Do you want your children to make good choices in life?

If so, you must teach them to think. Thinking is not just a verb. It’s a process.

You must teach them the process of evaluating outcomes. In other words, you must teach them to “play the movie” to see into the future.

For example, you might tell your 10-year-old son, “If you don’t apologize to your friend, what do you think will happen? If you do apologize, how do you see this affecting you personally from this point on?”

Young people who can truly learn to think about options will make better choices in terms of a marriage partner, career decisions, and overall life planning.

Thinking clearly affects their decisions and choices. Thinking helps them take control of their own destinies.

Those of us who avoid thinking run the risk of being victimized. Other people can be very happy to make decisions for us.

Everyone needs to understand that thinking is an acquired skill. Figuring things out takes practice, failure, re-tooling one’s plans and trying an alternate route if necessary.

If your children don’t learn how to think in detail about life’s challenges, other people will end up making their choices or their choices will happen by default.

“I think I helped my stepson, Chris, get off drugs by teaching him to think,” says a friend of ours we’ll call Jill. “Chris had never been taught to look at things from different viewpoints until I married his dad.”

Before Jill and her husband got Chris into rehab, Jill shared her own bad life choices with her stepson. She told him how her lack of thinking skills got her into trouble.

Jill says she openly shared her failures and mistakes with her stepson. “I told Chris things I had never told my husband!” says Jill.

“I knew Chris was hurting, and I didn’t want him to feel so alone. I wanted him to know that he could think, reason and make better choices. I’d been down some hurtful paths, and I wanted to help him see he could get to a better place.”

In order to teach your children to think about outcomes, help them do the following:

-Habitually study behaviors in others. Make mental notes about what’s working for other people and what is not.

-Define winning behaviors. Notice what habits help some people succeed. These habits might include getting up early or listening well.

-Look at your ideal life five years from now. Fast forward your thinking to see what goals you desire. Then, make sure you are working a daily plan to get there.

The main purpose of thinking is to keep yourself and those you love on track. By avoiding thinking, nothing has a clear rhyme or reason.

“It was kind of cool to drift and find yourself back in the sixties,” says a man we’ll call Stephen. “Trouble was, too many people drifted and never came back. I went back to a high school reunion to find that 30 people in my class had died young and only a few made anything of themselves!”

Stephen is a high-profile attorney in Washington, D.C. He says that learning to think and evaluate outcomes for his own destiny kept him on the success track.

For example, Stephen started to divorce his wife 10 years after marriage. But, after careful thought, he finally figured out that he was the one who needed to give more.

“My wife and I are still together, and we get along great,” says Stephen. “Divorce would have ripped our children’s lives apart and our own. I went through a selfish phase thinking I would marry a young actress I was having an affair with. How stupid was that?! My wife never knew about her.”

We asked Stephen if he should have told his wife about the affair.

“Absolutely not,” says Stephen. “I sat down and thought long and hard about that. There would have been nothing to gain in hurting my wife that way. I ended the affair and moved on.”

Teaching your children to think, use logic and avoid emotional turmoil will help them look at things from another’s viewpoint.

We live in a world where many people don’t care how their actions impact others.

By helping your children stop to think about actions and outcomes, you will steer them to have a positive impact on the world.

If your children learn to evaluate everything going on around them, they will always be able to find work, relationships and life experiences that serve them well.

Judi Hopson and Emma Hopson are authors of a stress management book for paramedics, firefighters and police, “Burnout To Balance: EMS Stress.” Ted Hagen is a family psychologist.