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MANAGING YOUR EXPECTATIONS
What You Can Expect from Your Child, and
WhenAT THIS POINT WE’VE covered both Stop and Start behavior, but there is
another underlying issue. When can you realistically expect (at what
ages?) kids to potty train, clean their rooms, sit still, or finish their
dinner? Lots and lots of parent-child conflict is caused not by kids
misbehaving, but by parents not knowing exactly when they can
expect what from their children. In other words, we parents often get
impatient and expect too much too soon. When erroneous
expectations are operating in a parent’s brain, trouble follows.
Your kids are little. Both their bodies and their brains are still
growing. No matter what your child is doing, his brain is working to
create tons of new learning pathways and processing three times
harder than an adult’s. Ages birth to five are the times when the