What the standard costs you

I've argued the mechanism. This chapter is the bill, and you've been paying it in the mornings.

The letdown itself. Daily, at twenty to nine and half past seven, the same small drop, the same sigh. A year of that is three hundred and sixty-five occasions of being disappointed by a nine-year-old for being nine, and disappointment repeated that often stops being about the kit and becomes a weather that you live in.

The anger. The standard's third failure is the one with the edge, and the edge is where shouting starts. An earlier book in this series is about the shout and I won't repeat it here, except to say that most of the shouting it describes sits on top of a standard set at the wrong height, and that moving the standard removes most of the occasions.

The label, and what it does to you. A parent who calls their child lazy most days comes to believe it, and a parent who believes their child is lazy treats them as lazy, and expects less, and the expecting less is the low expectation you were afraid of, arriving by the back door. The standard that was meant to raise the child has produced a parent who's given up on him in a specific way while still demanding everything.

The relationship. Every Thursday the child sees your face when the kit's not there. Three hundred faces a year. A child who meets that face most days learns something about what he is to you, and it isn't what you'd want him to learn, and it's built out of mornings.

The mornings themselves. Twenty to nine with a standard at adult height is a scene, most days. Twenty to nine with an arrangement is a list by the door and a child who ticks it, and the difference is forty minutes of your life, every day, that were being spent in a small war.

The sleep, if half past seven has become a nightly contest. A bedtime that begins with a fight is a bedtime that runs late, for both of you, and Diamond's list had lack of sleep on it, for the child's functions and for yours. A parent who's short of sleep holds the standard higher and the temper lower, and the child who's short of sleep meets it worse, and tomorrow's twenty to nine is made tonight at half past seven.

And the thing you're not seeing. A parent scanning for the kit that isn't there doesn't see the child who fed the cat unasked, who was kind to his sister, who did the reading without being told. An earlier book in this series is about that scan. Here I'd only say that the standard has a direction to it, and it points at what's missing, and a nine-year-old is mostly made of what's there.