I want to look at a scenario many of us home educators end up wondering about. Give your child real freedom over what they learn and how they spend their days, and sooner or later you’re probably going to ask yourself -
What happens if they only ever choose easy? What if they never challenge themselves? That’s gotta be bad, long-term, right?
What if they just read the same kinds of books, make the same things, play the same games, and every time you suggest something harder or more challenging or even just different they say nah.
Well, that’s probably going to make you nervous, and that’s because one of the big beliefs sitting underneath a self-directed approach to education is that children will just...take on hard things. But when your child is sitting there perfectly happy doing something they mastered six months ago, and you can see a whole world of interesting harder things sitting right there available to them but they won’t engage at all, it’s easy to wonder if things aren’t going how they should.
So let me start with something that probably isn't very reassuring (yet - stay with me). Given freedom, children WILL often choose the easy option. Of course they will. Adults do it constantly, right?
We cook the meal we already know how to cook rather than attempting a more complicated new one. We put off the piece of work we’re not very confident about. We train the things we’re good at in the gym and have to really push ourselves to work on the things we’re not. Sometimes the comfortable option is just comfortable, and I don't think we need to convince ourselves that a child with enough autonomy will wake up every morning ravenous for the most difficult possible experience. That’s just not how life works.
But it IS important that children do hard things, at least from time to time, so to help us get there I think there’s a better question. Rather than asking "why do they always choose the easy option”, we should ask:
What does choosing something hard currently feel like to them? What is that whole experience like?
Because two children can look at exactly the same difficult thing and have completely different experiences of it. One can think, ooh, that looks hard, I wonder if I can do that. While the other thinks, hmm, that looks hard, what if I can't do it.
For the first child, difficulty is interesting. It's a problem to solve. There's some uncertainty in it, and the uncertainty is part of the appeal. For the second, difficulty is exposing. Trying means finding out whether you're good enough. Whether you're as capable as people seem to think you are. Whether your brother can do it and you can't. Whether you'll get halfway and have to admit it was too hard.
And that reaction isn't something they were born with. Children learn what a hard thing means from what happens when they try one, and they're learning it all the time. Including today.
There's an experiment from way back in 1998 that shows us how powerful that can be. Two researchers gave 128 children, aged between 10 and 12, a set of puzzles to work through. Afterwards, they told every single one of them they'd done really well.
But then they said something slightly different to each group. One group heard that ‘they must be smart at these problems’.
Another heard that ‘they must have worked hard at these problems’.
And the last group were just told they'd done well, with no reason (that they were smart, or had worked hard) added.
The researchers then asked the children to choose what they wanted to try next. They could choose a puzzle they already knew they'd do well at, or one where they might not look so clever or fast but where it’d be a new experience.
Among the children who'd been told they were smart, over two-thirds took the safe option. The thing they already knew they could do well. But among the children praised for working hard, 92% took the new puzzle.
(The group who were only told they'd done well, with no reason attached, split about evenly. Better than the praised-for-being-smart group, but behind the children who were praised for working hard.)
Nobody had failed at that point, by the way. Nobody had been embarrassed, or done something badly. The only thing that had changed was how their success had been explained to them.
For one group, doing well became evidence about how ‘clever’ or ‘smart’ they appeared to the people around them, and within minutes - literally within minutes - protecting that was more appealing than risking it by trying something new.
Now, this was a short experiment with made-up puzzles, not every study in the paper produced exactly the same result (though five of the six did), and in later studies it has been both successfully reproduced but also not, so this is not perfect black and white psychology. It certainly doesn't prove that telling your child they're clever or smart a few times will have them avoiding hard things for life.
But there clearly IS something in all this.
And I think this is where we often mis-read things. We see a child ducking challenge and assume they need more pushing, that they're getting lazy or too comfortable or taking advantage of all this freedom we've given them. But often a child keeps choosing what they can already do because somewhere along the way, they started to believe that failure will cost them.
If getting something wrong means seeing disappointment on someone's face, failure is costly. If attempting the harder thing means being measured against someone who can already do it, and looking lesser, failure is costly. If every new skill turns into something adults monitor and ask for progress updates on, failure is costly. If getting it wrong means knowing it will come up later, maybe at dinner, maybe on the phone to grandma, failure is costly.
Under those conditions, choosing the easy thing makes complete sense.
Which is why I don't think the answer is making our children do harder and harder things until somehow they naturally embrace failure as a good thing. I think a big part of the job is making failure cost less.
Let them be genuinely terrible at something without saying anything about their progress (or lack of). Let them drop back down a level in something without comment. Let them attempt the thing their sister is already good at without anyone mentioning that (because their sister being good at it is really not information they need right now 😅). Let them scrap something and start again. Let them change their mind, let them attempt things privately, let them find out that being bad at something costs almost nothing.
And then, from that safer place, we can encourage them towards challenge. Because contrary to common belief, protecting a child’s autonomy doesn’t mean standing back and never getting involved. We're still their parents. We can see things in them they can't see yet, put opportunities in front of them they don’t know about yet, suggest the harder level, encourage them to stay with something when we suspect they're stopping out of frustration rather than being genuinely done, and so on, and so on.
So sometimes we might say: I know you don't think you can do this, but I do, I believe you can, and I'll help you.
That isn't taking their autonomy away. That's just good coaching.
The difference is that we're not trying to build a child who ALWAYS picks the hard option. We're helping them build a relationship with difficulty where hard doesn't always mean potentially threatening or exposing or embarrassing, and where they can fail, have another go, and adjust...or just decide they don't care enough about this particular thing to keep going.
My personal view? I don't need my children to choose the hard version of something every time they turn a corner.
I just don't want them to be afraid of it.