My Kingdom For One Rational Decision

Let’s Assume Rationality Isn’t All There Is

Decision-making, the truth of passions, and an apology for my kids. For supporting subscribers only.

But What About the Tardies: Adventures in Irrational Decision-Making

We’re in the midst of making decisions about school next year, and tonight, my youngest broke down in tears.

We’re probably moving away from homeschooling toward a 5-day-a-week option, and all the feelings are coming out as we approach May. With one month left, time’s cruel march is clomping its way up his tender little heart.

Tonight’s meltdown was about the following fear:

We might forget that we have to be there five days a week and get tardies.

Past meltdowns have included the following reasons:

I’ll never see my old friends again (we see them a good bit).

I won’t be able to find my classroom (the kids in various grades at said prospective school all wear the same backbacks).

What if doesn’t work out? (Kid. I have bad news for you.)

Anyone who’s ever raised a child will tell you this: rationality is buried under a mountain of emotions, developmental milestones, and scheduled existential crises. Reason surfaces from time to time, mostly when doing math, but you have to catch it when it flies by like a plastic bag on the breeze.

This submergence of reason doesn’t keep us from trying to make it appear. In legal practice, there occasionally surfaces a “rule of seven” which provides a helpful illustation of the illusion of kids as reasonable creatures. In this scheme, every seven years, more decision-making power and consent is presumed to be present in children. It’s not a hard and fast rule, even if it has precedent in English Common law, and has become more controversial within biomedical decisions: a seven year old is presumed not to have much sense of what they need, medically speaking, but somehow a fourteen-year-old has more.