How to Teach Kids to Make Good Decisions

Kids are growing up in a world of headlines, short clips, confident opinions, and algorithms designed to get a reaction before they have time to consider the full story. Good judgment does not suddenly appear at 18. It has to be built through small, everyday decisions while the stakes are still low.

In this episode, Sue and Randee explain how to teach kids to make good decisions using 360-degree thinking, real-life experiences, reflection, and empathy. You will learn practical questions that help children slow down, examine their assumptions, consider consequences, and trust their own judgment.

Hi everyone, happy to have you here listening to the Ask Mom Parenting Podcast, where we take the mystery and the yelling out of modern parenting and offer real-life self-help for parents. I’m Sue and with me is Randee, and whether you’re deep in the toddler tantrums, navigating tween and teen drama, or somewhere in between, you’ll get clarity and actionable tools one episode at a time. Please help us reach any of your friends or family who may be tired of figuring out parenting alone by sharing, liking, or commenting.

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The Challenge of Raising Kids in a Soundbite World

Your seven-year-old confidently announces at dinner that bananas are bad for you, and his source is Mason’s cousin who saw it on YouTube. Or your teenager watches one relationship clip on social media and declares that anybody who takes 10 minutes to text back is emotionally unavailable.

Meanwhile, the person is just in the shower. You know, it’s funny when the subject is bananas or texting, but this is how kids are learning to gather information. One clip, one headline, one confident opinion, and the case is closed.

In early 2026, 68% of Google searches ended without a single click, without a single further moment of curiosity. We’re no longer finding answers, we’re just accepting them. So how do we raise kids who pause, question, and make good decisions in the world that’s built to get their reaction before it even earns their trust? Kids can hear one sentence, see one headline, or watch one dramatic clip and walk into the kitchen like they just completed a six-month investigation.

That’s the challenge with the soundbite world that we’re living in now, and honestly, you know, I’ve caught myself doing the same thing. I recently started training myself to say to whoever I’m talking to, well, I only saw the headline or I didn’t read the article, and I’m just trying to do that to kind of keep myself honest. But our kids don’t have the same frame of reference that we do.

They didn’t grow up before this constant access to tech and this plethora of information by tapping on a screen twice. Information is coming fast, but context, not so much. And emotion tends to arrive way before common sense even gets invited.

Our kids are surrounded by opinions, clips, captions, comments, and influencers. A lot of it is designed to get a reaction or form an opinion before they’ve even had time to form their own thought about it. And that matters because your child will eventually have to make important decisions when you’re not standing next to them to learn perspective or a history lesson.

They’ll have to decide what to believe, who to trust, whether to follow the crowd, when to question something, and when to walk away. Good judgment doesn’t suddenly appear when they turn 18. It has to be built in with small everyday moments long before the stakes become higher.

So today’s episode is how to raise kids who make good decisions even in a world built to distract them. We’re going to break this into three parts. How to teach kids the process for making strong decisions, how to give them the experiences that build the foundation for good decisions, and how empathy helps them pause to remove judgment before making good decisions.

Teach a Repeatable Decision-Making Process

In our first segment, it’s how to teach kids the process for making good decisions. And, you know, I love giving kids a system that they can use again and again.

Use 360-Degree Thinking

For decision making, I teach a process called 360 degree thinking.

And this idea came to me during a breakfast with one of our triplets. It happened to be the time that he was also applying to colleges. He’d always had big goals.

He wanted to get an engineering degree and then he wanted to fly in the military and eventually become an astronaut. So those are pretty lofty goals. During our breakfast and completely out of the blue, he casually mentions that he’s considering going to our local university because that’s where all his friends were going.

Now, this was a complete switch up from anything he’d talked about before. And honestly, this was like a dagger lobbed across the diner table. The local college didn’t offer the degree programs that he wanted.

And honestly, I was in shock. But if you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I teach parents to remain shockproof on the surface. Inside, I was in a free fall scrambling to turn this ship around.

I understood the pull that his friends had. As teenagers, friend influence is super powerful and it matters the most to them. But as parents, we have to figure out how to break through the clutter.

And this is how I did it. I grabbed my pen from my purse and I drew one little vertical line on a napkin and then I circled it. The line represented the decision in front of him.

The circle represented all 360 degrees around that decision, all the different angles, choices, consequences, all the possibilities that he couldn’t see if he looked only at what felt good in that moment. That’s what 360 degree thinking teaches kids to do. Mentally kind of roll around in the decision before making it.

Their first answer is often the most obvious one. My friends are going there, you know, everybody has the app. This is what feels good to me now.

That’s the immediate gratification. And good decision-making teaches kids how to delay that gratification. The obvious choice is only one angle.

A good decision asks kids to step back and look at the bigger picture. So at breakfast, we explored both college options. What would staying close to his friends give him? What might it cost him? What programs did each school offer? And would he meet more people and grow differently by leaving the state or versus, you know, staying in the state with his friends? Which one is going to grow you as a person a little bit more? Which choice supports the goal that you’ve already set? Then we moved beyond how the decision felt to his 17 year old self.

And I asked, how might it look to his 25 year old self? 360 degree thinking is really a series of what if drills. If I choose this, what could happen next? If I choose that, then what becomes possible? Will what feels comfortable to me now limit me later? And what feels uncomfortable today? This decision process or exercise is applicable to every age and phase. Our breakfast conversation lasted maybe seven minutes.

I planted the seed and I got him thinking and kept the door open for him to keep talking to me. I didn’t shut it down like I really wanted to. I didn’t shut it down.

I didn’t panic. I stayed shock-proof as far as he knew. And I kept the topic open for discussion.

The temptation was to feel fear for his future or feel threatened by the magnetic pull of his friends. This idea came to me in a moment of desperation to act quickly. And what a dynamic idea it has been.

I’ve taught so many families and teens this process, and it’s really helped kids consider the facts, their values, the short-term payoff, the long-term effect, and any possible outcomes before they choose what they want to do. In case you’re wondering, he did pick the out-of-state school, and at 25 years old, he is on his way to achieving his goals. And the best part about this whole process is that by me not reacting and by planting the seed, letting it go, stepping back, and doing the 360-degree thinking method, by the time his final decision was made, he thought that it was all his own idea.

So yay.

Questions That Build Better Judgment

Here are some questions that you can use to help inspire 360-degree thinking for your kids or even for yourself. What decision or problem are you trying to solve? A lot of times clarifying the decision to be made and just sort of boiling it down to one sentence is really where we start to get success.

What are all your available options, not just the obvious two that feel good today? What facts do you know and what might you be assuming? Who or what is influencing you most right now? What do you gain and give up with each option? And how might this decision affect you in three days, three months, or three years? That is really one of my favorites because it really gets kids outside of that myopic thinking, that fishbowl thinking. I really like challenging them with that question. You can also ask, what would your older self wish that you had considered? So what would you think at 25 where he is today? What would you be thinking then? Would you feel like you let yourself down? And then another one of my favorites is, what does your gut say after you’ve looked at the whole picture? Sort of train them to think of everything and then step away and let it settle in for a few days.

And then you’ll get the nudge for what’s right for you. And that’s pretty much how I make a lot of my decisions as well. I’ll do all my research.

I’ll try to figure it all out. And then I will sort of just step away and realize that my gut, my higher self, like my meditation, whatever it is, is going to come back around and give me that nudge as to what feels right in my gut. And I love teaching kids to connect with that.

Yeah. I love these questions that parents can ask to help kids like build that discernment. And honestly, I feel like as adults and we’re bombarded with more and more clickbait as well, practicing these questions with our kids can help keep us grounded too, especially with how much time a lot of us spend on social media.

In fact, I have noticed a lot more clickbait now than ever. And so I just have to kind of keep, you know, thinking about these things as well. And especially since like about two weeks ago, this is something that has been interesting.

My Facebook like algorithm changed, or I should say they set up, right? So interestingly enough, Facebook has many different versions of, you know, how the setup looks because they’re always testing like different versions and what people, you know, how people interact with the platform. So, you know, I could have a different one than you, but I don’t know if this is widespread or not, but my Facebook setup now, when you start to scroll is like, it used to be the caption, right? You’d see the word somebody wrote and then a picture or a video and then the comments. And mine has flipped all around.

So you only see whatever the picture of the video is first, then there’s the line for the reaction and comments. And then the caption, what people say is completely underneath that. So it’s kind of buried in, in everything now.

And the first thing I thought of is, wow, this is going to spread like clickbait and misinformation, like wildfire, because it’s going to be like, you know, the headline where, you know, you had mentioned now that you’re like saying, oh, like I just read the headline, which actually I am. I do that by the way, too. If I don’t have time to look into something, I’m like, by the way, I heard this, but not sure if it’s true, just saw the headline.

But that whole concept is probably going to be applied if this like Facebook thing, like if what I’m seeing becomes more normal and widespread, I think it’s just going to, you know, this clickbait or people are not going to be, you know, necessarily looking for all the information because it just gets buried. It’s actually hard to see the caption now for me. And it’s been about two weeks that I’ve experienced this.

So it’s interesting that we’re talking about this now. And I, this like had me thinking about this ever since, you know, my like Facebook feed has changed, I should say. But, you know, as adults, you know, we learn discernment as we get more life experience.

So like I know, okay, I got a look further into things. But as you mentioned, like our kids are growing up with this, they weren’t pre tech, they’re born into tech. So how do we give kids opportunities to maybe build life experience or wisdom before they’re making much bigger decisions on their own? Well, I love I, when I wrote my book, I was sort of obsessed with wisdom.

Because, you know, we always say things like, Oh, you’re wise beyond your years. And we always thought people tend to think that wisdom is something that you just are born with, you know, that she’s just wise, she’s a wise old soul. And I don’t agree with that.

I think that we can teach wisdom. Yeah, some of us are born a little bit more with that knowing. But I also think that we can inject and teach wisdom in our kids.

And wisdom is something that is very important, again, for discernment. I love the word discernment. Because we’re, like I said, we’re looking at these headlines and kids aren’t really understanding that that the engineers have spent countless hours with big degrees to hook you and they’re constantly looking.

I mean, it’s a business, they don’t care about you. They only care about the clicks and the money and the ads and getting people to continue investing in their product. So kids just don’t have that background that we do.

And I think it’s important to be able to teach that for them. So that again, for good decision making. But wisdom is something that like I said, it’s not something that you’re always born with.

It’s something that I think as parents we can do. And so

Build Wisdom Through Real-Life Experience

the second segment for making good decisions and teaching kids how to make good choices is life experiences build wisdom for good decisions. And if you want your kids to become wise, wisdom has to be lived.

Okay, so good decisions don’t come from facts alone. Kids also need observation, perspective, judgment and enough real life experience to understand how the world works. Now we expect kids to make wise choices about life when honestly, they’ve had very little exposure to real life because they’re not really out and about yet.

So wisdom isn’t just information that they’ve been taught or something they’ve read. It’s what happens when they take that information and apply it. So it’s the application of information.

It’s not just again, scrolling, taking the sound bites, reading the headline and thinking that that’s fact thinking that that is the whole picture. We take the information and we have to apply it. And there really is no shortcut for this.

Your child has to live and they have to experience disappointment, success, awkwardness, responsibility and consequences, and the pride that comes from figuring something out for themselves. But for them to see more of life, we have to be willing to invest in showing it to them.

Expand Their View of the World

Every chance you get, expose your kids to different people, places, cultures, different ways of living, help them experience more than just a screen in front of them, more than their friend group or more than the four walls of their classroom.

Take them on a career tour. If they love cars, ask your mechanic if they can watch for an hour. If they want to become a vet, they can go volunteer at an animal shelter.

If they love to draw, take them to an art gallery and introduce them to somebody who makes a living creatively. Visit a trade school or a college campus or a courthouse during a public trial. All of these opportunities to see life and experience how an adult lives and what a job or career looks like is free.

And they allow your child to see possibilities that they never have imagined on their own. And it also gets them out of that, like that little kid thinking, and it gets them visualizing how future can look for them. I remember when I decided to start my own business, I had a mentor that was, you know, this was back in the nineties and nobody worked from home back then.

But I met this guy who is doing my other business, my rep business. He’s like, well, I work from home. And I was like, how does that look? So I made him send me a picture of his office in his basement.

And then visually I was like, oh, oh, that’s how I can do it. And you know, for 34 plus years, I’ve run my own business from my home before it became popular for everybody to be teleworking. So I just visualize, oh, that’s what you meant.

And that’s how that looks. And that’s what we need to do for our kids. Once they see it in action, this is how they start to form their goals and they create their own ideas of what their future can look like outside of just the home and the school.

Let them ask adults, you know, what do you enjoy about your work? What do you regret? Did you have to sacrifice anything? You know, if you had known anything earlier, what would you have done differently? Those conversations help our kids build perspective and it also helps, like I said, for kids to develop goals. And when a child has something with meaning that they’re working toward, they’re suddenly more at stake when they make a decision. Like with my son, he had all these goals.

He dressed up in his astronaut suit and he wanted to fly. And now all of a sudden, the pull of your friends is taking you away from a school that has all the programs you want for this temporary moment. My job as a parent was to get him outside of that temporary teenage thinking.

Their choices are no longer happening in a vacuum. You know, they start to understand that what they can do today can open or close doors tomorrow. And I have another little example.

One of my other kids wanted to fly forever. Ever since he was a little boy, you know, he was throwing up little parachutes and he was playing with airplanes. And in high school, he started kind of blurring the lines from doing his own work and what other people were doing.

So he was looking at other people’s papers. He was not really doing all the work himself. And anyway, I was on the speed dial with the vice principal.

Every week, there was some type of new thing going on with this kid. And this principal really taught me an important lesson. After, I’m not kidding, the fifth time this guy called, hey, you know, so-and-so’s in the room here, but you know, he’s this, he’s that.

He just sat my son down and he asked him one question. And this was so pivotal. He just said to my son, what do you want to do in the future? Well, in that moment, it just, he spiraled into like, it crystallized everything in that moment.

And the principal was able to say, you know, if you continue down this road of being mentally lazy or not doing the work yourself, or, you know, when you, I could really get you in trouble to where things are on a record for you that might affect your college, it might affect future opportunities. This principal really gave him, you know, a conversation of like, what’s your goal? And it just so happened that my kid did have a goal. And that was now in jeopardy with all of his behavior.

And I’m not, that was it. I never, you know, last time I saw that vice principal was at graduation. And it was, it was a really big lesson for me.

And I love when other authority and, you know, teachers, coaches, whatever can help get through to our kids like that. So

Connect Today’s Choices to Future Goals

once you have a kid with a goal and you’re trying to get them to formulate that and have life experiences that help crystallize that, let them practice, you know, give them like low stakes decisions that allow them to live with the outcome. Let them spend the money they wish they hadn’t, you know, let them forget something and feel the inconvenience.

Let them choose how to prepare and experience the result of, you know, doing things that might not achieve that goal. Like with my son. Wisdom is built when a child has experience and reflects on it and begins to think next time I might do that differently.

Yeah, definitely. I think this whole idea of wisdom and experience is so great and especially important right now because of all the time, you know, they’re spending on technology and just all kinds of things. Algorithm changes, you know, fake pictures going around the internet.

There’s all sorts of stories. You know, in kids, they’re not just hearing opinions from the people around them. You know, if they have any sort of access to a device, you know, they have, they’re getting hundreds of messages every day, whether that be through social media, influencers, videos, group chats.

I know group chats. My daughter’s about to go into middle school. She’s not in the group chats yet, but I know like they’re big around here.

So I’m like, oh, what about the group chats? I know that’s going to come down the line on like the iPads. You know, and even like my daughter, right? Like she doesn’t have social media, but she has YouTube and YouTube has like a short section. So it’s kind of like scrolling through Instagram reels.

And it’s like, I started to like, I just see her sometimes scrolling. Like she has a limited amount of time on it, but she’ll like, it’s almost exhausting, but like see her flick up, flick up like every 15 seconds. And you know, it’s just crazy that like things are coming down to like 15 second reels for a lot of people, right? Like we have 15 seconds to grab your attention.

And at one point I said to my husband, I was like, well, what’s next after the 15 second reels? I was like, I don’t think we can go any less. Cause usually like the timing of stuff gets shorter and shorter. And I’m like, I don’t think we can go any less than a 15 second reel.

But you know, I just think like a lot of these messages are designed to get an immediate reaction. So just curious what your thoughts on like, how do we help kids pause before turning one moment, one story or one rumor around school into like judgment about someone’s character or making a decision about, you know, somebody else. Yeah.

That’s important because like you said in 15 seconds, you cannot possibly consume, you know, any, anything worth value and, you know,

Use Empathy to Slow Down Judgment

empathy is our third, our third section on making good decisions and helping kids make good decisions. And it’s how empathy helps kids make better decisions, because this is a skill that can be taught. You know, we think, Oh, some kids are deeply feeling, or some kids are just a little bit more in tune.

No, no, we, there are certain things we can do to help build empathy in our kids so that they can get outside of their own brain and their own mind and their own, again, self gratification into thinking how their actions or what their thought processes or decision is going to affect others. And again, this is a skill that can be taught because if you’re making a decision without empathy, that’s really just judgment. And that’s kind of what is what you’re talking about with the scrolling.

You know, we’re just judging, judging, judging, judging, and we’re consuming and it’s all external coming in as opposed to figuring out inside what matters to me and then putting my value out into the world. I’m just consuming and consuming and consuming. And I think that’s really dangerous.

You know, we want kids to understand that the first version of a story is rarely, if ever the whole story, a rumor, you know, a rude comment or an angry reaction might tell us something about a person, but it doesn’t tell us everything about them. There’s always more to the story. And right now, our kids are growing up in a world that rewards fast opinions.

Like, you know, we were talking about, right? They see one headline or one short clip. And within seconds they’ve decided who is right, who is wrong, and what kind of person everyone involved must be. But good decision makers don’t just ask what happened.

They think, what could be missing? What am I missing? Let’s say your 10 year old daughter comes home and says, you know, I’m not friends with her anymore. She’s rude. And she was rude to me all day.

And I’m, we’re no longer friends. You know, before agreeing that the friendship is over or telling your daughter to ignore it, if you can just slow her decision down, you can say, well, what did she actually say? Or was this just one moment? Or is this, does this keep happening? You can ask her, you know, did you happen to ask her if something was wrong or maybe what else could be going on? You know, I really, I learned that from my husband. He’s talk about judgy.

Like I’m, I’m the worst. I’m the, I’m the, I’m that person. You know, I was like, I’m assessing, I’m connecting dots.

And my husband is always the guy that if somebody is acting out of character, he’ll walk up, put his hand on them and say, you know, is it, is everything okay? And I’ve learned a lot from him in that regard, because it’s just been such a successful way of getting people to open up if they’re acting sort of, you know, differently. So it’s important to ask her kids, did you ask them, is everything okay? I think that’s important for bringing empathy out and then show her how to flex her empathy muscle, right. By offering, you know, maybe your parents were fighting.

Let’s think about all the things that might be going on in her life. You know, maybe she didn’t sleep. Maybe she’s embarrassed about something or dealing with something that she doesn’t know how to explain, or maybe she just doesn’t like you anymore.

That is an option. You know, maybe she just woke up and was like, you know, I have grown this friendship. It happens.

You know, we don’t really know, but if we apply our 360 degree thinking around it, we can consider options before just ending the friendship without a conversation, you know, or imagine your teen is angry because another kid didn’t contribute to the group project. And I hear this a lot with parents that I’m coaching, or I do coach teens. And surprisingly, it is a really big thing.

The kids are so pissed that one kid is doing all the work and there are so many that aren’t carrying their weight. And, you know, you’re going to come to the conclusion, you know, he’s lazy. I hate him.

He’s dumb. But you know, what if your son learns later that the kid is caring for his siblings at home by himself after school, or maybe he doesn’t have consistent internet access at home, or, you know, maybe he is lazy. But if you confront him and you show some empathy and you apply these different versions of thought process to your immediate reaction, it does sort of start to, you can train your kids to start thinking, well, maybe I don’t have the whole story.

It just takes a few minutes to help our kids think through all the what-ifs. You know, like I said, maybe he is lazy, you know, but let’s not jump to that conclusion if that’s just the headline. And it’s not always the deeper story.

Help Kids Imagine Themselves in the Hot Seat

Kids understand this even more if they have some skin in the game. You can ask your child, how would you want your friends to think about you if you had a crappy day, or if you didn’t sleep that well last night, or you forgot the assignment, or you said something you regretted, because that day’s coming. We all say things we regret.

So we’re taking this moment to bake in the process for how to feel empathy for others, the same empathy that we hope somebody will give us. And now, they’re not just analyzing someone else’s mistake. They’re imagining what fairness feels like for them when they’re in the hot seat, and we all end up there at some point, and we hope that we’re given grace and understanding when we do.

Separate Observation From Assumption

Curiosity can become such an important parenting tool, you know, asking our kids to separate what they actually observe from what they may be assuming or what they’re just hearing. You know, what did you personally see? Are you taking someone’s word for it? And what decision would you make if you knew there was more going on? Empathy keeps us from building an entire conclusion from just one side of the story or one, just one little snippet. And teaching our kids how to make great decisions isn’t just about making fewer mistakes.

It’s that very soon the stakes will be higher, and the choices that they’re making will be more important. As parents, it feels pretty good when our kids have been raised to trust themselves enough to choose what protects them today and also protects their future. If you’d like to go deeper, I break down exactly how the wisdom continuum and my 360-degree thinking process works together in my book, Secrets to Parenting Without Giving a Fuck.

It lays out exactly how this works. It’s got tons of examples and helps you show your child how to slow down, look at the full picture, consider options, and trust their own judgment. So you’re not making every decision for them forever.

Check it out on my website, AskMomParenting.com. Thank you so much for listening and happy parenting.

Help Your Child Build Better Judgment

Sue breaks down the Wisdom Continuum and her 360-degree thinking process in Secrets to Parenting Without Giving a F^ck. The book gives you practical tools for helping your child slow down, examine the full picture, consider consequences, and make confident decisions without relying on you forever.

Learn More and Get Sue’s Book