Simply put, expectations can be healthy or they can be toxic. Our challenge as parents and teachers is to recognize, hold, and communicate the healthy ones. …
Studies have found that the extent to which parents regularly communicate high academic expectations for their children (“You can do well” not “you must do well”) had a far greater effect on the kids’ academic performance than any other parental behavior, including how strictly parents supervised their children’s free time or monitored their homework. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home, Viking / Penguin Random House, 2021, p. 157]
Firmness refers to the degree and consistency of limits that parents impose on their child’s behavior. Firm parents have clearly articulated the rules they expect their children to follow, and they make demands on the child to behave in a mature and responsible fashion. …
We learn how to regulate ourselves by being regulated. Children acquire self-control by taking the rules that their parents have imposed on them and imposing them on themselves. When the external control isn’t there to begin with, the internal control won’t develop. …
Naturally, parents’ specific rules and expectations should change as their child matures and displays an increasingly capacity for self-regulation. A parent’s job is to pay attention to these signs and to adjust the rules accordingly. …
Here are some tips on how to be a firm parent:
Make your expectations clear. … Explain your rules and decisions. When children understand the logic behind their parents’ expectations, it is much easier for them to figure out how to behave on their own. … Be consistent. … Be fair. … Avoid harsh punishment. …
Your expectations should be set so that meeting them will require a level of maturity that slightly exceeds what your child has shown up until that point, but that is still within your child’s reach. [Laurence Steinberg, Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, pp. 129-135]
[Inductive disciplinary] techniques succeed because they lead children to understand, and accept, the standards that their parents are trying to communicate rather than focusing only on the sanctions through which parents enforce these standards. An effective parental influence encounter … will ensure that the aspect of the encounter most salient to the child will be the attitude or behavior that the parent is trying to instill rather than the child’s punishment for refusing to comply. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 180]
[S]tudents who grow up with excessive performance expectations are at strikingly high risk for mental health problems in adolescence and young adulthood. So a first step, as a parent or a teacher, is to figure out where the kid is. Are they feeling expectations that aren’t there? Are they feeling fearful of failure? The best way to get to these answers is simple: ask them. …
Parents can set the tone for healthy expectations in a multitude of ways: …
“I have confidence that you can handle the challenges in your life [rather than “I have confidence you will always be successful”].” …
“When I say I expect you to do well, what I really mean is that I think you can do well and that I’m confident in you as a student—and as a person.”
“I think about the big picture. The world is full of successful people who weren’t top students. So if you’re not an academic superstar, it doesn’t bother me. I know you’re smart enough to get an education and learn skills that are helpful to people.” [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home, Viking / Penguin Random House, 2021, pp. 160-163]
[P]arental pressures to meet harsh performance demands, while perhaps temporarily successful in driving academic achievement, are ultimately destructive. This does not mean that high expectations for children are potentially lethal. On the contrary, high expectations are found to promote achievement and competence in children. It is when a parent’s love is experienced as conditional on achievement that children are at risk for serious emotional problems. These are children who are driven to be “perfect” in the hope of garnering parental love and acceptance. Their inevitable missteps activate intense feelings of shame and hopelessness. [Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure And Material Advantage Are Creating A Generation Of Disconnected And Unhappy Kids, HarperCollins, 2006, pp. 29-30]
The best way to ensure the healthy kind of expectations is to encourage kids to set their own expectations of themselves—without being burdened by perfectionism, fear of failure, and fear of disappointing other people.
A large part of this work includes encouraging them to set their own goals. … We should teach them about what are called SMART goals—goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Bound. …
There’s an important prerequisite to setting goals, though: the child’s belief that they can attain whatever goal they set. Support goal-setting by encouraging positive self-talk—which is an important tool of cognitive behavioral therapy—or verbal affirmations, which has been a staple of self-help psychology for almost a century. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home, Viking / Penguin Random House, 2021, p. 164]
William H. Jeynes, who has studied parental expectations for decades, says that the healthiest expectations don’t come via edicts nor are they voiced as demands like, “You’d better make the cross-country team next year, because you’re going to need it for college applications!” Healthy expectations are more often unspoken and communicated by modeling a strong work ethic, a strong faith in the future, and “a pleasantly steadfast spirit.” …
We’ve written a lot … about words to say, questions to ask, and ideals to model. But we want to leave you with the idea that so often, the best way to convey the right kind of expectations is simply to trust your kids. …
Remember, it all comes back to relationships—and is much less about saying exactly the right words—whether about expectations or anything else—and more about how we make our kids feel. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home, Viking / Penguin Random House, 2021, pp. 167, 181]
“If you think the best of people, they will give you their best.” That may be the most useful advice I have ever received. I make myself think the best of students. Sometimes trusting and encouraging are not easy. Still, the good teacher must trust. [Sam Pickering, Letters to a Teacher, Atlantic Monthly, 2004, p. 46]
There’s a vast amount of research in what happens when we believe a student is especially talented. We begin to lavish extra attention on them and hold them to higher expectations. We expect them to excel, and that expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. [Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Scribner / Simon & Schuster, 2016, p. 26]
Teachers’ expectations have radical implications for the achievements of their students. If teachers convey to students that they expect them to do well, it’s much more likely that they will. If they expect them to do badly, that’s more likely too. [Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education, Viking, 2015, p. 108]
[A] teacher who believes only one or two of the students in each of his classes are capable of doing fine work will in subtle ways communicate that lack of faith. Then his exhortations and promises ring false. They reach the student’s unconscious finally as discouragement. [Ken Macrorie, Uptaught, Hayden Book Co., 1970, p. 116]
In schools the process of self-fulfilling prophecy involves several steps. First, teachers anticipate that certain students will succeed in school, while others will not … Second, these expectations invariably influence the ways teachers relate to students. For example, teachers spend less time with students whom they believe are less likely to succeed (Allington, 1980). Not only are these interchanges fewer, but they are of dubious educational value. … Given this kind of treatment it is not surprising that students of whom little is expected, and little help given, will fall progressively behind and, in effect, complete the third step of the prophecy cycle—by acting in ways that fulfill the teacher’s initial predictions of incompetency. [Martin Covington, The Will to Learn: A Guide for Motivating Young People, Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 114-115]
Adolescents who are absorbing negative messages about who they are and what is expected of them may sink to that level instead of realizing their true potential. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being.” Adolescence is not a period of being “crazy” or “immature.” It is an essential time of emotional intensity, social engagement, and creativity. This is the essence of how we “ought” to be, of what we are capable of, and of what we need as individuals and as a human family. [Daniel J. Siegel, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain, Penguin, 2013, p. 4]
Visiting another university, I had lunch with a poet who was also a professor of creative writing. He spoke highly of the work of his graduate students, a welcome surprise to me to hear a good word about the lower classes. But he added, “And the undergraduates, they were—well, you know, undergraduates.”
In his Life and Times, the former slave Frederick Douglass said:
“Man derives a sense of his consequences in the world not merely subjectively but objectively. If from the cradle through life the outside world brands a class as unfit for this or that work, the character of the class will come to resemble and conform to the character described. To find valuable qualities in our fellows, such qualities must be presumed and expected.” [Ken Macrorie, Uptaught, Hayden Book Co., 1970, p. 75]
The work load for T-eachers in conventional S-chools is so heavy only because the S-chools and the T-eachers believe, and soon convince the children, that everything that is learned must be T-aught. So the T-eachers must spend hundreds of hours trying to cope with and outwit the kind of children’s evasive tactics I wrote about in How Children Fail: They make children anxious and dependent, and then say, rightly, how hard it is to deal with their anxiety and dependency. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, p. 77]
Having by our method induced helplessness, we straightway make the helplessness a reason for our method. [Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical, 1860, D. Appleton, 1896, p. 126, https://archive.org/details/spencereducation00spen]
It is truly amazing, as pointed up by our findings, that if people are ongoingly treated as if they were either passive mechanisms or barbarians needing to be controlled, they will begin to act more and more that way. As they are controlled, for example, they are likely to act more and more as if they need to be controlled. That fact has led some commentators to conclude that society should use more controls. It has led to the call for greater discipline, for more heavy handedness. But ironically, it should call for just the opposite. This phenomenon behooves us to insist even more emphatically that it is time to stop looking for the easy answers contained in the reliance on control and instead to start employing more autonomy-supportive approaches. [Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste, Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation, Penguin, 1996, pp. 83-84]
Low expectation … is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Children become, to a considerable degree, what they are told it is “appropriate” to wish to be. In this respect, I think it can be said that most of us need a sense of “sanction” or “authentication”—an “empowering voice”—in order to believe it is our right or our vocation to become just, passionate and risk-taking human beings. Conversely, there is limitless power of expropriation, for most children, in the voice that tells them it does not belong to them to yearn to be such men or women. We build perimeters around the ethical aspirations of our students by the very terms we teach them to bring to their own act of self-description. [Jonathan Kozol, The Night is Dark and I Am Far From Home, Houghton Mifflin, 1975, pp. 71-73]
[W]ith each passing year, we seem to find new ways to let kids know that life is full of risks and hardships that they can’t handle without our persistent aid and vigilance. …
[O]ur physical protectiveness of children has reached so deeply into their routine activities that one wonders if we are actually training them for timidity…
We are also sending negative messages by pathologizing our children. Increasing numbers in recent years have been diagnosed as “learning disabled,” a disparaging and misleading label that wields enormous influence over how a child is perceived, treated, and medicated. … The label “disabled” itself can become self-fulfilling, since children are acutely aware of how they are being appraised, and they base their own self-conceptions largely on how others see them. Our use of this labeling for ever larger segments of the population (especially boys) indicates a more general tendency to perceive children as fragile and inept creatures, who need constant protection from the ordinary challenges of everyday living. [William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, Free Press, 2008, pp. 169-170]
The surest way to breed incompetence (and low self-esteem of the real kind) in a child is to treat the child as incompetent. If a parent assumes that a child cannot be counted on to accomplish a task, the child takes that message to heart. The child thinks that “I am not the kind of person who can …”; and a negative belief in one’s own capacities forms. …
In actuality, children are far more competent at early ages than adults in our society give them credit for. They thrive on challenges and on chances to prove themselves. Competence motivation is a natural part of every child’s repertoire. If encouraged, it enables children to develop their capacities with zest and vigor. Still, we have found many ways to discourage children’s native competence drive. Not the least of these are our unfounded doubts about children’s abilities to be helpful. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. 83-84]
In all the places that children are raised—the family, the school, the community—one conspicuous change has occurred within the lifetime of everyone reading this book: All the commonly accepted standards for young people’s skills and behavior have fallen drastically. Less is expected of the young, and in turn less is received. Either as a cause or as a result, instruction, discipline, the very fostering of competence and character in the young are fast becoming lost arts. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. xii-xiii]
[T]he way you honor a human being is to ask of him an effort. … In the hopeless popularization and down-marketing of our crafts, we don’t honor the student, we condescend to him, and that is a hideous hideous contempt. You honor him by what you ask and demand. [George Steiner, “On the History of Literacy,” 2002, YouTube, uploaded by Infame filmes, 13 June 2019, 39:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH0MXdeGwSE]
Related:
– How can parents improve their influence on their children?
– How can we foster self-directed learning in others?
– Why is trust and faith in young people important in education?