Guest Post: Think It Through

Happy Monday! Sharla is back with another great story with wisdom attached to it.

Please check out her other posts and leave a comment if you like it!
January - Blow It Big
February -  Family Principles
March - Love Does

P.S. I don't mean to get all sentimental, but when Josiah was a itty bitty baby, maybe a bit older than Carsen, he'd come over to my parent's house and hang out with us. My family LOVED this baby, and now he's practically a man.

1. Where does the time go?
2. His woman needs to be funny and happy!

For the last month, the chalkboard in my kitchen has read, “Think it through.” We see those words each time we leave the house, when we eat a meal, or when we set out to watch television.

It is good advice for everyone, but especially for those who are not yet adults. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain in charge of long-term thinking, is not fully developed until around the age of twenty-five. This explains so much about my children. I’ve often wondered why they would use a Thursday to play video games instead of clean their rooms when they knew fully well that they couldn’t have any friends spend the night on Friday since their room was messy. I’d like to help them develop the skill to clean on Thursday in order to have fun on Friday, but I want to take it deeper than that.

Sometimes thinking it through is a very complicated thing to attempt. Sometimes we find ourselves deciding between only bad choices, and other times it seems as if any of the choices we are faced with would be good and it is hard to choose just one. There is a trick I use when this happens: Before you take action, pretend your life is a movie you are watching, and you are the main character. Play each situation through to its conclusion and see how it works out. At its end, would that main character wish to go back and make a different choice? If so, you are able to choose differently from the start.

My seventeen-year-old son, Josiah, asked Mike and me what we thought about a girl he knew. He was considering asking her out and wanted our opinion. We didn’t know her very well, but she seemed like a nice enough girl. He decided he would ask her at school the next day.

“How did it go with Claire today?” I asked Josiah when I saw him after school.

“I decided not to ask her,” he said, throwing his backpack onto the couch.

“What happened?” I asked, surprised.

“Well, I was planning on it, but as the day went on, I just kept thinking about it. I saw it all in my head, and I saw that we would be really happy for a couple weeks, but then I would get tired of the way she likes to be sad instead of happy, and then I would try to make her happy, and she would get tired of me trying to change her. I would want out of the relationship, and I would want to be just friends again, but then she would be really sad, and probably mad, and all her friends would be mad, and then all of my friends would be mad at her friends, and it would get awkward. So I decided to just stay friends like future me would want to do.”

He may have learned the lesson too well.

Sharla Hintz lives in Des Moines, Iowa with her husband and four teenage children. She owns and runs a remodeling and management company with her husband, and spends most of her time trying to avoid working there.

 She graduated from University of Northern Iowa with a degree in science, and puts that degree to good use by ignoring it so she can write a blog called fromthecarpoollane.blogspot.com.