Excerpt: Expecting Too Much
Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 07:43PM 
Why Can’t Johnny Jump Tall Buildings? Parents Expect Way Too Much from their Kids, Slate:
“[T]he trick in each case is to find the individual child’s sweet spot, the point between too little and too much expectation.
The good news is that you’re the world’s leading expert on your child, the one person in creation best equipped to find that sweet spot. Just remember, as you go about it, that it’s only human for parents to tend to expect that our children can do more than they can really do. Even slight adjustments of your expectations to compensate for that tendency — a little more emphasis on shaping, a little more patience, a little reflection on what’s really important to you as a parent and what behaviors can be left to disappear or develop on their own — can produce surprisingly excellent results.”
Reader Comments (6)
re: more reasonable expectations for the 2nd (and after) child .. so true! i wonder if that’s born of our increasing parental wisdom or just tiredness. :^P
She's thinking about a project she'd like to undertake at home, and I'm trying not to expect too much....
Is it more of an issue of expectations of ourselves as parents, or of our kids?
I
“If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.” — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
i like this quote from the slate article: “[I]t's natural to underestimate the astonishing variability among and within individuals”