Adult Expectations

Imagine: You sleep through your alarm and have to rush through your morning routine. You were expecting a bagel for breakfast but your partner ate the last one so you’re stuck with your least favorite flavor oatmeal. On the way to work you hear a song that always makes you sad for some reason. You trip getting out of your car and spill your coffee on your shirt in front of a colleague. When you head inside you see your best work friend and, upon seeing the look on your face, they ask if you’re okay. You start crying. They respond, “Stop crying. It’s really not that big of a deal.”

In this scenario, how do you feel about that friend? Have you ever had someone dismiss your feelings, and, if so – how did that impact your relationship?

For the most part, we don’t do this to adults. We don’t tell other adults to “get over it” or to “stop crying.” So why do we expect children to keep it together (to suppress or hide how they’re feeling) when they express their emotions?

For us adults, it’s hard to relate to the devastation that some toddlers face when we hand them the red cup instead of the blue. The good news is, we don’t have to feel what other people are feeling in order to support them. What we can do - is consider the many ways the children in our lives may be having a hard time, validate their feelings, and offer the kind of support that specific child needs or asks for.

When students in your classroom are upset over something that seems small to us, it might be worthwhile to consider: Did they get enough sleep last night? Are they hungry? Is it possible there are big changes in their home life? Did they see something on the TV that upset them? Are they feeling well?

The truth is, while we may be seeing a child cry and think it’s because we offered them the “wrong” cup, they may be crying because they had the kind of morning described in the above scenario and the final straw was the red cup. And even if the child is truly crying because they didn’t get the cup they were expecting, we can help them co-regulate. We can acknowledge their feelings by saying something like, “It seems like you wanted the other cup. It’s frustrating when we don’t get what we were expecting.”

Along these lines, I can think of many other ways our expectations of young children can sometimes exceed those we have for our adult peers. If I asked you to sit cross-legged on the floor without speaking or moving for thirty minutes while I gave a lecture on something you found inherently boring, could you do it? Would you feel actively engaged?

If you saw an adult neighbor trip and fall on the cement while checking their mailbox, would you shout, “You’re okay! Walk it off!”?

When we have certain expectations of children, I believe it’s worthwhile to practice this exercise: ask yourself if you would expect the same of a friend or peer? This practice can help us to better understand the student who needs to move doing circle time. It gives us permission to ask a fallen child, “Are you okay?”

And even if we ask the question, “Would I expect this of an adult?” and the answer is “yes” – that doesn’t mean we need to expect it of the children in our classroom. Our expectations should be built on the knowledge we have of the specific, individual children in our lives. We can see children as capable and have high, developmentally appropriate, expectations AND we can reflect on those expectations and remember that children are human, just like us.