Self-Regulation Expectations for Children

Consider: Are we holding children to a higher standard than we hold ourselves?

My opinion: yes, I think we often are.

In fact, there are many times I will tell the children that I work with that adults are often working on the same things (or should be!)!

This is one of my biggest frustrations as a therapist. We’ve all seen adults have wild temper tantrums over something little. For example, when someone gets an incorrect order at a restaurant and yells at the server or their ride to the airport is late. There are plenty of road rage incidents. Many of us have lost our temper over something small when we’ve had a long day or we’re tired. To a certain extent it’s normal.

But children seem to be held to a much higher standard. And what’s especially sad about that is that they don’t even have fully developed brains to process their experiences. They don’t have the executive functioning skills, language, and life experience to manage difficult situations that we adults do.

Our Expectations of Children

I have even seen these high expectations for children who are in preschool (children who have only been on the planet for 3 to 4 years!). Children are expected to sit when they’re told to sit. Often they’re told to sit longer than their little bodies are meant to sit. They are supposed to follow all directions. They are supposed to get along with peers.

Yes, there are some children that do this amazingly. But that should be seen as the exception and not the norm.

And then, if they make a mistake they are supposed to fix it, say they’re sorry, and never make that mistake again. How many adults make the same mistake over and over again?

So What Can We Do? 

Changing whole systems, like a school, where high or unrealistic expectations are the norm will take time. We can start with ourselves and the power we have as individuals. We can:

Manage our expectations. We may need to lighten up a little or rethink how we do things. We can have realistic expectations for the time we are with them, even if our adult peers are still working on this.

• Help others learn what is developmentally appropriate.  When you know that developmental norms are higher than they should be it can be very challenging to work within systems that don’t acknowledge that. We can feel stuck between what an administration wants and what we know is appropriate. We may have to help educate, even if it is in small increments as things come up. If we work with someone who has difficulty understanding this we may be able to help by modeling more age appropriate expectations.
• Connect. Connect. Connect. Having a personal connection with children helps them feel safe and more likely to hear us when we are helping them learn what to expect. 
• Can we also teach them in part by owning up to our own errors and big reactions? Can we acknowledge that it’s OK to have days when we don’t feel fully in control? In fact, sometimes we have less control when the children in our lives are having big reactions and we are overwhelmed because of it.
  
• We may also need to give ourselves and our peers grace because we are often working against systems and norms that have been in place for a very long time.
  
• Finally, we can respond with empathy when children aren’t meeting expectations, realistic or not, because we understand how it feels.

What have you noticed? Do you also see high expectations for self-regulation that aren’t always developmentally appropriate?