Last week, my high schoolers brought home their course selection forms; the annual process by which, after hours of consideration and conversation, they select their preferences for courses for the next school year. Maybe this process is easier in some households, but around my house this is a stressful time. My teenagers are as decisive as squirrels.

When they were in junior high, there was less pressure to the course selection process. My advice came easily. If the elective sounds interesting, take the class. Junior high is the ideal time to explore your interests. If the teacher suggests pre-AP classes, take the class. You don’t know what you can do until you try. And always, if I think you need a haircut, get it. You haven’t reached an age where you get to weigh in on haircuts yet.

Now that they are in high school, it’s more complicated. A while back the state decided that in addition to the required credits, in the required categories, our students should also pick an endorsement for their high school studies. The endorsement options are STEM, Business and Industry, Public Service, Arts and Humanities and Multi-Disciplinary. With the implementation of the endorsement requirement now students also had to take a specific number of courses to support their endorsement choice ... which they chose at the end of their eighth-grade year.

I don’t know where the average kid is at in life at the end of eighth grade, but my boys were more concerned with what they wanted on their pizza than they were deciding what track of high school courses to focus on because presumably this would better prepare them to be successful on that track after graduation as they entered career options or further schooling in that area. As their mom, the person with the best glimpse of their strengths and passions, even I couldn’t tell you what endorsement would fit. Note: my kids come by it honestly, I’m 47 years old and I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. We chose pepperoni for our pizza and muddled through.

Now, here we are midway through their high school careers, checking boxes to make sure we have the required art credit, two years of a foreign language, the prerequisite classes for electives and the teacher recommendation needed for yearbook. Bless the high school counselors who do this for a living! There are TSA flight plans with less points plotted out than a current high school course selection form.

And for some reason, the older they get, the less input they think I should have. One son – who tells me he’s never having kids because his siblings are brats – informs me that he wants to take the Child Development class. He isn’t working towards the Public Service endorsement so he doesn’t need this class and there’s no personal interest there. I grill him on why he wants that class … seems his buddy took the class this year and tells him that it’s an easy class with no homework. Let me think about that for a minute. How about no?! You might be old enough to have input on your haircut, but momma is maintaining some authority on course selection.

Tough choices are made. I reluctantly agree that one son can drop AP Science classes. He’s not going to pursue anything science-related after high school and he’s struggling to juggle the homework with sports and a part-time job. That’s a hard call.

We’re programmed to push our kids to reach their full potential. Not to mention today’s society has us judging each other as parents based on our children’s successes. If I let my kid drop an AP class, am I a bad mom? Meh! I decided I wasn’t going to do that to myself. Or my kid. I want to teach my kids to understand how to prioritize things in their lives so that they have balance and tolerable stress. If the kid doesn’t need the class for future goals and has other things that are important to him pulling at him, then this is the chance for a life lesson.

The course selection process in our house may look different than it does in the next house. That’s OK, so does the menu. We had frozen pizza twice last week and I’m confident my kids aren’t scarred for life. Same thinking with this course selection stress.

We worked towards their goals (endorsement), we met the requirements, we found some things that will be interesting and worth exploring and we focused on balance. I can live with that and I’m mostly sure my kids won’t be scarred for life. If not, we get to make these decisions again next year. In the meantime, for practice on making decisions, we might work on deciding when the favorite hoodie needs to go into the laundry.