Teach Your Children to Think About Outcomes （ 1 ）
Help your kids to make better choices in life

Young people who can truly learn to "put their thinking caps on" will make better choices in terms of marriage partner, career decisions and overall life planning.

Thinking clearly affects their decisions and choices.  Thinking helps them take control of their own destinies. Those of us who avoid thinking run the risk of being victimized . Other people can be very happy to make decisions for us.

People need to understand that thinking is an acquired skill. Figuring things out takes practice, failure, retooling one's plans, and trying an alternate route if necessary.

If your children don't learn how to think in detail about life's challenges, other people will end up making their choices or their choices will happen by default. Thinking is not just a verb. It's a process.  You must teach them the process of evaluating outcomes. In other words, you must teach them to "play the movie" to see into the future.

Imagining the future

For example, you might tell your 10-year-old son, "If you don't apologize to your friends, what do you think will happen? If you do apologize, how do you see this affecting you from this point on? "

" I think I helped my stepson, Chris, get off drugs by teaching him to think," says Jill. "Chris had never been taught to look at things from different viewpoints." Before Jill and her husband got Chris into rehab , Jill shared her own bad life choices with her stepson. She told him how her lack of thinking skills got her into trouble.

Jill says she openly shared her mistakes. "I knew Chris was hurting, and I didn't want him to feel so alone. I wanted him to know that he could think reason and make better choices. I'd been down some hurtful paths, and I wanted to help him see he could get to a better place."

Vocabulary Focus

put (one's) thinking cap on (idiom) ---to think seriously about something

retool (v) ---to revise and reorganize, usually for the purpose of improving

by default (adv phr) ---automatically occurring when no deliberate action is first chosen or taken

Specialized Terms

victimize (v) ---- 欺负；不公平地对待 to treat someone in an intentionally unfair way, especially because of their race, sex or beliefs

rehab (n) --- 协助戒（毒或酒）的过程 the process of helping someone to stop taking drugs or alcohol