Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Inability to make up one's mind - gifted trait?

I was never given choices about food or clothes until I was old enough to buy my own. if you tell him stuff rather than asking it won't hurt him.

DD is like this. Then again, I can be too. To some extent, anxiety is involved (what if I make the wrong choice?) However, DD is also quite particular and highly aesthetic and enjoys weighing options (for instance, she likes to shop and to think about party planning). But it can be a problem, for sure.

For older children (and adults!) a tool like Pinterest can help organize decision-making.

Have you tried making a decision tree together for some of these choices to bound the decision? It might be slow the first time or two, but giving him a systematic way to analyze a decision might help downstream. Keep your probabilities simple.

Great thread. You've received wonderful replies and I'll just add that while it may be good for kids to begin practicing small decisions now in preparation for making larger decisions later, to keep slow decision making from being annoying for a parent, you may wish to consider stating which option will be the "default" if he doesn't answer within x minutes.

This introduces another lesson - which some might call "window of opportunity", or "strike while the iron is hot", or "the show must go on", or "not making a decision IS making a decision", or "analysis paralysis".

Aquinas already mentioned decision trees and probabilities. I like those as well as any other decision making tools especially ones where I can calculate the best decision.

Now, I also like to analyze time efficiency. Often, I can be prone to want to come up with the optimum solution to some problem, but as soon as I realize it must be the optimum solutions within a time domain I can break free of the perfection trap. I do think it is good for kids (and adults to have adequate time to make decisions that are important), but that can not be an unreasonable amount of time.

My kids went through phases like this - I don't think it was necessarily related to giftedness as I've seen other kids go through it too. With mine, I think it was more simply not being interested in the decision. I am fairly certain that most of the time I was asking my kids if they'd decided yet they had actually moved on and were thinking about something else entirely but just said "I'm thinking about it" as a standard go-to answer.

Limiting decisions is one way to deal with it - giving a child choices is a good thing, but they don't need to be given choices on a large # of things. If it's a decision your child does need to make, give them a time limit and remind them to make the decision.

Best wishes,

polarbear

ps - fwiw, my kids didn't really have choices like what's for lunch or which shoes to wear outside at 7 years old. The choices they had at that age were more along the lines of what toy to play with, what game to play, what friend they wanted to have a playdate with etc.

My personal observations with this type of behavior tell me three things: it's not specific to giftedness (though the gifted proclivity to perfectionism makes it more likely), it's not something one necessarily grows out of, and it can become a limiting factor in future success. I'm most easily able to observe this behavior in the technology field, where you find people who are unable to successfully diagnose hardware/software problems, because they are so afraid of breaking things further that they require significant handholding and never take a single step forward in the troubleshooting process on their own. They find themselves sidelined, and do not advance in their careers.

So, I would recommend taking this seriously as a potential problem, and addressing it at an early age.

Apart from the many strategies for addressing perfectionism in general, for this specific problem I'd add one: give him a time limit, and once he exceeds it, choose for him... and if you know he has a preference, choose the one he'd like least. So if you know he likes baths over showers, choose shower. When he immediately protests, tell him it's too late, and let him experience the consequences of failing to choose in a timely manner.

If you're not certain of a preference, then choose the one that's more convenient for you.

I think this is a gifted trait. My DS16 does something similar. He won't answer the question "what is your favorite" or other vague prompts that expect you to make a random choice. For years he couldn't answer it.. period. He would freeze and not answer or not write anything. Teachers LOVE to use this as a prompt for writing and he often just freezes and can't write anything. It's taken YEARS to get him to not take the question literally. It's especially bad when it's something he really doesn't care about like "what is your favorite sport".

Over & over I've explained and had other teachers and professionals explain that it is a prompt to get him to say something. The teacher really couldn't care less if it's really his favorite he just needs to find something social acceptable to respond, or if it's a writing assignment that it's a subject he is comfortable writing about. If it's a person trying for an ice-breaker it's perfectly OK to say you don't have a favorite.

Yup.

Of the three gifties in my house, DD and I are the ones that do this.

Could be that it is LOG, could be it's a major aversion to black-and-white thinking, could be that it's perfectionism, and it's possible that it's just a personality quirk.

I will say that this kind of over-analysis tends to be a really detrimental feature in many educational settings which use T/F, cloze, or multiple-choice assessments. Because the more you know, the harder the questions get, see...

In the case of little insignificant things, though, DD and I neither one have any trouble at all-- it's only when we are MISSING information necessary to make a larger decision that has definite consequences that we begin to have trouble.

I'm another me too. A recurring event from my childhood was standing at the register in a store where my mom was waiting for me to pick a candy bar frozen like a deer in headlights. She eventually would say say I had to the count of three or I wouldn't get any, and I would pick at random, and often ended up a little disappointed. Looking back, I may have a solution. I think what kind of sandwich do you want isn't a thinking kind of question, it's a feeling one. I was a very cerebral kid, and tried to analyze everything, but was not really in the world the way some people are. Mindfullness, and sensory and emotional awareness let us know what we like. I was almost 30 before I had any idea that I liked anything other than problem solving reading books drawing and swimming. I knew what i didnt like, but everything else take it or leave it.Im pretty sure those skills can be taught, and the how to make a decision advice is probably inappropriate for this particular kind of situTion. Better is to pick at random, then get him to really pay attention to eating Which ever, and how it makes him FEEL.