"I'm just being consistent"

Every parenting source says consistency matters, and you'd say the standard is you being consistent. Kit every Thursday. Tablet off at half past seven. Coat on the hook. If you let it go once, you've taught him that rules bend.

The NHS says children need consistency, and it says why. If you react to your child's behaviour one way one day and another way the next, it's confusing for them. Notice what that's about. It's about your response. Consistency, in the NHS's sense, means the same behaviour meets the same reaction. It isn't a claim about how high the standard should be. A parent can be perfectly consistent in expecting a nine-year-old to do an adult's task and perfectly consistent in being let down, and the consistency doesn't make the standard right. It makes the letdown reliable.

There's a difference between a consistent standard and a consistent response, and the habit has fused them. The standard is what you expect. The response is what you do when the expectation isn't met. You can move the first and keep the second. If the standard becomes "kit in the bag with the list", and the response to the list being skipped is the same every time, calm and small and certain, you're being exactly as consistent as before, and the standard is now one a nine-year-old can meet, and the response is one that teaches.

What you've been consistent about, if the list from chapter 1 is honest, is the letdown. Every Thursday the same expectation, the same failure, the same sigh, the same word. That's consistency, and it's the wrong thing to be consistent about, because what a child learns from a perfectly consistent cycle of expectation and disappointment is that they disappoint, reliably, and chapter 17 is about what that lesson does.

There's a version of consistency that's about the other parent, and chapter 22 covers it. Here I'd only say that two adults holding different standards is the inconsistency the NHS is warning about, and that agreeing the columns together is what fixes it, not one parent winning.

Move the standard to the age and keep the response steady. That's consistency doing what the NHS meant it to do, which is give the child a world that makes sense, and a world in which you're asked for what you can do and helped to do it makes a great deal of sense to a nine-year-old.