How to Raise Decisive Children: Tips and Techniques

It's important for kids to learn how to be decisive, because they'll have to face different obstacles throughout their lives. That's why we'll give you some helpful techniques to raise decisive children in today's article.

Once they grow up, children need to become decisive adults. This is because they’ll have to face and overcome many difficult situations throughout their lives. To help them, parents need to be prepared. For this reason, we’ll show you some strategies to raise decisive children in the following article.

As we’ve mentioned before, little ones need to learn techniques to solve possible difficulties in an efficient way. And, parents can teach them how to do this by using two different strategies. They can either directly teach them how to be decisive, or they can show their children how to behave through their own actions. As we all know, children learn many things by watching others.

What do parents do when they find themselves in a problematic situation?

First of all, it’s important to know how we behave when our children have to face a problem. Always bear in mind that our kids find themselves in problematic situations, just as we do.

Even though there are different kinds of problems, children need to count on the necessary resources to be decisive and face all types of situations. Let’s see how parents usually react when their children experience some kind of conflict.

We tend to overreact and get upset

If we overreact and get upset every time our children have a problem, they might end up limiting their experiences in order to keep us calm. If we overprotect them, they’ll miss all the important experiences that help them learn new things. Furthermore, they’ll grow up as fearful children.

We try to solve their problems

When doing this, we take away their independence, and their chance to face their own problems. As a result, they depend too much on us, and they don’t learn to be self-sufficient enough to solve any problem.

We show our insecurity because we’re too involved in their problems

If we’re insecure and get confused about how involved we should be in our children’s problems, they might become insecure children as well.

We stay close to our children, trying to help them become independent

We can stay close to them while they try to solve their own problems. This way, they’ll learn from their mistakes and reinforce strategies to face problematic situations in the future.

Techniques to solve problems and raise decisive children

There are many different conflict resolution strategies. In this article, we’ll talk about certain techniques mentioned in the book Social Interaction Skills Teaching Program (Programa de enseñanza de habilidades de interacción social). Next, we’ll try to summarize it into 5 steps to solve conflicts.

1. Identify the problem to help your children be decisive

First of all, you need to identify if the problem involves other people. To do this, we can ask ourselves some questions.

• What’s the problem?
• Did we do or say something that could have caused this problem?
• What did the other person involved do or say?
• How do we feel about this?  How does the other person feel?
• What is our objective?
• What do we want the other person to do?

Try to come up with all the possible ideas to solve the problem

Now, we can brainstorm ideas trying to come up with the solution to the problem. To do this, we can use other questions:

• What do we think could be the solution to the problem?
• Can we do or say something to fix this?
• Is there any other possible solution?
• Can I think about something else if nothing has worked so far?

Try to anticipate the possible consequences of the solutions you came up with, and other people’s reactions

Whenever we think about possible solutions, we need to anticipate their consequences. To do this, we can use the following questions:

• If I do this, what will happen next?
• If the other person does it, what’s going to happen?
• What do I think will be the consequences of these actions?
• What will I do or say, and what will the other person do or say?

Choose the best solution, after evaluating all the possibilities

Once we’ve considered all the possible consequences, it’s time to choose the best one.

• Do we think it’s a good one?
• Is it fair?
• How can this affect the other person?
• How does the other person feel?
• Will this have short- or long-term consequences?
• Will this be effective?
• Is this solution our best choice?
• Do we think it’ll actually solve the problem?

Make a plan and try the solution out

Once we go through all the previous steps, all we have left is to try the solution out. To do this, we have to make a plan and consider all the possible setbacks we may encounter. After that, we’ll analyze the results.

Advice to raise decisive children

We’ve already highlighted the steps to follow in order to solve possible problems, so you can teach these strategies to your children. Next, we’ll give you some recommendations to raise decisive children.

• We have to teach our children there’s no universal answer to face problems. They’re the ones who must come up with the best solutions to the different situations they may encounter.

• Another important thing is to explain to them that they might face many problems throughout their lives. Therefore, they need to be prepared to deal with them.
• A good idea is to role play to simulate different conflicts they may have to face in the future. This way, you’ll get to see what strategies they’ve learned.
• They need to identify their own signals to realize they’re in front of a problematic situation. This will help them understand their emotions and reactions.
• To teach them these strategies, we must do it at home and with no rush.

More things we can do to raise decisive children…

In conclusion, children need to be decisive and they need to be able to solve any problem they may encounter. The only way to do this is to face all the experiences life has to offer, even if those experiences are negative.

If parents teach them conflict resolution strategies, they won’t find it so hard to solve problems. Remember that practice makes perfect, so you can start thinking about games or dynamics to put everything we’ve learned into practice.