On this week's 'Parenting' segment on the Moncrieff show, one listener sought advice on what to do about her nine-year-old daughter who struggles to make up her mind.
Joanna Fortune, a psychotherapist specialising in child and adult psychotherapy, offered some guidance.
Listener question
How do I help my nine-year-old daughter to make decisions for herself? She has always struggled to make her mind up on things since she could walk.
When she does finally decide, for example, to buy something, like clothes, she never feels fully satisfied that she has made the right decision and seems unhappy when she should be delighted with a treat.
We've often spent ages in shops when she's ruminating over what to pick and sometimes there are tears and moods that don't lift until hours later.
Her younger sister aged five is definitely more decisive and might choose something very quickly, often then my nine-year-old will then change her mind and pick the same thing. I presume she feels jealous and possibly that her decision was not as good.
I think I need to help boost her confidence and self-esteem but I don't know how to go about this. Any advice would be great.
Joanna Fortune's advice
"You want to praise effort over outcome, because sometimes decisiveness can also be linked with self-doubt, 'I'm not sure I can trust myself to make good choices and decisions', and then if it wasn't the perfect decision, I was wrong. I can hold myself to very high standards and if it didn't work it was a failure.
"You want to focus on praising effort over outcome and I think such a good example is about her choosing an outfit. I think if I go into a shop and there's so much I want and there's so much colour and so much nice things and I want it all actually, it would be hard to pick one thing. If you're going into the shop you could use that more structured piece of letting her look but picking out three or four things that you know she would like and you're happy to buy.
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay"Then you hold up the items and say, which of these four, because maybe choosing from a whole shop is overwhelming. Because when you say you presume she feels jealous when her sibling has a different choice and she wants to change her mind and pick the same thing, I don't think it's jealousy, I think she doubts that her decision was good, so that would be about indecisiveness more than jealousy.
"They can look at the same, 'Oh I want what she has', but it can be, 'I didn't make the right choice' and those are different things. I think that structure of giving three or four options and gradually, and I don't mean the next time you go to the shop, but gradually extending her decision-making window until the day she can go into a whole shop and make a choice for herself without doubting it or so she can see you can make a choice, get it wrong, or regret that choice, and learn from it and say next time I will choose differently or I'll use a different way of coming to my choice.
File photo. Credit: Huy Lam/Design Pics via ZUMA Wire"That's what you really want to do. At home, I want you to support her, if you're not already doing it, then start, learning to do things for and by herself. This could be learning how to scramble eggs, how to make a basic meal, what laundry goes where, how to load up the washing machine, household tasks that require some responsibility but moreover, independence. The more she feels she can do for herself by herself, the more she will believe in her capacity to make good choices for herself.
"Spot those opportunities for decision making, always tell her it was a great choice and praise the effort that went into the choice. The key to all of this is as parents, we have to stay out of the fix or change agenda. You have to bear witness to the struggle [of the decison-making], not jump in or rescue, but bear witness to it and then keep reaffirming that she'll find her way out of it."
