It's Important That Children Practice Making Real Decisions

I was feeling cruddy in the aftermath of my most recent vaccination booster, so I was curled up on the sofa watching baseball with a single light turned on and a window open to cool my low grade fever. A moth was attracted to the light. It flapped furiously, bouncing against the bulb. Occasionally, it would lurch away from the light, returning seconds later, wildly. Once it plummeted to the coffee table where it flipped and flopped before righting itself to return to the light that irresistibly drew it. Its frenzy increased, carrying it off into the dark and back again. Then one time it didn't return. I later found its lifeless body floating in our dog's water dish.

I wondered if this was a metaphor for life in the vein of Macbeth's "sound and fury, signifying nothing." It sometimes seems that way, but I couldn't make myself identify with the moth, as sorry as I was that it lost its life in pursuit of . . . Well, whatever it was pursuing. No one knows for sure. We call the phenomenon phototaxis. Moths are positively phototactic: it's an instinct, an imperative. That moth had no choice but to fly, manically, at that light bulb.

Humans, on the other hand, have choices, or at least the illusion of choices, which means that we, unlike that moth, rely more on decision-making to determine our actions. Of course, we do have our instincts as well, but we have evolved the ability to override them, to alter them, to control them in ways that moths cannot. At least that's how it seems to us. Which means that we have, in at least some cases, replaced the imperative of following an instinct with decision-making.

This still doesn't mean that we won't still wind up floating in the dog's water dish. The difference, is that when we do, we have arrived there via bad choices rather than, as did the moth, because it had no other choice.

I tossed the befouled dog water into the garden. As I refilled the dish with fresh water I wondered if maybe the moth had the better deal in life. If we're all going to end up in the water dish anyway, the moth got there without the stress of making all those decisions, of learning to override, alter, or control its instincts, and there is no shame or guilt in its demise, because, after all, it simply had no choice.

One of the grails of early child childhood education is to develop children's "executive function," which is, essentially, the ability to make decisions. When a two-year-old hits another two-year-old, we don't see this as an intentionally harmful act, but rather the result of impulsiveness. We then work to "teach" that child to make a different decision next time, which is to say, override their instinct, to engage in what we used to call self-control. I can't help but think, however, that much of the time we aren't teaching them to make a different decision as much as we're expecting them to replace one imperative (their instinct) with another (our command). This is explicitly what we do when we train our dogs: we don't expect them to make decisions, but to obey us rather than their inner compulsion to bite, bark, or jump up.

Some make the argument that this is our only choice until our children are developmentally ready to make their own decisions. The theory is that we gradually allow them more and more agency until some day they are an adult with the freedom to make all their own decisions, for better or worse. I get it, there is a certain comforting logic to it, but again, I worry that what we are doing in this case is conflating actual decision-making with having internalized our commands. I wonder if this doesn't explain why so many young people leave the family nest only to "lose control" for a few years, making all manner of bad decisions. Neuroscientists suggest that this is because their brains are not yet fully formed, that the pre-frontal cortex, the seat of executive function, is not fully developed until they are in their mid-20's. 

Or it could be that too many children in our modern world are growing up in environments in which true decision-making is increasingly rare. The pre-frontal cortex doesn't develop in a vacuum, but rather as a result of the environment in which it is developing. Executive function, like with any other aspect of human endeavor, needs practice, and lots of it, in order to develop properly. This is why young children need play and lots of it. It's while playing, freely, that children get to practice making real decisions both large and small. They will make mistakes, of course, but as adults it is not our job to command them into the "right" decision, but rather to allow them to experience the natural consequences of their bad ones. Naturally, we prevent them from flying into the dog's water dish, but we must still allow them to explore whatever light they are attracted to, to learn about it, and to make decisions about it.

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