it bogs down most people. And one of the things we don't have to look too far to realize is that choices are a part of every single element of our routines. And when we look at Children's route routines, that translates to too many choices, sort of sort of information overload if you will, right, we have different colored plates. and cups, we have multiple shoes, we have clothing with sparkles and flippy sequins. We have hair clips for every season, there's macaroni or spaghetti there strawberry or raspberries, there's bagels or toast, there's this kind of milk of that, right? You can think of all the endless choices that are available, because our world has access to so much more than it ever did. Now, is that translating into supporting children where they're at developmentally? No,

Tara Gratto  5:29  
that's the answer. The answer is no, we are so overwhelmed by choice that we can't really function. And one of the things that research shows us is that with more choice, people actually become more frustrated with the decision making process. And they're less inclined to follow through with the decision and therefore less satisfied with the choices they finally opt for. That recommend, he shared that in her article about realizing when she was giving her young child too many choices, it was actually backfiring. And she shared that in today's parent. Now, this research doesn't just apply to children. Imagine how it's playing out for children who don't have that fully formed brain capacity I was talking about. And yet, here we are applying sort of the choice theory to everyone. So this research is actually applying to adults. Now imagine how it's playing out for children who don't have fully formed brain capacity for making decisions just yet. Right? They're still early in that 20 to 25 year trajectory. And there is some new research that I will dig into in another episode about toddlers and play, they've actually done some studies to show that the more children are exposed, the more toys children are exposed to and the types of toys actually limits their ability to play, which is something I've been seeing for over 10 years, I've been seeing this for as long as I've worked with in the early years and been supporting parents, the more toys children have, the more layers of toys, the less likely they can play independently, the less likely they can clean it up. There's all kinds of layers here that I've talked with Tara steward about in some of our in our Facebook live in an hour podcast episode last week. So there's a lot of layers here. But one of the things I do want to share is how consumerism has actually complicated the idea of giving children choices. And that's actually a big part of what's making your life harder. So a part of what's happening, maybe you're not aware of it. And so therefore, I want you to step back a bit so that you don't have so much guilt, so much parent guilt around this. Because one of the things I think is we're giving children more choices that are not age appropriate because of this consumerist culture, we are living in a world that has so much option that we don't know, unless you're an educator, and you have a lot of experience working with children, you're not going to know what's developmentally appropriate, because I can tell you, the world is telling you, your child, it can do a lot more than they can or should have to do. And there's also a real big connection between us thinking that what we expose our children to will have lifelong success and the sort of the data and research is coming out of Europe has said, we actually do way too much too young, that we shape play a certain way that we're exposing children that we're over programming them, and that in terms of long term trajectories, that's actually not supporting them with life success. So I think another sort of piece of this is that there's a huge trend in the world, especially on social media. And I like to use social media, as an example in some of my podcast episodes, because I know it's, it's out there, and everybody's exposed to it. And one of the things about being on social media is it's not going to go away. So you can't just like turn it off and walk away from it. But I think it's so important to be understanding of what's happening, and how the marketing is sort of setting into your brain. So there's this huge I see this code all the time, be the parent you needed as a child. And it's a quote that frustrates me actually quite a bit. Because what it says and what it means and how it's taken, are not exactly sort of missing the nuance, right? So I see it playing out all the time with families that I work with, I didn't have choices as a child, and I'm not going to do that to my child. So in some cases, the reason you might not have been given choices is because there weren't as many choices to be given only multiple pairs of shoes and a plethora of shirts, it's actually a product of fast fashion. And it has nothing to do with the choices people had as children. But underlying a lot of the advice out there is that people can afford to give their children more choices, versus understanding what might be developmentally appropriate. So this really highlights for me that because of consumerism, children have all these choices. And one of the ways we avoid having conflict with our children is by giving them choices, choices about what to wear choices about what to eat choices about what to play with. And in many cases, it may fix it in the moment, maybe maybe, but in the bigger picture, the number of people that tell me about they're getting dressed for school battles, and their food battles and all that those things, when I sort of dig into those, one of the things I discover is, it's children who have so many choices that they truly do feel that everything is a choice. And the reality of the world is not everything is a choice, right? Not everything is a choice. So where's consumerism? clouding our parenting? Okay. So now that there's a little bit of like the why, let's get into, like, what can you do about it? So, as you're thinking this through and thinking, Well, I do want to still give my child choices. And I don't want to be that sort of strict, rigid parent who doesn't offer choices. I think the theme that I'm trying to sort of give here or dig at is let's stick to age appropriate choices. Let's try to, you know, build some developmentally appropriate choices, and build them up slowly. build them up slowly over time, right? You have 20 years. And if people like, what, 20 years, I know, it gives people a little bit of like heart palpitations when I share that stat. But I think it does also help us understand that we don't have to have our children ready for life by five, right? That's not when we need to have our children ready. We don't need to push their learning trajectories so steeply so early. So if we're building up our choices with children, slowly, instead of giving multiple choices a day, we can start small and build up. Right. So the idea is to avoid children thinking they have choices about absolutely everything. Because that's where the problems really start. And if we were to like, sort of dig into the next layer, for example, one of the things that used to come through my world quite a bit is like struggles over more uncomfortable things like snow suits, and mittens, and what to wear to school and all those kinds of things. And people are like, Why was giving choices because I didn't want to be strict, right. And the issue isn't about being sort of rigid as a parent, it's understanding that children can't make that many or type of decisions, when they don't have the skills for it. And at that age and stage, they literally need your help, it will actually bring calmness. So if you're solving conflict, or trying to avoid disagreements, or you know, the power struggle, and all those kinds of things, there's some another layer that you need to be working on versus giving more choices. So one way that we tackle this is by aiming to provide a more balanced to our approach. And to do this, we need to think of ourselves as guides. And I talked about this a couple episodes, when I was talking about how do you like foster connection, and I talked about like parenting mindset around friend versus guide. That's a really helpful sort of mindset to help you with this strategy. Right? When we're a guide with experience and knowledge. And we have that fully developed prefrontal cortex, right, we have higher levels of executive functioning skills than our children, it's our job to slowly help them build their decision making skills in age appropriate ways. You can still validate children while supporting the idea that children do not have the same level of knowledge experience or problem solving skills that are required to make decisions about a lot of things. This is also an example of where picking and choosing when brain science applies can be super problematic, right? We can't in one hand, say children have big feelings, and they don't have the emotional regulation capacity for it. But let's give them a whole bunch of choices, right. And one of the interesting things about choice overwhelm is that it's highly anxiety inducing. Like if you think about Netflix, I like to use Netflix or the ice cream parlor, right? Where there's all the things on the on the wall, or all the things on the screen, and you can't decide what to pick, because ultimately, you're in the back of your mind worried that whatever you pick won't be the best choice. And so when you're standing in front of the ice cream, and there's like 40 flavors on the wall, it is super hard to isolate it down to one. And if you're a child, you might be going into freeze frame. I know adults go into this too. And then when they leave after finally deciding and maybe having a meltdown before they decided they are having another meltdown because they wish they'd gotten the strawberry instead of the chocolate. So this is an example of choice overwhelm, and how it's related to anxiety and worries and stress. Right. So this idea that having more choices isn't actually potentially helpful is actually potentially harmful. And as one of the most anxious sort of generations in history, I think it has a lot to do with how many choices we have every day related to access versus, you know, what we actually need where we actually need to have. So how do we foster some age appropriate choices? So what do we do? How do we solve this problem? So when you're thinking about how to foster some age appropriate choices, think about things that you wouldn't typically have to say no to, or things that aren't going to have an impact on health, well being physical safety, right. You're in your mind as you're sort of problem solving through age appropriate developmentally appropriate choices. One of the things that can be a really helpful guide is If I don't need to have an input here, or I don't have to sort of sway the decision heavily, this is probably a great developmentally or age appropriate choice. Right? So for example, with young children things like what crayon to use, what toy to play with what book to read what song to listen to.

Tara Gratto  15:20  
I know a lot of people want to know about clothes, because it's probably one of the biggest topics that comes through my world. What do we do about clothing? And how do we give choices there? So one of the things that we want to really sort of build into this is being really intentional about our language, in about the amount of options we do provide, for example, you might want to consider giving a choice between two, whether appropriate tops or bottoms versus the entire drawer or closet, right, that's that ice cream parlor example I was just talking about, when you have too many choices, you actually can't isolate one easily. Because you get stressed you get overwhelmed. And I talked about this in teen brain, right? Freeze. That's freeze brain, that's a freeze brain reaction. And as you're building this in, you're going to want to use language to support why you chose those tops so that you're building knowledge for the future, right? Today, you can choose between the pink sweatshirt or the blue sweater because it's chilly. Which one would you like? And sometimes people will say to me, Well, what if they don't want either of those? Well, that's where we have to problem solve feelings. That's where we have to problem solve disappointment, frustration, annoyance, because the two options available are these two, not the third option. Right. The third option is just entering into a debate, a power struggle, right? disappointment, frustration, but when we are empowering children with age appropriate choices, we in our adult brain know that two choices is all they can handle. And the third choice is because they're uncomfortable, they're annoyed, they're frustrated, they don't have to like our decisions all the time, right? That's okay. That's where we're actually opening space for feelings and saying, You don't have to like your two choices, but you do have to pick one of them. Right? And that's where we support the feelings part. The validating? Yes, it's very annoying. But the two options today are right. This is an example of how we start to build a foundation for children to make decision versus, you know, giving them the whole sort of sphere of, of clothing choices. And the idea here is that by picking clothing, they'll start to learn how it looks, how it feels, what it's for, and things like that. So one of the things that I just touched upon is, well, what about the power struggles? What about the power struggles that have never really come out of some of these situations? One, you're gonna have less power struggles if you're consistent on your messaging around choices. So if you start to get clear on things like I know which choices are say no to and which ones I am making, without realizing that I'm not actually giving a choice, automatically, some of your power struggles are going to go away. The other thing is, when there's some power struggles of our choices, it's often a sign that our children and sometimes us can handle the uncomfortable feelings that go with those, like disappointment, like frustration, like not being in control, right. So one of the things that they say is, when kids don't like not being interested in control, none of us like that. Right? None of us like not being in control. But it is a skill that we have to be okay with sometimes, sometimes we have to understand that we have to follow directions, we have to do what other people need us to do, right. That's part of collaboration, part of teamwork, there's some other things that are happening here. And it can be annoying and frustrating. It doesn't mean that we change the fact that there's no choice in the matter, right? That doesn't, that's not what needs to change, we need to validate that, that annoying feeling that frustrated feeling that out of control feeling. That's what actually we need to build tools for. Because you can't always change the way things go in life. Right? You can't always change the trajectory, the path. Sometimes you just have to be able to handle the thing that's being dealt at you now, what is the purpose of what I do here at raising resilient children? It's to say, okay, in previous generations, we didn't validate the feelings, we told you to suck it up, we told you, right? So instead of the situation I'm describing now, it'd be like, you're gonna wear the pink sweater, I don't care what you have to say about it, you're just gonna do it. And if you start to have a meltdown, you know, baby, only babies cry, there's, I mean, you can all imagine all the things that happen. So what I'm saying here is, yes, we're going to limit our choices. And in moments when we're not giving choices, we're just going to validate the feelings because that's the part that's missing from the previous generations. You weren't allowed to feel frustrated, you weren't allowed to be disappointed. You had to suppress that. Now, without building tools for those feelings, they get out of hand. There is no if ands or buts about that when we don't actively build tools for uncomfortable feelings like frustration and anger, disappointment, right? Those reactions, those dyno brain reactions are hitting and kicking and screaming and, you know, meltdown level crying, right? That is what we do when we don't build tools. So if we don't start to build tools with young children, so they get good at handling those difficult feelings. That's why when you get to five, six, and you're beginning choices about things, and then suddenly you really can't like school is not a choice. And suddenly, you're against a wall, because you're like, oh, goodness, I can't convince my child to go to school. And I see this quite a bit. Five to eight year olds, who believe places like school are a choice, because they've always had so many choices. And their little brains don't understand why you've changed the rules. Everything's always been a choice. So this is why I talk about how important it is to understand what's under the power struggle, what's under the conflict, and giving more choices is probably not your solution. Instead, we want to validate those uncomfortable feelings, and actively build tools for that. And this is what I do in my br TK bundle, we spend time learning about how do we do that? How do we do that in common connection? What does that process look like? Because it is a process and a journey. It doesn't just happen overnight. Breathing isn't the only tool. It's not the most effective tool sometimes, actually. So that that part of the power struggle dynamic is something we have to build skills for. Right, that's our social emotional skills. And that's the difference between what's happening in today's world, versus what happened before before you just were told to suck it up, and you listen to adults. But what we have to strike a balance for here is, hey, I'm a caring adult who has my fully formed prefrontal cortex, I need to limit your choices so that you're less anxious about choices. And you also don't learn that you have choices about everything. Because in life, we don't have choices about everything. But I want to validate those feelings, I want to let you have those feelings. And we got to use some some constructive tools for those feelings, because not every feeling can end up in a meltdown, or hitting or biting or yelling, or whatever the thing is, right. And that's the process that I was talking about that I teach in the VR TK bundle. That's the process of building tools for feelings. How do we do that? What does that look like? How do we make it fun and engaging, because nobody likes doing boring stuff on there, too. So as I was sort of, as I round out this episode on choices and thinking about fostering the importance of choices, but thinking about it on a much larger, longer trajectory than my child needs to have this choice to avoid the feelings that I don't want to see. Or I want my child to feel more empowered than I did, or whatever the reason is, let's take a couple steps back and say, Okay, this is actually a 22 year trajectory, and sort of as they are going through their teen years, that's when I want to give them a different kind of choice where they're gonna play with it and make different kinds of mistakes, versus my very young child or a younger child who can't handle this level of choice. And then as they get older, it just becomes the runaway snowball that we cannot catch. So if you're anywhere in this trajectory, so if you've been listening, and you're like, oh, this theory isn't it applies to adults too. So if you're like, Oh, I'd never realized how stressed out picking a TV show is. That's this choice science, this sort of science around choice, overwhelm and how it impacts our ability to make decisions. And when we think about that part of it, it really does help us understand. Giving children age appropriate choices is essential while they're building their skills and tools for executive functioning. Thanks so much for listening. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss future episodes. You can also submit questions or comments to me at Tara gratto.ca forward slash podcast. I'd love to hear from you. Until next time, have a great one.