Activity: Create a case scenario to discuss with your group

            Your parents have given you permission to go trick-or-treating with your friend as long as a parent is with you at all times.  Your friend’s mom picks you up and drives you to the best-decorated part of the neighborhood!  After visiting 5 houses you realize that your friend’s mom stayed behind in the car.  This makes you feel uncomfortable but before you can say anything, your friend pulls you in the direction of a house two streets away because they are giving out full-size candy bars.  Should you go with your friend to trick-or-treat at this house?

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Create an infographic for youth to use as they consider how they would respond to the situation:

I created a decision-making activity pertinent to the group’s wide range of age and developmental stages.  For this, I created a decision-making tree.  The main branch asks a question from the case scenario, “Should you go with your friends to trick-or-treat at this house?”.  The decision-making tree splits into two branches, “yes” or “no”.  The smaller branches lead to additional questions to help the students reaffirm their decision.  Additional spaces were built in for comments and ideas that came from student participation.  

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Activity with my youth group:

I began the group activity by asking the children who were planning on going trick-or-treating this Halloween.  The purpose of this activity was to help the children feel competent and confident in their decision-making abilities while also having a plan to stand up to peer pressure.

 

Using the decision-making tree, students who selected “No” followed the branch to an empty space where we wrote down their reasoning.  Students that selected “Yes” followed the branch to the next Yes-or-No question: “Am I following my parent's rules?”  Children who selected “Yes, I’m following my parent's rules” travel to the last question: “Can I do something else?” Here, we talked about why parents have rules and what our actions tell adults about us when we don’t follow the rules.  Children who answered “No, I’m not following my parent's rules” travel to “Are there any consequences?”  When I asked what a consequence was, one child responded with “a punishment”.  This allowed us to talk about how consequences can be positive or negative and if we think about them before we make our decision, we can make choices to avoid negative consequences.

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