Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit. You expect your child to do a thing that a sensible adult would do without thinking, remember the kit, put the coat on the hook, come off the tablet when asked, be ready by ten to eight, and they don't, and you're let down, again, and the letting down has a name attached to it. Lazy. Careless. Doesn't listen. Doesn't care. You say the name, or think it, most days.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the standard makes sense from the inside. Your child is capable, they've done the thing before, and low expectations do fail children. The second is that the abilities you're expecting, holding several things in mind, stopping something absorbing on request, planning ahead, judging time, overriding a want, are a set of mental functions that researchers have measured across childhood, and they grow steadily from about four into the late teens. A nine-year-old who forgets the kit isn't a lazy adult. They're a nine-year-old, doing what nine-year-olds do with a nine-year-old's equipment. The gap between what you expect and what they can do alone isn't attitude. It's age, and the label you've been reaching for predicts nothing and teaches them something false about themselves. The third is practical. When your child lets you down, you ask what a child their age can do alone, and you build the arrangement that gets the kit into the bag, instead of raising the standard or your voice. Chapters 18 to 21 cover how.

This book doesn't ask you to expect nothing, to do everything for them, or to believe children can't learn responsibility. They can, and the way they learn it is the last third of the book. It asks you to set the standard at the age, and to move it up as they grow rather than holding it at adult height and being disappointed daily by the distance.

Two cautions.

If your child is far outside the range for their age, at school as well as at home, if teachers are raising it, or if the gap is causing your child real distress, that's worth a conversation with the school's special needs coordinator and with your GP. Some children need more than an arrangement, and the NHS pages on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are a place to read. This book is about ordinary children and ordinary parents. It isn't a diagnostic tool and shouldn't be used as one in either direction.

And if the letdown has become shouting, most days, at predictable times, an earlier book in this series is about that, and it's named in the notes. This one is about the expectation underneath the shout.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.