Toddlers, teenagers, homework, the other parent and when the gap is too wide

The rule holds at every age. The columns move, and a few situations need a paragraph.

Toddlers. Almost everything is in the with-you column, and the standard that fails most is expecting a three-year-old to stop a thing on request. Diamond's inhibition is barely started at three. The arrangement is warnings, distraction, and doing it with them, and the NHS list of tired, hungry, overexcited, frustrated and bored explains most of what looks like defiance.

Teenagers. The wanting has grown up and the braking hasn't, which is Steinberg's account of adolescence, and it means a fourteen-year-old can be trusted with a great deal alone and still can't come off a screen at eleven at night without a cue. The handover accelerates through these years, and the label becomes more damaging, because a teenager believes what they're told about themselves with an adult's conviction. The arrangement for a teenager is agreed with them rather than built for them, and that agreeing is itself the handover.

Homework. The task with the most adult-height standard attached to it. Sit down alone, at a set time, and do forty minutes of something dull. That's proactive, self-directed control sustained over time, and at nine it's in the with-you or cued column for nearly everyone. A place, a time, a parent nearby doing their own dull thing, and a timer, and the homework gets done. Alone at the kitchen table with a parent shouting from the next room, it doesn't, and it isn't laziness.

The other parent. If one of you holds the standard at adult height and the other builds arrangements, the child has two houses in one and the NHS's point about consistency applies to the two of you. Agree the columns together. Show the other parent the list from chapter 1 and the three columns from chapter 18 and let the evidence make the case.

Grandparents and "in my day". Chapter 7 is the argument. Their memory of you at nine has had the reminders edited out too. Ask them what you were actually like, and let them tell you.

When the gap is too wide. If your child is far outside the range for their age, not at the lower end of normal but well beyond it, and the school sees it too, and the arrangements that work for other children don't work for yours, that's worth taking further. The school's special needs coordinator is the first conversation, and the GP is the second. The NHS pages on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder describe what an assessment involves. Nothing in this book replaces that, and the arrangement in chapter 19 is often exactly what such a child needs more of, not less. The book's claim is only that most children who look like this are ordinary children with adult-height standards, and the way to find out is to move the standard first and see.

When the letdown has become the shout. The earlier book in this series on shouting at children is the one to read alongside this. This book removes most of the occasions. That one deals with the ones that remain.