"I am the decider."
-- George W Bush
Life is about making good decisions. Making good decisions takes a lot of practice. Our own biases and the biases of our family and friends all conspire to cloud our decision making process. Kids need to do things on their own early on. They need to learn to make their own mistakes and live with the consequences. By making choices and seeing how they pan out, they learn to make better choices. By making more decisions early on, kids also become more comfortable and resilient with the decisions that they make, even if the outcomes are not all favorable. Not all our choices will have good outcomes. We need to have the courage to continue to choose even after some choices turn out badly. kids will be more comfortable in taking on new challenges in life on their own term if they dealt with life on their own terms as young children. When everything is arranged by the parents, kids never got to chart their own courses while they were young. Even when they got to the best colleges, they seem bewildered and unsure of themselves, lacking in direction in life at the stage of their lives when they should be pursuing their dreams.
We never have all the information needed to make decisions. We fill in the blank with our gut instincts and feelings. In some cases, it is about learning who to trust(presumably someone with more information). In other cases, it is about learning to read people. Reading the body language and what is not said. Reading between the lines.
Howard Stringer of Sony and Carlos Ghosn of Nissan are two examples of none Japanese hired to run big Japanese companies. With an average IQ higher than their white counter-parts, the Japanese was unable to find someone with the talent to run these companies. I suspect at least partly this has to do with the way we East Asians raise our kids. Being a CEO is the ultimate decision maker. No amount of tutoring and prep school can prepare one to sit in that chair. They got there by making a lot of decisions early and learn from their mistakes. Once they make better choices in life, it carries over to their profession and they climb up the corporate ladder.
In my life, I was made witness to a scene where an East Asian mom was preparing her adult son in his thirties on his business trip. She brought him a jacket and told him that there are four pockets in the jacket. She coached him how to wash his underwear in the sink, something a White child would have learned in his childhood. The East Asian culture, being more paternalistic, wants to make virtually all the decisions for our kids well into their teenage years, sometimes well into their adulthood. No wonder we come out weak in this area.
On the other end of the spectrum are the Spartan soldiers. When he is three years old, he is taken out of his family and trained. Contrary to what most people think, the training is not about how to sacrifice himself in the battlefield. A dead soldier is a useless soldier. Instead, he is trained to use every part of his guile to stay alive and evade capture. At one part of the training, he is expected to sneak inside a camp for the slaves and kill one of them. Now this is against the law and if he is caught while doing this, he can lose his life. So in essence he is asked to risk his life by breaking the law. The training of commandos all over the world, especially the Israeli commandos are also similar. They are given a mission but must make their own decisions to plan and carry out the mission. If their contingency plans failed, they must come up with a different way to carry out the mission on their own, or if they completed the mission, extract themselves to safety.
Teaching kids to make good decisions does not mean condoning everything kids do. There must be a way to feedback the information if a bad decision is made. I have seen many cases where doting parents tell a kid, even in very young age, everything she does is OK. Children raised this way while they were young almost never turn out well. While a child is young, she needs guidance and a firm hand. In fact, a firm guidance helps the child by giving her a frame of reference. As she grows older, we need to learn to let go and allow her more and more room to make her decisions. If she makes decisions that are different then how we would decide, we need to respect her and allow her to learn the consequences. Finally, as she develop good judgement as a late teen, we get to become cheer leaders for her.
Making good decisions is an important skill that must be developed by allowing young kids to do it and learn the consequences of their actions. Only when kids learn how their decisions succeed and fail at a young age would they develop the skill and toughness to continue to choose wisely, even if some of their choices have bad outcomes.
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