Modern parenting is largely a battle against these things, as modern society makes them so easily accessible. The very concept of allowing kids to choose what they want is so completely flawed, as kids are driven more by instincts as they don’t have other more modern mental structures to rely on.
Learning stuff is hard because it actually changes the brain, and kids need to be pushed because they will avoid it otherwise, as per the instincts mentioned above.
I base this on the idea that decision making is a skill, and you build skills by practicing. Well, not necessarily decision making itself, but rather the mental constructs that surround decisions -- weighing alternatives, short- vs long-term planning, etc.
Hopefully, then, when he starts coming up with his own options and breaking the false dichotomy, they'll be well-considered.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/18ec/2947a5358610a2215412f3...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
Our eldest (he's 4 now but we've been doing it for a couple of years) responds really well to that. In fact a 100% pass rate so far. Which is unusual for a boy of that age from what I've read.
That's impractical in your day to day life as it would involve wasting a lot of food. But, most children really do crave nutritious foods as long as they are tasty and available right now.
This dates back to 1939, and is a rather over the top experiment still:
Accordingly, Davis devised the experiment to let children do for themselves because she suspected that children's bodies instinctively “knew best” what the individual child should eat. Her intellectual model, a view that would later be called “the wisdom of the body,” likened a child's instinctive appetite to the way various autonomic body systems effortlessly adjust themselves to compensate for external challenges — think of sweating on a hot day, and breathing faster when you start to run.
Initially, it seemed that this conceit didn't apply to Davis's test children and their food preferences. None of the eat-what-and-how-much-of-what-you-want infants had the same diet on any given day, week or month. “Every diet differed from every other diet, 15 different patterns of taste being presented, and not one diet was the predominantly cereal-and-milk diet, with smaller supplements of fruit, eggs and meat, that is commonly thought proper for this age,” she told her Montréal audience.
Yet, she and others later saw that the infants' fanatical heterodoxy turned into what appeared to be 15 uniformly well-nourished, healthy children.
... The important bits:
It is actually beyond easy to imagine how Davis's orphans could have eaten themselves sick with healthy foods. Had one or more chosen only meat, fish and eggs, within short order they would likely have come down with scurvy. Had another been a fanatical vegan and eaten only fruits and vegetables, there is a good likelihood that he or she would have experienced a vitamin B12 deficiency and megaloblastic anemia.
Thus, the issue, really, was the extent to which an inner nutrition-seeking mechanism might lead children through the maze of choices they actually would face in the modern, eating world.
PS: Several versions of this experiment have been preformed including some with plenty of junk food, though the setting up an orphanage bit was rather extreme. Also, diets that seem odd are not necessarily unhealthy.
There's the problem. By the time they start grade school, a majority of American children will be overweight and 14% will be obese. We don't feed our children, we fatten them up like cattle. Most American children have never actually experienced real hunger - they've been raised in households that are abundantly overflowing with food. They get three meals a day from a wide range of choices, plus snacks, plus free access to an array of tempting treats. Their natural instincts to eat in response to hunger have been completely muted. Of course they act like spoiled emperors at the dinner table. Of course they reject anything other than their absolute favourite food. That's the incentive structure we've given them.
Unless your child is clinically underweight, stop trying to get them to eat. If they don't want to eat a healthy meal, they don't have to - they can go hungry. Throw away the uneaten meal and give your child the gift of experiencing hunger. A psychologically healthy child will not starve themself to death because they're not offered a-la-carte dining at every meal, they'll just adapt to their environment. When given the opportunity to make choices that have consequences, they'll make the rational decision to eat a meal they don't particularly like in preference to going hungry.
> give them good examples
As far as I’ve heard, the former largely depends on the latter. You can do a lot of shaping of what someone will become through the examples you expose them to.
I remember ads when I was a kid: “Always obey traffic signals when walking. Your child is learning from you”. This was on every pedestrian traffic light around the first few weeks of school when it is encouraged to teach your first grader how to walk to school every morning.
There’s also that famous anti smoking ad based on the same principle.
If you have kids, stop doing this to them. You're their father/mother. Love, nurture, train, and instruct them to be good people. If they go to Harvard, good for them. If not, Harvard be damned, they're your kids.
If you don't have kids yet, mature before you do.
On the other hand, my son aspires to become a lazy couch potato and gamer. He's actually quite successful on that front, but I admit I was hoping for something more.
However, we have not all ended up in the same place. One of my brothers managed to spend over half a decade in and out of odd jobs, spending all his money on drugs (thank fuck none of the hard stuff). Me and my other brother have managed to carve out a good life for ourselves, at least by society's external measure.
People will go their own direction in life. You can prod them and help them on their journey, but you can't fundamentally change who they are.