"If I don't expect it, they'll never learn"

This is the belief that makes lowering the standard feel like giving up on the child. Expectation is how children rise. Take it away and they stay where they are.

John Best and Patricia Miller, in a 2010 review that deliberately looked at studies spanning wide age ranges rather than just preschoolers, traced the development of the executive functions, inhibition, working memory and shifting, from early childhood through adolescence. Their conclusion was that these functions emerge in the first few years of life and then continue to strengthen significantly throughout childhood and adolescence, with the different components on somewhat different timetables. Significantly and throughout. The growing isn't finished at nine and it isn't finished at fourteen.

Now ask what does the growing. Not expectation. Expectation is a thing in the parent's head. The functions grow with age and with use, and the use that grows them is doing the thing, with enough support that it gets done and little enough that the child is doing some of it. A child who's expected to remember the kit alone at nine and can't, and fails every Thursday, isn't practising remembering. They're practising failing and being labelled. A child who has a list by the door and ticks the kit off is practising the thing itself, remembering-with-help, which is the stage before remembering alone, and the stage that leads to it.

So the belief has the mechanism backwards. The standard, held at adult height, doesn't teach. It sets a task the child can't do and records the result. What teaches is the handover, which chapter 20 describes, and the handover keeps the expectation exactly as high in the long run. The child will remember the kit alone. The question is whether they get there by a route with steps in it or by being dropped at the top and blamed for not being there.

And notice what "they'll never learn" is a prediction about. It's a prediction that a child who's helped at nine will still need help at nineteen. Best and Miller's review says the functions strengthen throughout adolescence regardless. The nineteen-year-old will have the equipment. Whether they've had years of practice using it with support, or years of being told they're lazy for not having it, is what you're deciding on Thursday.