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Life Skills · Decide · Grades 6 to 8
Chapter 2: Thinking & Decisions
You will not have all the information. Decide anyway.
You will not have all the information. Decide anyway.
2 situations to decide. There is often more than one good answer: pick one and see what happens.
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Not deciding is a decision. It has results like any other, and it usually picks the default without you.
Choosing a movie is reversible; you can turn it off. Sending a message is not. Spend your thinking on the ones you cannot take back.
You can decide well and it still goes wrong. Judge the decision by what you knew at the time, not by how it turned out.
These ones do have right answers.
Sort by how hard each one is to undo.
Which of these can you take back?
Tap something to move it.
Question 1 of 1
You made a careful choice and it went badly. Was it a bad decision?
Something to do away from the screen. Nobody is checking.
Why: Most people spend their thinking in exactly the wrong place — agonizing over lunch and firing off messages.
The reversible-versus-not distinction is the single most useful decision tool at this age, because adolescents systematically over-deliberate small choices and under-deliberate permanent ones — especially online, where the irreversible ones are the fastest to make.
Separating decision quality from outcome quality is worth defending in your own house. A child punished for a reasonable choice that went wrong learns to avoid decisions, not to make better ones.
If your child is stuck on something reversible, "you can change your mind on Thursday" often unsticks it faster than any amount of analysis.