Making Decisions

Salvador Dalí

My wife and I moved to Germany in the early 1990's. She grew up in Austria, Germany, and northern Italy, so for her it was a kind of homecoming, but for me it was a true fish out of water experience.

For instance, I was accustomed to American style supermarkets with massive aisles of, say, chips, offering dozens, if not hundreds, of choices. At German supermarkets in 1992 there were two choices, both potato. Of course, there were 1,500 types of wurst available at the butcher's counter, but as far as American style packaged goods went, options were limited. 

From my perspective, these "supermarkets" didn't seem so super. My first reaction was to feel put out. Where are all my choices? But the longer I lived there, the more I came to appreciate the freedom that came from having my freedom of choice narrowed. Without so many micro-decisions to make, not only did shopping go a lot faster, but I rarely had cause to regret the decisions I'd made. Start with the cheap bag. If that didn't work out, try the expensive bag. If that didn't work out, stop buying potato chips. Simple.

Twenty-five years ago, researchers conducted the famous "jam study" (officially entitled "When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?"). Essentially, one group of shoppers encountered a display of 24 flavors of jam, while another group was offered only six choices. The larger display attracted more shoppers, but only around 3 percent of them actually made a decision to purchase jam. In contrast, 30 percent of the shoppers with only six choices decided to make a purchase. The conclusion: some choice is good, but too much seems to paralyze many of us to the point that we make no choice at all.

Long before that, philosopher Herbert Marcuse suggested that many of the apparent freedoms of the west are illusory because they are of this superficial consumerist variety.

Indeed, on the surface it may seem that the more choices you have, the more control you have, but as anyone who works with young children knows, too many choices can easily lead to feeling overwhelmed. I'll never forget a parent who asked me if I would use my "Teacher Tom magic" to persuade her son to brush his teeth at night. After a few questions, however, I found that in a misguided attempt to give their child freedom of choice, they had allowed him to pick out his own toothbrush . . . Every time they were at the drug store! Each evening, this poor boy was faced with the choice of some dozen toothbrushes and it overwhelmed him to the point that, like those jam shoppers, he couldn't make any decision at all. It wasn't until they got his choices down to none that he began to brush without a fuss.

This phenomenon also at least partially explains why play gets chaotic when there are too many toys, loose parts, or whatever. As Goethe wrote, "It is within limitations that he first shows himself the master."

One of the most important things we do in life is make decisions and the practice we get making these kinds of small decisions -- like about toothbrushes, potato chips, or jam -- prepares us for the more important decisions we will make in the future. We want our children to practice making real decisions for themselves, of course, because that's what ultimately makes a life: decisions, both large and small. And this is a particularly important skill for children growing up in a world of superficial consumerist choices. 

I'm a 63-year-old man who has made many "life altering" decisions. Looking back over my life, I see how I got to be who and where I am, in large measure, for better or worse, because of the decisions I've made. One thing I've learned over my decades of decision-making is that no matter how many lists of pros and cons I make, no matter how much I try to peer into the future, my best decisions have always been those that come down to following my gut, a practice I've been honing since I was a preschooler. In hindsight, many of my decisions weren't necessarily "good" ones, but neither were many of the decisions I made after systematically weighing the options. I often happily reflect on the series of lazy, superficially "bad" decisions I made leading up to the moment I met my now wife of nearly four decades.

At the end of the day, the future remains unknown, and the decisions we make today may or may not be the right ones. What we learn from a life of decision-making, however, is that, good or bad, we must strive to make the most of them, or recover from them, which is really the story of a life. Some of the most "successful" humans who ever lived made horrible decisions. Abraham Lincoln went bankrupt as a young man due to bad business decisions. Oprah Winfrey admits to bad romantic decisions. Robert Downey, Jr.'s decisions landed him in prison. Some people even assert that their success was a result of their bad decisions.    

When our children are very young, we make their important decisions for them in order to protect them from the negative consequences of bad choices, but there must be a gradual letting go, as we allow them to experience the natural consequences of their decisions. When we try to help this process along with punishments and rewards, we derail their learning by turning their attention to the power-dynamic between adult and child, instead of allowing them to experience the real world consequences of their actions, and, with our love and support, figure out what to do next.

Of course, we give them our best advice, but if it is truly their decision to make, we let them. Sometimes we're surprised when their apparently "bad" decisions turn out okay. Other times their "good" ones go awry. Most of the time, however, things go pretty much as our "gut" expected because we ourselves have a lifetime of practice with decision-making and its consequences. And we got there by making our own decisions.

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