When my job gives me the choice of a drop in compensation when my stock grant expires, or earning that promotion to get raise.
You want A or B?
I want B.
Are you sure you don't want A?
Yup. Definitely B.
Here's A. I'm happy you made the right decision.
And that's how it was. They'd let you pretend and then the worst part was they would force you to be complicit after the fact. And let's be honest I would have totally been a responsible dirt bike owner. Maybe.
There's limits; if they pick something not an option presented, they might not get it, but giving kids everything they ask for isn't stellar parenting either
What's the alternative? You make sure there's never a bad choice possible? Or that there are bad choices but not super duper bad? Like the dirtbike is on the table but you have to wear a helmet?
I didn't like being kid but in a lot of ways being a parent is even worse. I'd like them to not be a jerk, stay safe and maybe be happy but I can't and don't want to run their life for them. At the same time I see this combination of brilliance and poor judgement that just makes me feel tired all over.
At least being a kid you could (with even the hazy reasoning available to a child) squint and see that the trend line was in the right direction. As a parent every year is worse then the one before it. All I can see for the future is me being more concerned and having less and less capacity to do anything about my worries.
At a certain age, they get to the point where you can point out obviously bad consequences and maybe word that as a choice ("wear a helmet or suffer lifelong brain-damage if you fall on your head"), but that's primarily because they understand that you aren't really offering them a choice, and when they don't understand this it just comes off as cruel. If one of my kids picked "lifelong brain-damage" (and wasn't being obviously sarcastic), I would probably respond with something like "when you're 18 you can make that choice, but until then, I'm responsible for taking reasonable precautions against you getting lifelong brain-damage, so wear the flipping helmet" not "I'm glad you decided to wear a helmet"
I got the impression from your first comment that it was more like "ice cream or broccoli" and less like "helmet or brain damage" but that may have been a poor assumption.
Also, I want to be clear, I called the action "bad parenting" but I don't want to imply that parents who do this are "bad parents" since all parents occasionally do things that are bad parenting. I could make a list a mile long of my less-than-stellar parenting moments, but, on the whole, consider myself to be a good parent.
Eg : “I don’t want to eat broccoli with dinner!”
“Well, would you rather eat it on the pink plate or the blue plate?”
Maybe I’m missing something or likely I’m diverging from the actual Hobson’s choice paradigm, but the Take-It-Or-Leave-It example in the article is clearly not a choice (that’s the point presumably). But letting my kid choose the color plate to eat the broccoli is a real choice although inconsequential to the act of eating broccoli itself.