If a child is to learn how to make responsible choices about areas such as honesty, sexuality and drug use, she must first be given a chance to make lots of other choices. As a parent, you need to need to look for and find opportunities for her to make choices.

Choices begin early. It is as simple as when your little one chooses between Grape Nuts and Fruit Loops or the red pants or the blue ones. You may not want to give her the choice and that is fine. But wherever you can, let her pick which is the one she wants. She needs to practice picking the best choice for herself. You can let her pick the one she wants if she will be home playing with her sister. If she is going to spend the evening with friends, you may want her to wear what looks really the best.

Choices change as time goes on. While you may have something to say about what she wears when she is 4, you may have less choice to pick her clothes when she is 14. Give her that chance. She is learning to say no to you just like you want her to learn how to say no to others. If you always have made the choices for her, she will have much more difficulty saying no to others as she grows and as some of these choices become far more critical.

Sometimes you need to work hard to make choices available to her. A choice she can make is between making the salad or doing the dishes. She can pick between practicing her flute now or right after dinner. She can watch television or play a game on the computer. These are some easy choices to give her as she grows.

You do need to talk together about coming choices. Pose questions about how she might handle it if she were to go to a friend’s house and the discussion turned to taking some of the alcohol in the parent’s cupboard. How might she handle that situation? Give her a chance to really think it over. Then talk about how she could handle it.

Be sure to have these discussions before she goes to parties with her older friends and things get out of hand either because of alcohol or because of drugs. Again ask how she might handle it. Then put your ideas out about it.

I always remember some of our children discussing that we should pretend that an older sister or cousin was due to have a baby. If the situation got out of hand, they would call home to see if she had gone into labor. That would be a key to us, the parents, knowing that it was time for us to come get her. We never needed to use this tale but it gave her strength knowing that she had a way out of a difficult situation.

Teens are faced with many tough choices as they grow. Be there to help by introducing some of the difficult choices they will face. Make sure she understands that most teens face these kinds of choices and you don’t fault her for them. Explain that these choices go on throughout life.

When she is in a department store and the clerk has turned around, it looks so easy to take the earrings she really likes. She has to make a choice. When she is with her friends and they offer her illegal marijuana and she may think no one would ever know if she used it, again she has to make a choice. When she is taking an important test and a friend tells her a way she can smuggle the questions to her before the test, she has to make a choice. Life is filled with them and they don’t quit when she is an adult. These choices determine the kind of person she decides to be. Help her practice so that she can be the person she is proud of.

You may have to set limits on her choices but within those limits, let her pick. For example, when it is too cold for her to wear shorts, you still can give her a choice between her jeans and her red pants. You can let her make the choice of which vegetable the family will have for dinner. Positive, purposeful parenting helps make responsible adults.

Cynthia Martin is the founder of the First Teacher program and director of Parenting Matters Foundation, which publishes newsletters for parents, caregivers and grandparents. Reach Martin at pmf@olypen.com or at 681-2250.