What it does to them

The standard is quiet for the parent, who's only disappointed. It's loud for the child, who's told.

A child told most days that he's lazy learns that he's lazy. Not as an opinion he might dispute, but as a fact about himself, delivered by the person whose account of him he trusts most. He can't check it against Gathercole's line or Diamond's review. He's nine. He has a parent's word and a morning that seems to confirm it, and he takes the word into himself and carries it, and when he's fourteen and can't find his football boots he'll think "I'm so lazy", in your voice, and the thought will be as unhelpful to him then as the word was on Thursday.

There are two ways a child goes with that, in my observation, and both are bad. One stops trying. If you're lazy anyway, and the kit will be forgotten anyway, and the face will happen anyway, there's no point putting the effort in, and the effort was the thing that was going to grow the function. The other becomes anxious about it. This child checks the bag four times and still forgets the kit, because anxiety impairs the very functions being asked for, and now there's a child who's frightened of Thursday mornings and forgets more because he's frightened. Diamond's list of what impairs the executive functions had stress on it.

What the child doesn't learn is how to remember the kit, because nothing about the label carries that information. The child who's helped, who has the list and ticks it, is learning the thing itself, and is also learning something about himself, which is that he's a person who manages when he's got the right set-up, and that's a true and useful thing to believe at nine and at forty.

And there's the small stuff, which is most of the day. A child who's scanned for failures learns to hide them. The reading book that didn't come home gets not mentioned. The kit that's forgotten gets a story. The child who could have said "I forgot, can we go back" says nothing and does PE in his pants, because saying invites the face. You've raised a child who manages you, and that's a skill he didn't need at nine and a distance you didn't want.

None of this is what you intend. You intend a capable child. But from where the child stands, the standard arrives as a daily verdict that he's failed a test he couldn't have passed, and the verdict is the only part of it he takes in.