I have written about children and decision-making before, and perhaps this is one of those subjects that I keep returning to because the older I get, the more I realise how complicated our relationship with children's independence can be. Most adults would probably agree that we want children to grow up to be confident, independent and capable of making their own decisions. We want them to be able to think critically, solve problems and navigate the world without constantly needing someone to tell them what to do. Yet, at the same time, we can be remarkably uncomfortable when children actually begin exercising that independence in ways that do not look familiar to us.
I see this contradiction quite often in education. We tell children to think for themselves, but when they come up with an answer that is different from ours, we are quick to correct them. We encourage creativity, but sometimes only when that creativity eventually leads them towards the outcome we had already imagined. We ask them to solve problems, but if they are taking too long, we become impatient and show them the quickest way to do it. We tell them that mistakes are part of learning, but when the mistake happens, our first instinct can be to step in and prevent the consequences. I understand why this happens. Adults have experience, and experience gives us a certain confidence in what works and what does not. If I have already spent years learning something the hard way, why would I want a child to spend the same amount of time making the same mistake?
The problem is that perhaps we sometimes confuse saving children time with helping them learn.
There is nothing wrong with efficiency. In many parts of life, efficiency is useful and sometimes necessary. If there is a way to complete a task in twenty minutes instead of an hour, knowing how to do that is certainly valuable. The problem begins when efficiency becomes the only measure by which we decide whether something is worthwhile. Learning does not always happen efficiently. Creativity certainly does not. Discovery rarely does. Sometimes the process of figuring something out requires a child to wander around a little, try something that does not work, change direction and perhaps arrive somewhere that neither the child nor the adult expected.
I think this is particularly important because children are not simply smaller versions of us. They are going to inherit a world that will be different from the one we grew up in, and they will eventually have to deal with problems that we may not know how to solve ourselves. If we spend their childhood teaching them that the safest way to approach a problem is to find the adult who already knows the answer, we may be preparing them very well for questions that already have answers while doing very little to prepare them for the questions that do not.
So perhaps the first thing we need to do is give children more genuine opportunities to make decisions.
I say “genuine” because there is a difference between giving a child a choice and giving a child agency. Sometimes adults give children two options and call it independence, even though both options have already been selected by the adult. There is nothing wrong with that, especially for younger children who need boundaries, but as children grow older, we should gradually allow them to participate in deciding what those options might be. If a student is working on a project, for example, perhaps the teacher does not always need to prescribe exactly how the project should be completed. If a child is trying to solve a problem, perhaps the adult can ask what approach they would like to try before immediately explaining the method that the adult knows will work.
This does not mean that we abandon children to figure everything out for themselves. In fact, I think that is an important distinction that often gets lost in conversations about independence. Empowering a child does not mean removing every boundary and allowing them to do whatever they want. Children still need structure, guidance and adults who can recognise when a situation is beyond what they are ready to handle. The difference is that within those boundaries, we allow children to exercise some judgement of their own.
There is research to support this idea. Wendy Grolnick and Richard Ryan, in their 1989 study of parental styles and children's self-regulation and competence in school, examined autonomy support alongside parental involvement and structure. Their findings associated parental autonomy support with children's autonomous self-regulation, teacher-rated competence and aspects of school achievement. What I find particularly useful about that study is that autonomy support was not treated as the absence of structure. The research looked at autonomy, involvement and structure as different aspects of parenting, which is a useful reminder that giving children agency does not require adults to stop providing boundaries.
Perhaps this is why one of the simplest things we can do as adults is to ask children what they think before we tell them what we think. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but I suspect many of us do not do it as often as we imagine. When a child is struggling with something, we tend to move quite quickly towards solving the problem. When they are taking too long, we give them the shortcut. When their idea sounds strange, we explain why it probably will not work. Sometimes we do this so quickly that the child barely has an opportunity to finish thinking.
There is a certain amount of patience required to allow someone else to think in front of us, particularly when we already know the answer. Yet perhaps that patience is part of what children need from us. If I already know that a particular method will work, there is no harm in allowing the child to try another method first, provided the consequences are manageable. They may discover that their idea does not work. They may discover that it works better than expected. Or they may discover something else entirely along the way. None of those possibilities is necessarily a waste of time.
This brings me to the second part of empowering children, which is allowing them to experience failure when the stakes are appropriate.
I think adults have become increasingly uncomfortable with children failing. Some of that discomfort is understandable. We do not want children to be humiliated or hurt, and we certainly should not deliberately place them in situations where the consequences are serious simply so that they can learn a lesson. There are things children should be protected from because the cost of learning through experience is simply too high. But there are also many ordinary situations in which the consequences of a poor decision are relatively small, and these are precisely the situations where children can be given some room to discover what happens when their decision does not work.
Research by Florrie Ng, Gwen Kenney-Benson and Eva Pomerantz, published in Child Development in 2004, is interesting in this regard. Their studies looked at how mothers' controlling and autonomy-supportive responses related to children's engagement, performance and responses to failure. Among lower-achieving children in particular, controlling responses were associated with diminished engagement or subsequent performance, while autonomy-supportive responses were associated with better outcomes over time. The study does not suggest that adults should simply leave children alone when they struggle, but it does provide some evidence for the value of responding to difficulty in ways that support children's own engagement rather than taking control of the situation.
I think the difference can sometimes be seen in the language we use after a child has made a mistake. There is a very easy satisfaction in saying, “I told you so,” especially when we genuinely did tell them so. Unfortunately, being right does not necessarily mean that we have helped the child learn. The more useful conversation might be to ask what they expected would happen, what actually happened and whether they would make the same decision again. The child is then encouraged to examine the decision rather than simply accepting that the adult was correct.
That is a subtle difference, but it matters because we are trying to develop judgement rather than obedience.
A child who is constantly told what to do can become very good at following instructions. That can be useful in certain situations, but it is not the same thing as knowing how to make a decision when there are no instructions available. Eventually, children become teenagers and then adults, and the number of decisions that cannot be handed back to a parent or teacher increases. At some point, nobody will be standing beside them to explain which subject to take, which opportunity to accept, which friendship to pursue, which problem-solving method to use or which direction their life should take.
We cannot suddenly expect them to become independent simply because they have reached an age where independence is expected of them. It has to be practised beforehand, and that practice happens through relatively ordinary decisions that adults might otherwise consider too insignificant to matter.
This is also where I think our obsession with efficiency deserves a little questioning. We often assume that the quickest solution is automatically the better solution, but those two things are not necessarily the same. A shortcut is useful when the destination is already known and the objective is simply to arrive there more quickly. But what happens when we are trying to discover something new? What happens when the problem itself is changing? What happens when the old solution is no longer particularly suitable?
In those situations, efficiency can actually become a limitation because it encourages us to repeat what we already know works rather than investigate what else might be possible.
This is particularly relevant when we talk about creativity. We often tell children that we want them to be creative, but creativity can be quite inconvenient. A creative child may not take the most obvious route. They may ask questions that interrupt the lesson. They may propose an idea that requires more explanation. They may take a familiar activity and approach it from a completely different direction. From an adult's perspective, this can sometimes look like unnecessary complication when what the child is actually doing is exploring possibility.
Of course, not every unusual idea is a good one. Children will come up with terrible ideas. Adults do too, although we tend to have developed more socially acceptable ways of disguising them. The point is not that every idea should be celebrated simply because a child came up with it. The point is that children need enough space to develop, test and revise ideas before we decide whether those ideas are worth pursuing.
If we constantly interrupt the process because we already know a more efficient way of doing things, we may unintentionally teach children that the purpose of thinking is to arrive at the answer that the adult already has in mind.
That seems particularly short-sighted when we consider the problems they will eventually face.
The next generation is going to encounter questions that we cannot possibly answer for them. Technology is changing at a pace that would have seemed extraordinary when many of us were children. The nature of work is changing. The way people communicate is changing. Environmental, social and economic challenges continue to evolve. Some of the problems that children will have to solve as adults may not yet exist in the form that we recognise today.
We therefore have to be careful about teaching children that our existing solutions are the final word.
There is a difference between passing on knowledge and passing on assumptions. Knowledge is valuable because it gives children something to build upon. Assumptions become problematic when children are discouraged from questioning them. We can tell them what has worked before while still allowing them to ask whether something else might work better.
In fact, research into student motivation gives us another reason to take children's agency seriously. A 2022 meta-analysis by Julien Bureau and colleagues examined 144 studies involving more than 79,000 students and found that self-determined motivation was associated with academic well-being, persistence and achievement. The researchers examined the role of psychological needs including autonomy, competence and relatedness, and found that autonomy-supportive environments contributed to the satisfaction of those needs and to more self-determined motivation. Again, this does not mean that giving children unlimited choice magically produces academic success. What it suggests is that the way adults create learning environments can influence whether children experience learning as something they actively participate in or something that is primarily being imposed upon them.
That distinction is important because there is a temptation to reduce the entire discussion to whether children get better grades or perform better. I do not think that should be the only measure.
There is something much more fundamental at stake here, which is whether children develop confidence in their own ability to think.
If every decision is made for them, if every mistake is corrected immediately and if every unfamiliar problem is solved by someone older and more experienced, then they may become very efficient at reaching answers without necessarily developing much confidence in finding those answers themselves.
I have always found this particularly interesting in drama education. Theatre can be wonderfully frustrating for adults because children will rarely interpret a scene exactly as we expect them to. Give them a simple instruction and they will sometimes produce something completely different from what you imagined. Sometimes it is not useful at all, and we have to guide them back towards the objective. But sometimes they find something that I would not have thought of myself. That is one of the reasons I enjoy working with children creatively. They remind us that there is often more than one way to look at the same problem.
And perhaps that is one of the things adults need to remember more often: we are experienced, but we are not omniscient.
We have lived longer, which means we have accumulated knowledge and experience that children do not yet have. That gives us a responsibility to guide them, but it does not necessarily give us the right to determine every decision they make. There is a subtle difference between saying, “Here is what I know from experience; think about whether it is useful to you,” and saying, “I know better, so you should do what I say.”
The first leaves room for the child to think. The second leaves very little.
This is why I think the third part of empowering children has to be reflection. Giving children a choice is useful, and allowing them to experience manageable failure is useful, but neither becomes particularly meaningful if we never encourage them to think about what happened afterwards.
When a decision does not work, we can ask what they noticed. When something succeeds, we can ask why they think it worked. When they try a different approach, we can ask what made them choose it. These conversations help children develop an awareness of their own thinking, rather than simply relying on an external authority to tell them whether they were right or wrong.
It also gives them permission to change their minds.
I think that is an underrated part of decision-making. We sometimes talk about confidence as though a confident person is someone who makes a decision and sticks to it regardless of what happens. I would argue that confidence can also mean being willing to recognise that a decision did not work and having enough self-belief to reconsider it. Changing your mind because you have learnt something new is not necessarily weakness. Sometimes it is evidence that the learning process actually worked.
This is why I am increasingly convinced that children need opportunities to make decisions while the consequences are still relatively small. They need spaces where they can experiment with responsibility before the stakes become enormous. They need adults who can intervene when necessary but who are also willing to let them discover things for themselves when the situation allows it.
Perhaps we need to become slightly more comfortable with the fact that children will sometimes take longer than we would. They will sometimes choose an approach that seems unnecessarily complicated. They will sometimes misunderstand something, make a poor decision or pursue an idea that eventually goes nowhere. That does not mean that the adult has failed to teach them. It may simply mean that the child is actually doing some of the work of learning.
The danger comes when our desire to help becomes so strong that we remove the very experiences through which independence develops.
We save them time, but they lose the opportunity to experiment. We prevent the mistake, but they lose the opportunity to understand its consequences. We provide the answer, but they lose the opportunity to discover that they could have found one themselves.
And perhaps this is where I think the conversation about children and independence needs to move beyond the usual argument about whether parents or teachers are being too strict or too permissive. The issue is not simply about giving children more freedom. It is about giving them appropriate responsibility and allowing them to develop judgement through experience.
There will always be things that adults should decide. There will always be boundaries that children need. There will always be moments when we have to say, “No, you are not ready for this yet.” That is part of being an adult responsible for a child.
But there should also be moments when we can say, “You decide.” Not because we do not care what happens, but because we care enough about who they are becoming to let them practise becoming that person.
The next generation does not need us to solve every problem on their behalf. They need us to give them enough knowledge to understand the problems, enough guidance to navigate them and enough space to discover that they are capable of thinking through them.
After all, the problems of the future may require solutions that none of us have thought of yet. If we insist on teaching children only the ways we already know, we may become very good at reproducing the past while leaving very little room for the future to surprise us.
And perhaps that is the real reason we need to let children make more decisions. It is not simply because independence is a desirable quality, although it certainly is. It is because the world does not remain still, and eventually the children we are directing today will be the adults responsible for deciding what happens next.
Maybe we should give them some practice before then.
Maybe we should allow them to take the longer route sometimes, even when we know the shortcut. Maybe we should let them test an idea that we suspect will not work, provided the consequences are manageable. Maybe we should resist the urge to immediately correct every mistake and instead give them the chance to tell us what they think happened.
We may discover that they were wrong, and that is perfectly fine because they will have learnt something from being wrong.
We may also discover that they were looking at the problem from an angle we had not considered. And if that happens, perhaps the most useful thing an adult can do is not to feel threatened by it, but to be curious about where that new idea might lead.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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