Poopoo is making the same point that I did, Gnocchi - that as parents we all make decisions for our children when they are young - whether it is that we will feed them meat/be vegetarian, give them a diet that is mainly home made from scratch or one heavily reliant on junk food, to attend church/temple/mosque or not, what manners we expect and what behaviour we enforce, where they will live and what schools they will attend - this is called parenting. As our children grow up, they learn more about the different choices, and can start to make their own decisions, with guidance from us where necessary - so it makes little sense to categorise some parenting decisions as 'forcing them down a route you have chosen'.
When children are small, we have to make the important decisions for them, because they don't have the knowledge, experience or emotional maturity to make them themselves - so when ds1 was 10 months old, we didn't consult him on whether dh should take a new job that would require us to move from Wiltshire to Essex, nor did he have a say in the house that we bought. When we moved house again, the boys, who were all under 7, did get to look round the new house, and expressed their opinions, but the decision was still taken by dh and I. But when dh was offered a job in Scotland, we consulted them and gave equal weight to their opinions, because it was such a big move, and they were old enough to contribute to the decision.