You are repainting your bedroom. You want blue. Not just any blue. A calming but not dull blue. One that will lighten the room, but not make it too bright. A blue with life in it, not a dull “hospital blue”. You visit your local paint store and stand in front of a display with cardboard strips featuring hundreds of paint colors. Those paint chips offer a world of possibilities, they hint at what could be. You grab all the blues and return home with dozens of blue choices, and realize, you are not really any closer to finding the perfect blue for your bedroom walls.
Human beings do not like having no choice. Parents and educators know that telling a child to “do your homework” is often less successful than asking “will you do your math or reading first?”, allowing the perception of choice to take the sting out of the sense of being directed or controlled. We have learned, however, that too much choice often has a negative effect.
In the 1970’s Alvin Toffler published his landmark book, Future Shock, which included a chapter on what he termed “overchoice”. He predicted “People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.” He arranged for the book to be published with a variety of different color covers – providing buyers with the personal experience of overchoice. Toffler wrote at a time when there were perhaps a dozen toothpaste versions, and 7 major TV stations. Imagine what he would think about our current world!
Research on choice is clear. Some is good, too much is not. The Hick-Hyman law, named for two psychologists, states that increasing the number of choices will increase the amount of time it takes to make a decision. The phenomena of overchoice or choice overload has been widely documented. Overchoice leads people to delay or totally avoid decision-making, to make poorer decisions and to feel less satisfied with any decisions they do make. In some cases, too many options leads to total decision paralysis.
As parents and educators, we certainly do not want to eliminate choice from children’s or student’s lives, any more than we want to totally limit our own choices. But the endless blues of our paint chips remind us – we can overdo it. Asking our students or children if they want to practice math, or write a letter, or have a snack or work together, etc. may overwhelm their decision-making capacity. We can scaffold decision making by breaking big decisions into smaller ones. Of these two options which do you prefer? Now that we have eliminated your least preferred option, which of the following two choices are better?
Perhaps one of the most important ways we can help our children, our students, and ourselves with choice is to recognize and label overchoice and decision paralysis when it happens. In the grocery store when we are blessed with a seemingly endless array of breakfast cereals, we can verbalize “when there is so much to choose from it is hard to decide”. When we see a child struggling to make a decision, we can ask “is this hard because there are too many choices”.
Today’s children are living in a world with a lot of choice, and a world that will likely continue to expand those choices. As adults who care about healthy growth and healthy choices, we cannot hide from the overchoice reality. We can stand with children at the proverbial paint chip display and validate their sense of being overwhelmed. We can help them narrow the field, winnowing the choices down to a reasonable number. And perhaps most importantly, we can let them know, we will be with them, always, no matter how they choose to paint their lives.
Life's Tool Box - A Guide for Parents and Educators 