Making choices...

Today I was talking a lot about making choices with my class. Quite often my conversations with kids will go like this:

Me: You chose to do the wrong thing, you can't blame anyone else.

Child: But so and so told me to.

Me: If so and so told you to jump off a roof would you?

The good old, bog standard British excuse to to someone saying another person told them to do something. When kids are growing up they find it so hard to realise that actually, they make their own choice in behaviour regardless of whether someone has told them to do something or not. My kids have this in their mind now and I very rarely have the above conversation now, however, when they get older this isn't how things work.

Regardless of how often we make our own choices, there are many which even as an adult are made for us by the 'higher powers' of government and managers etc. We try and instill this value by allowing kids to make choices about their behaviour and generally the running of the school e.g. timetables is all set for them. This will hopefully make children realise that as you grow older, their own behaviour choices are so important.

We also discussed how to make someone special happy by making the right choice and most answers revolved around the idea of compromise. They all choose to do things such as play a friends game, play a game with their brother and take turns at being in goal. As a grown up compromise so often goes out the window. Due to the stresses and craziness of lives, people tend to become quite self-focused. This isn't on purpose it just happens. 

That's one thing I like about blogging and reading blogs- it opens your eyes up to other people and things they're going through or feeling and it's nice to have that back. Basically, I think a lot of people (myself included sometimes) need to focus on how to make the right choice to make other people happy. By working all the time I make the wrong choice as this gives me less time to spend time with friends and family. Maybe I should make a choice to spend less time working to make others happy. It's hard and quite often choices are but after all, you get what you give. 

What about you? Is there any choice you could make to try and make someone happy that maybe you sometimes forget about or just know that they're always there anyway?