Guiding our Children Through Tough Decisions

The hectic schedule of his older kids leads Jake Frost to consider the power of choice and how to teach them to decide between competing good things. 

One of the hardest things in life is choosing among many competing good things.  

As my kids are getting older and starting into high school, lots of new opportunities are opening up for them.  

There are sports and speech competitions and Science Olympiads and Future Farmers of America and all sorts of things.  

Good things. 

And winning in these competitions and moving on to state, or even nationals, means trips with the team across the state and even across the country, staying in hotels, meeting new people, having new experiences. 

All great stuff. 

Warning Signs 

But when we get toward the end of a busy week, when the kids have been out late each night pursuing their various endeavors, and I suddenly hear: “Oh no, I have a test tomorrow and I didn’t study for it,” I start thinking we need to recalibrate.  

Granted, we all forget things sometimes. We’ve all been there, putting something on the calendar, thinking we’ve got plenty of time for it, and then it creeps up on us and arrives before we know it — or got ready for it. It’s just part of life.  

But it’s also part of life to set goals and make choices. 

And part of pursuing opportunities is making sure that we can it well, giving our best efforts to the things that are most important to us.  

If you find yourself cutting corners and short-shrifting first priorities in favor of lesser goods, it might be time to reassess.  

(And spoiler alert for the high-schoolers, the school part of school is the first priority; that’s not just a necessary distraction to get through in order to facilitate all the exciting activities attendant to your high school experience; the school part isn’t the side dish, it’s the main course.) 

Which is where things get hard. Setting priorities will inevitably mean saying “no” so some good things, so that we’ll have the time and attention demanded to give our best to the first priorities.  

The Drift  

There’s no way around it. If we don’t make our choices thoughtfully and intentionally, choices will still be made, but they’ll be dictated by circumstances instead of our own decisions.  

It’s the danger of “the drift” — drifting along, juggling things thrown our way until we run out of hands and can’t juggle anymore.  

Better to decide for ourselves what matters to us and deciding what we’ll take up, and what we’ll decline. As Kenny Rogers sang a long time ago, we have to know what to throw away and what to keep. 

Our choices make all the difference, so we’ve got use that power of choice carefully. 

Never as Young Again as We Are Right Now  

It’s an art, for sure, and as we grow and change in life, our priorities will, too. But the ability to be able to set priorities and make choices can help navigate us through those changes to get to the places we really want to go. 

Which are good lessons to learn earlier rather than later, when the field of possibilities remains wider open. But whenever we learn that lesson is a good time to learn it.  

For us parents, we’ll never be younger than we are right now, so our aperture of possibilities is as wide open now as it will ever be.  

And knowing that our families figure into the mix of all the demands and plans and hopes were juggling, it’s a good thing to recall that we’ll never have more time with our family than we do right now. 

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Copyright 2025 Jake Frost
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