Teaching Our Kids Better Decision Making

This summer, I had the opportunity to teach a group of 80 incredible youth leaders about decision-making, cognitive biases, and how our minds can sometimes trick us when we are trying to make a choice.

At the end of these sessions, I always hand out a short feedback form. I usually ask questions about what decisions students are currently struggling with or what their biggest takeaway was from the session. But this time, I added a question I had never asked before:

What is the biggest problem, opportunity, or decision you see your parents struggling with?

I thought it might give me an interesting glimpse into what young people notice about the adults in their lives.

It did much more than that.

Their answers included many of the things you might expect. They talked about their parents’ worries about money, work, relationships, time, the economy, caring for aging parents, and supporting their children.

But what struck me most wasn’t simply that they knew what their parents were dealing with.

It was that they noticed how their parents were dealing with it.

One student wrote about how hard it was for their parents to juggle three children, their jobs, and making time for themselves. Another talked about the stress of figuring out who would be home with a younger sibling while everyone else was working. Someone else described the opportunity their family had to move into a home that might better fit their needs, while also recognizing how scary, risky, and expensive that decision felt.

They noticed that their parents were stressed about bills, their mom never seemed to have time for herself, and when stress turned into arguments. They noticed worry, fear, pressure, avoidance, and even the healthy or unhealthy ways adults in the household coped when life felt difficult.

Our kids are noticing much more than we sometimes realize.

Your Kids Aren’t Just Watching What You Decide

As I read through their responses, I started thinking about what was happening underneath all of those observations.

These young people weren’t only learning about the problems adults face.

They were learning how adults respond to problems. Problems or opportunities are decisions lurking.

Every child will eventually face decisions about how to use their time, money, energy, attention, and other resources. They will have opportunities that feel exciting and risky at the same time. They will have relationships to navigate, competing responsibilities to balance, and moments when they simply do not know what is going to happen next. We all face these.

Those challenges are inevitable.

What is not inevitable is how they will respond to them.

That is where our example matters.

When our children watch us make decisions, they are learning whether uncertainty means panic or curiosity. They are learning whether fear means we stop, avoid, or spiral, or whether it means we slow down and ask better questions. They are learning whether difficult decisions are something to dread or something we can move through thoughtfully, with a sense of empowerment and agency.

They are learning a decision-making process, even if we have never intentionally taught them one.

Every Family Has a Decision Playbook

For some of us, that playbook may be something we have intentionally built. For others, it may simply be the habits, reactions, assumptions, and coping strategies we absorbed from our own families and have carried forward without thinking much about them.

The important question isn’t whether your children are learning from your decision-making.

They are.

The question is what they are learning.

• Are they learning how to pause and identify what is really being decided?
• Are they learning how to think about what matters most?
• Are they learning that there may be more than two options?
• Are they seeing you involve other people when a decision affects the whole family?
• Are they learning that asking for support is part of making a good decision?
• Or are they seeing decisions happen primarily through urgency, overwhelm, avoidance, or fear?

The Goal Isn’t to Get Every Decision Right

There is an important distinction here, because this is not about creating another impossible standard for parents. Fear, stress, uncertainty, and overwhelm are normal parts of being human. Our children are going to experience all of those things themselves.

The goal is not to hide those emotions or pretend that every difficult decision can be handled calmly and perfectly. In fact, one of the students in the group wrote about learning that perfection isn’t required, and I think that matters here.

• They can see us feel worried and still ask, “What do we know right now?”
• They can see us feel overwhelmed and still step back to thoughtfully identify what really matters.
• They can watch us recognize that we don’t have enough information yet rather than forcing an answer before we are ready.
• They can see us say, “I don’t know yet, but let’s think about this.”

That is decision-making too.

Great Decisions Come From Great Questions

One of the best ways I know to strengthen our own decision-making process is to improve the questions we ask.

A good question slows us down just enough to see if there’s something we may have missed. Great questions come from curiosity and openness about what’s possible.

• Instead of immediately asking, “What should I do?” we might ask, “What am I actually deciding?”
• Instead of assuming we only have two choices, we might ask, “What other options do I have? What would someone else see?”
• Instead of reacting only to what feels urgent, we can ask, “What matters most to me in this decision?”
• We can ask who else needs to be involved, what information we are missing, what assumptions we may be making, and what the next small step might be.

These questions create clarity and create a very different experience for the people around us.

Imagine a child growing up hearing those kinds of questions during difficult moments. Decisions aren’t something you have to immediately have the answer to. They are something you can thoughtfully work through. Your children are learning teamwork and resilience.

Good decision making is an incredibly powerful skill to pass on.

Practice on the Small Decisions, Too

Like any skill, decision-making gets stronger with practice.

You don’t have to wait until your family is facing a major financial decision, a move, a health crisis, or a career change to start modeling a better process.

You can practice with smaller decisions.

• What class does your child want to take next year?
• How should your family spend the weekend?
• How do you solve a scheduling problem?
• How do you respond when two people want different things?

Each of those moments is an opportunity to practice asking better questions.

Think of it like building strength. You don’t begin lifting the heaviest weight in the gym. You start where you are, practice the movement, and gradually build your capacity.

Decision-making works the same way.

The more we practice, the more natural the process becomes when the stakes are higher.

What Will They Hear When You’re Not in the Room?

Eventually, our children will make important decisions without us.

They will make decisions with friends, at school, in college, in relationships, at work, and perhaps one day with children of their own.

We will not always be there to tell them what to do.

But the way we taught them to think may still be there.

They may hear the questions we asked:

1. What really matters here?
2. What am I actually deciding?
3. What choices do I have?
4. What am I missing?
5. Who can help me?
6. What is my next step?

Our goal is not to give our children the answers to every decision they will ever face. We couldn’t even if we tried.

What we can give them is a stronger way to make those decisions for themselves.

I’ve created a free list of 12 Great Questions for Better Decisions that you can use with your own choices and begin bringing into conversations with your family.

These questions are designed to help you slow down, get clearer about what matters, think more creatively about your options, and move toward action.

They can help strengthen your own Decision Playbook.

And every time you use it, someone else may be learning from you, too.