Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
The joke in my house (and with my assistant at work) is that I can make any decision except what to eat. If I have a work lunch to schedule, I will ask someone else to choose the restaurant. Daniel and I spend more time discussing what to eat for dinner than we spend actually eating it.
The last ten months have required me to make myriad decisions I never anticipated when I went into education. I have rendered verdicts about health protocols, ventilation systems, and whether to follow public health recommendations. And we have had to make difficult choices as a family, like how to celebrate a holiday or how much we are willing to do with people outside of our household. There are decisions that have been popular, and there are decisions that have been...decidedly unpopular. Sometimes it’s been easy. And other times, it’s been gut wrenching and heart breaking and tortuous.
What I love about that Eleanor Roosevelt quote is also what is maddening about it - there is no black and white, no objective answer, no easy path for so many of these inflection points. What I decide to do on Thanksgiving in the pandemic might look very different than what you decide to do on Thanksgiving in the pandemic, and there are very few decisions that are clearly right or clearly wrong (unless the question is whether to eat ice cream - it is always right to eat ice cream).
So I’ve been asking myself: What’s core to good decision making? How do we feel confident in our decisions, even when we hear from people who disagree with us? And how do we help kids develop their own decision making skills?
I was recently asked what qualities I think a Head of School requires, and my first answer was that a leader needs a North Star in decision making. As an educator, the first question I always ask when facing a decision is “what is best for children?” In my home life, we have values we use to make those decisions as well. I love the line from the American President, when Andrew Shepherd says “I was so busy trying to keep my job that I forgot to do my job.” There can be so many pressures on us to make decisions to appease others, to keep the peace in our family, or to make others’ lives convenient. I think it is essential that we define for ourselves our own North Stars and that we teach our children to do the same, so that we spend our lives “doing our jobs” and not just trying to keep them. Like Eleanor Roosevelt reminds us, each of us has a moral compass, and it’s that internal guide that ought to be steering us.
To be clear, I’m not writing this to justify choices I have made or to insist that I would always make the same ones again. Rather, I think there’s an important skill set involved in the process of decision making. Learning how to think clearly, how to filter out the noise to hear your own voice, and how to apply a set of criteria to arrive at an authentic conclusion, is what’s most critical.
Teaching kids how to make decisions - the actual nuts and bolts of it - is an essential element of raising children. Dr. Jim Taylor, a parenting psychologist, lays out the following steps as important when raising good decision makers: First, give choices. This helps kids understand what it means to decide and shows them what it means to have a voice in that process. Second, make things explicit - teach your kids to ask themselves questions like “what are my choices?” and “what are the consequences of those decisions?” Finally, let your kids make poor decisions. This is the hardest part of parenting, watching your child make a decision that can be hurtful to them or to others, and allowing them to have that decision play out. But making those poor decisions is essential if they are going to learn how to make good decisions in the future.
A last element of raising a good decision maker is helping your child live with consequences. Jim Fay, of Love and Logic, advises that, once you have let a child make a choice, have them stick with that choice - that if they choose option A and immediately want to switch to option B, you don’t let them. Let them understand the consequence of a choice when it’s mundane, so they understand the concept before they quickly make decisions around sex or drugs or alcohol.
All of us have been challenged to give our decision making muscles a very intense workout this past year - between COVID and politics, socializing and children and school openings, it’s never been more pressing to know how to make decisions with clarity and conviction. And while the consequences for all these decisions right now feel - and, in many cases, are - life and death, we will soon return to a world in which the stakes aren’t quite as high. Ultimately, if we are using our values to make a decision, and actively grappling with them in order to reach a conclusion, we’re already doing it right. We are modeling what it means to be a person living in a world that is messy and nuanced, and we are showing our children that what we hold true through the gray is what makes us who we are.
