Teach Your Kids to Make Good Decisions

 

 I came to a realization this morning, which I will get to shortly. I have often shared a story with people that I know that demonstrates how people need to be taught what many of us may think of as a basic skill of survival. I may or may not have already written this story on this blog previously, and I'm not about to share it now as it is merely a parallel situation to what I am writing about today, but this story is about maintaining basic cleanliness and how it is not an ingrained human trait, but rather, something that has to be taught. I came to this realization many years ago after having been exposed to a people group who had apparently never been taught this skill.

To the same end as this story, this morning I came to the conclusion that people need to be taught how to make good decisions. In our internet age, we get to have a front row seat to the consequences of too many peoples' bad decisions. How often have you come across some story or video of someone who is behaving badly in some way, and they choose to make a video of themselves behaving badly, and then they choose to post that video of themselves behaving badly to the internet for all of their friends to see? But who else sees it? Family, neighbours, employers and potential employers, people in their community/town/city, the police, prosecutors and judges. It turns from one bad decision to a whole cascade of bad decisions.

I have sometimes wondered how this cascade of bad decisions happens. It all starts with one bad decision; one mistake. We all make mistakes, and unfortunately, not all of those mistakes remain a secret shared between us and our Maker. Sometimes our mistakes have overflowing consequences, like loss of employment or jail time. Sometimes our mistakes can have consequences for innocent loved ones. These mistakes can sometimes lead to addiction problems, unemployment and even homelessness, or even death.

This doesn't just happen to those who seem to be perpetually down and out; this can happen to apparently well adjusted people as well, who had a good upbringing and who seemed to be walking a path to responsible adulthood.

I have also wondered about the cultural aspect of this. I am going to sound somewhat racist here, but please, hear me out. Why is it that some of the oldest civilizations in the world which are found largely in the Middle East and Asia, seem to be and remain so...backwards. I think of countries like India, which has a well earned reputation for the entire country remaining in a state of perpetual filth, with refuse strewn everywhere and a lack of basic sanitation infrastructure throughout much of the country. This country has existed almost since the beginning of time itself. How is it that there is such filth and chaos throughout the country?

Pakistan and Afghanistan are other examples, though in a different way. The ways that they treat each other verge on incomprehensible from a western viewpoint. Those countries are cleaner than India, but there is still something about them that seems to be stuck in the past in ways that they should not be. It may be purely cultural, and I do not know enough about those countries to be able to speculate on that. I have wondered if there is a religious basis to it.

Look at what is referred to as western civilization. Countries that exist in places such as most of Europe and North America. These are arguably among the youngest civilizations in the world, yet there seems to be much more in way of sanitation infrastructure, transportation and educational opportunities than there is in the older civilizations. These western nations are largely Caucasian in makeup, or they were until recently. And these nations have been largely built on Christian ideologies. While the Christian nations bear up under near constant accusation of colonialism dating back centuries, if it weren't for that very colonialism, many of the nations that are currently significantly developed likely still would not be; they would look like their neighbours.

But Christianity cannot be the only cause for this. We have to consider the far east Asian countries of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, as a few examples. These are not Christian nations, these civilizations have existed for millennia and they are highly developed and advanced. They are largely clean and polite societies that are neighbouring less developed societies. So what is the difference?

Even as I am writing this article, it is taking a different direction than I intended for it. It was not supposed to be so far reaching in a geographical or cultural way, but the mind begins to wander and thoughts come unbidden. This was going to be an article talking about how parents need to teach our kids how to make good decisions, and it is still about that, but in a much larger view.

As parents, it is our responsibility to raise up our children to be able to function properly as adults. This includes things such as basic personal hygiene; basic cooking skills are helpful; how to relate to others, particularly those in authority over us; and even basic financial understanding. As I observe society around me, I wonder how many parents are failing at this. These are not things that humans will somehow magically absorb as they travel through life; these things must be taught.

This also applies to good decision making skills. The ability to look into the future at what the different potential outcomes of a pending decision may be. Maybe it even boils down to teaching that there are outcomes to every decision. Perhaps that is where the first ball is fumbled. We see, more and more, that there appears to be a movement to protect kids from consequences; even to protect adults from consequences. This, in itself, has consequences.

Thinking about bad decisions and consequences, I am reminded of a young man that I used to know, who thought very highly of his own intellect. He claimed to be able to foresee all possible outcomes of any decision that he was faced with. I want to emphasize this; he claimed to have the ability to consider literally ALL potential outcomes. It was the peak of arrogance, and I believe I told him as much, but he was too smart to listen to me. 

He was always frustrated that his earnings were less than what he thought they should be. He always had some idea about some business that he could pursue to increase his income. This in itself is not a problem, but some of his ideas did not necessarily align with the moral positions of the Christian faith that he claimed to hold.

He was married with a young child at the time when I lost touch with him. In his constant pursuit for more, he was offered an opportunity to move to a different province for a position of some type, the specifics of which I no longer remember. He was very excited about this prospect when he told me about it, but when I asked him for specifics, his answers to me seemed to lack specificity and he seemed to be acting on verbal promises offered to him by a stranger, with no guarantees whatsoever, including a guaranteed minimum income.

I had numerous concerns and voiced them to him, but his 'higher intellect' had already run through all of the possible outcomes and had calculated that this was a good move for his family and for his career. I think it was within a year that I heard through the grapevine that the opportunity was as hollow as a chocolate Easter bunny and it crumbled just as easily. He ended up working a very different, dead end job for a different company, barely making ends meet. I don't know specifics since he has never talked to me again since moving away, but it may be that the entire move put such a strain on the family that, eventually, his wife left him with their child and moved back to this province, divorcing him and eventually marrying someone else.

I have heard that this young man has since moved back here as well and got work in construction with his father. This was many years ago already and I sincerely hope that he has landed on his feet and settled into a good life since then. It is really too bad that his lack of humility and ability to truly weigh the potential results of his decisions lead to these outcomes, but he was truly beyond accepting advice from anybody, including our shared pastor at the time, who also urged caution in the move.

I could share several other stories of others whom I have known who have made life altering bad decisions, which they did not realize were life altering at the time. I have tried to talk some of them out of their choices, only to be ignored; others did not give me the opportunity to try to dissuade them. Even now, I know people who act in bad habits that hurt themselves, but they find that changing those habits is too difficult to do, so they continue to live with the consequences of repeat bad decisions.

I will not claim that all of my decisions are right and without repercussions. Nobody possesses the foreknowledge to be able to avoid all bad decisions. But, my parents taught me basics to good decision making, and when I was younger, they walked alongside me on several decisions and pointed out pitfalls that I may not have seen otherwise. They taught me what it looks like to walk through the decision making process with a clear mind and a sharp eye, looking for things that I may be choosing to ignore and figuring out how those things may affect me.

Going back to my observations about the cultural differences noted above, I have noted that far east civilizations are very old and very advanced in multiple areas, and while western, Christian civilizations are much younger, they are also generally very advanced. It can't merely be the age of the civilization, since western society is possibly the youngest society in the world, but is largely equally as advanced as the far east. And further, why are the middle east civilizations apparently so far behind in many aspects when their civilizations are also as old as the far east societies? There is no direct connection between the age of a society and that society's advancement.

India is a Hindu nation, Pakistan and Afghanistan are Muslim nations. The most common religions of the far east appear to be Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. And then there is, of course the Christian faith upon which western civilization was built. There are myriad differences between these religions and a full spectrum of development between the civilizations, so religion cannot be the only, and likely not even the main difference.

This leads to the possibility that the difference is cultural, particularly in the ways that children are raised. Maybe the middle east method of parenting relies more on a trial and error form of children making their own decisions, but there seems to be a large amount of error over the generations then, given their lack of basic western levels of infrastructure and order. Maybe it is moreso a problem that the parents make all of the decisions until such time that the child leaves the childhood home, then they are dropped into making their own decisions without having been taught anything about how to make good decisions. This could make sense when you consider that we are then talking about generations of people who have never been taught how to make good decisions, which would definitely lead to poor societal outcomes like rampant litter, feces in the streets and crumbling infrastructure. Culturally, they simply do not know any better.

Far east cultures take a lot of pride in their ancestry, and thus, they do not want future generations to squander what they have received, so they teach their kids how to maintain and expand on what they inherited by making good decisions. As a result, those societies are clean and educated and successful.

Western societies fall somewhere in between these two extremes in my opinion. We value our standard of living enough to teach our kids how to maintain it, but we do not value our past enough to protect it from bad decisions about cultural protection. We are watching the collapse of western civilizations through what is aptly called toxic empathy. The western world has been told that caring for others is the ultimate good, but this has resulted in the destruction of our own cultures as we seek to accept and amalgamate all others into our own culture, which is diluting it to the point of irrelevance. This is a major example of poor decision making.

As we continue to allow other cultures of poor decision makers to gain more and more influence over our own countries, we are seeing the degradation of our own societies. A society will devolve to the level of the lowest common denominator every single time. It is much harder to drag someone up to another level than it is to either allow them to stay at the lower level, or even worse, for future generations to drop to the level of those around them.

A critical thinker can recognize that the modern liberal ideology has lead to the collapse of western civilization, and it is the highly educated who are pursuing this, because their education told them to. Unfortunately, this is also the result of emotional decision making, which is largely exercised by women. Now this will sound exceedingly chauvinistic, but if women did not get a vote, I think that there is a good chance that western society would be in a much better situation than it is. It is not that women are not intelligent; it is that they are created by God to be empathetic caregivers, and it is this maternal instinct that is sinking nations. The willingness to sacrifice self in order to raise somebody else to a higher level.

The survival of western civilization is hinging on hard decisions that need to be made, and men are better equipped to make those decisions. Not all men are capable of making those decisions, just like not all women are susceptible to making decisions based largely on emotions, but it seems that there are enough incapable men and emotional women who are casting votes that they are overwhelming the capable men and emotionally insusceptible women who are also casting votes. The modern politician will always pander to whoever will keep them in power, regardless of the impacts on society, so here we are, on the potentially interminable slide of western societal ruin that toxic empathy breeds.

This seems like it may have turned into a somewhat rambling article. I hope that you've been able to follow the twists and turns of this one. My apologies if I lost you somewhere along the way. The point that I intended to make when I began this article is that it is the responsibility of the parents to teach our children how to make good decisions. We cannot expect that they will develop that skill on their own. There is a certain degree to which this skill is absorbed through observation, but it is unlikely that parents who didn't grow up with good decision makers will make good decisions themselves, and as a result, their kids will also struggle with the skills that are required to make good decisions.

If you don't have the skills to make good decisions, find somebody that you know who does and ask them to teach you so that you can teach your own kids. This will take a lot of humility, but the payoff of your humility will pay off for generations to come, and society will thank you.