There is a great book along these lines, highly recommended: “Parent Effectiveness Training” by Thomas Gordon.
One thing the book emphasises more than OP is letting children make their own decisions wherever possible. This encourages them to take responsibility for their own outcomes and massively helps them to learn. It is important—and empowering—to allow them to experience the consequences of their decisions.
Our daughter picked her own clothes from the age of 8, for example. There were only two instances where we overruled her about her own life choices after she turned 12. We never forced her to do homework. [She ended up with a PhD in a hard science, so yes she mostly did her homework. But it is her life.]
A lot of this seems counter-intuitive to people. Parenthood seems to trigger some sort of authoritarian program in many otherwise liberal people. It may be that you could make better decisions on a given issue than your children, but they lose the opportunity to learn when you do that.
It may also be that you would not actually make better decisions than your child. Conjure up in your mind a 16 year old dressed for a party a) in clothes of their own choosing, b) in clothes chosen by their parents. Who did the better job?
One thing the book emphasises more than OP is letting children make their own decisions wherever possible. This encourages them to take responsibility for their own outcomes and massively helps them to learn. It is important—and empowering—to allow them to experience the consequences of their decisions.
I don’t know how much my view differs from the book here, but practice making decisions and seeing how they turn out is definitely really important, and features in I think the majority of the examples above. It also is a natural part of doing things independently, since doing anything involves making lots of decisions!
Our daughter picked her own clothes from the age of 8, for example.
Our kids pick which clothes to wear that day, but Julia picks what clothes are available in their drawers. As they get older buying clothes will move to be their responsibility.
Picking what clothes to wear goes back to before they could dress themselves (“papa, I want you to put my bow dress on me”)
+1 and the parent’s role comes in the form of helping to make complicated and noisy feedback for decision quality more legible since the meta skill of doing that for yourself is something even many adults don’t have.
There is a great book along these lines, highly recommended: “Parent Effectiveness Training” by Thomas Gordon.
One thing the book emphasises more than OP is letting children make their own decisions wherever possible. This encourages them to take responsibility for their own outcomes and massively helps them to learn. It is important—and empowering—to allow them to experience the consequences of their decisions.
Our daughter picked her own clothes from the age of 8, for example. There were only two instances where we overruled her about her own life choices after she turned 12. We never forced her to do homework. [She ended up with a PhD in a hard science, so yes she mostly did her homework. But it is her life.]
A lot of this seems counter-intuitive to people. Parenthood seems to trigger some sort of authoritarian program in many otherwise liberal people. It may be that you could make better decisions on a given issue than your children, but they lose the opportunity to learn when you do that.
It may also be that you would not actually make better decisions than your child. Conjure up in your mind a 16 year old dressed for a party a) in clothes of their own choosing, b) in clothes chosen by their parents. Who did the better job?
I don’t know how much my view differs from the book here, but practice making decisions and seeing how they turn out is definitely really important, and features in I think the majority of the examples above. It also is a natural part of doing things independently, since doing anything involves making lots of decisions!
Our kids pick which clothes to wear that day, but Julia picks what clothes are available in their drawers. As they get older buying clothes will move to be their responsibility.
Picking what clothes to wear goes back to before they could dress themselves (“papa, I want you to put my bow dress on me”)
+1 and the parent’s role comes in the form of helping to make complicated and noisy feedback for decision quality more legible since the meta skill of doing that for yourself is something even many adults don’t have.
On the topic of parenting books there is also Kazdin’s Everyday Parenting Toolkit (one of the few evidence-based books on parenting).