Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

essential responsibility of parenting. Expectations communicate messages to your children about what’s important to you and establish a standard toward which your children can strive. But expectations can be double-edged swords. They can be a tremendous benefit to your children’s development or they can be crushing burdens that destroy their self-esteem, depending on what types of expectations you set.
    But it isn’t just the messages you send about expectations that are important, but also how they are received and interpreted. As I noted in chapter 3, there can be a disconnect between the messages that you send your children and the messages they receive. And research has demonstrated the harm that can be done to children when the messages they get from their parents are different from those that their parents intended to send. One study found that students experienced anxiety about their ability to perform in school, which can hurt self-esteem and make adapting to school more difficult. But, as I mentioned previously, the findings showed that students’ perceptions of their parents’ expectations were exaggerated. Specifically, students thought their parents’ expectations of academic achievement were much higher than those actually held by their parents.
Unhealthy Expectations of Competence
     
    There are two types of expectations that you shouldn’t set for your children: ability and outcome expectations.
Ability expectations
send children the message that you expect them to achieve a certain result because of their natural ability, “We expect you to get straight A’s because you’re so smart” or “We expect you to win because you’re the best athlete out there.” The problem with these messages is that children have no control over their ability. Children are born with a certain amount of ability, and all they can do is maximize whatever ability they are given. The fact is that if your children aren’t meeting your ability expectations, you have no one to blame but yourself—you didn’t give them good enough genes! Another problem with ability expectations is that if children attribute their successes to their ability—“I got an A because I’m so smart,”—they must attribute their failures to their lack of ability—“I failed because I’m stupid.”
    Popular culture also conveys the message that results matter above all else. As a consequence, parents often set
outcome expectations
inwhich the message is that their children must produce a certain result—“We expect you to win this game” or “We know you’ll be the soloist in your dance school performance”—if they want to be seen as competent. The problem is that, once again, children are asked to produce an outcome over which they may not have control. They might perform to the best of their ability but still not meet their parents’ outcome expectations because other children just happened to do better than they did. So they would have to consider themselves as incompetent despite their good performance. Setting outcome expectations also communicates the meta-message to your children that you value results over everything else, so they’ll come to judge themselves by the same standards. Contrary to what you may believe, ability and outcome expectations actually hinder your children’s development of competence.
Results Matter!
     
    Now you might be thinking, “Wait a minute! I can’t push my kids to get good grades or do their best in school, sports, and other activities? No way I’m buying this one.” Before you jump all over me, give me some latitude to bring all these ideas back to the real world.
    Here is a simple reality that we all recognize in our culture: results matter! No two ways about it, in most parts of our society, the message that children get is that their competence is judged on the results they produce: grades, victories, test scores, rankings. Though it would be great if children were rewarded for their good intentions or efforts, that is not the way the world works. Unfortunately, this societal message can cause parents to place their desire for their children to excel in the short run ahead of their desire to instill a sense of competence in the long run, and the result is interference with, rather than encouragement of, their children’s growth.
    I would recommend that you give up outcome expectations altogether but still give your children outcome “somethings.” These somethings are