Communicate Expectations to Your Children

You Cannot Expect Results Without Giving Instructions

I raised four children, and they are all grown now. They are also some of my best friends. They call me, talk to me, tell me what is happening in their lives, ask my opinion, disagree with my opinion, laugh with me, and occasionally remind me that I am still their mother when I apparently become a little too comfortable with the friendship part. I consider that relationship one of the greatest accomplishments of my life because once your children become adults, they no longer have to maintain a relationship with you. If they keep showing up when there is no parental authority forcing them to, you built something they actually want to keep.

One of the biggest things I learned while raising them is that parenting requires more discipline from the parent than it does from the child. That probably isn’t going to be popular with everybody, because it means parents have to stop blaming children for situations the adults failed to manage. Children need consistency. They need instructions they can understand. They need expectations communicated before they are expected to meet them. They need consequences they can predict. And they need a parent willing to do the exhausting, repetitive work of actually following through. Quite frankly, a lot of parents are too damn lazy about that part, and it shows.

I took all four of my children everywhere. Grocery stores, restaurants, appointments, getting my hair done, errands, visits, and pretty much anywhere else I needed to go. I did not automatically expect four children to magically understand how they were supposed to behave in every environment. Before we went somewhere, I told them what I expected. I explained where we were going, what behavior was appropriate, what I needed from them, and what would happen if they chose to ignore those expectations. That conversation happened before the problem.

Parents sometimes walk into a restaurant with a young child who has barely been alive long enough to understand why forks come in different sizes and somehow expect that child to possess an instinctive knowledge of restaurant etiquette. Then the child behaves like a child, the parent gets embarrassed, frustration builds, the warnings start piling up, and twenty minutes later everybody is miserable.

News flash: your kid has never done being a kid before.

They do not automatically know what “behave” means. Behave how? Sit still for how long? Can I talk? How loudly? Can I get up? What can I touch? What happens if I forget? Adults understand that different places come with different social expectations because adults have accumulated years of experience. Children are still collecting those instructions. So give them the damn instructions.

Talk to your kids like people. Explain what you expect in language they understand. Explain the consequence attached to the choice. Then follow through with what you said. You are teaching cause and effect, responsibility, communication, and trust at the same time.

I also did not believe in telling my children something seventeen times while getting progressively louder. I instructed them once. If they ignored me, I addressed it. I did not wait until I was furious, exhausted, embarrassed, and ready to explode. That required discipline from me because consistency is inconvenient as hell. Sometimes you are tired. Sometimes you do not want to stop what you are doing. Sometimes ignoring the behavior is easier in that particular moment. Then tomorrow you suddenly decide the exact same behavior deserves a consequence. What exactly is the child supposed to learn from that?

If something is unacceptable on Monday, it cannot become acceptable Tuesday through Thursday because you are tired, then suddenly become a federal offense Friday because you have had a shitty day. Children learn patterns incredibly quickly. If your boundary moves depending on your mood, they are going to test the boundary because you have taught them that the boundary is negotiable. That is not a child failing to understand consistency. That is a parent failing to provide it.

I also learned very quickly that my children were four different people. What got through to one did absolutely nothing for another. When my children were young, corporal punishment was part of how I had been taught to discipline, and I used it with some of them. Looking back across the entire experience of raising four children, though, the more important lesson was that I could never parent them as though they had identical personalities.

My oldest daughter and my youngest daughter responded incredibly well to conversation. I could sit them down, explain what happened, tell them why it was a problem, and they understood. My sons required different approaches and different levels of intervention. The lesson I carried forward was simple: you have to know the child you are raising. Discipline is supposed to teach. If your method is not teaching that particular child what you are trying to teach, repeatedly applying the same method because “that’s how I parent” makes absolutely no sense.

There was one rule I took very seriously regardless of what consequence I chose: I did not correct my children while I was raging.

If I was too angry to deal with something appropriately, I told them to go to their room and wait until I could handle the situation. Sometimes Mom needed a damn minute. I would breathe, meditate, collect myself, think about what actually happened, and then deal with it. The behavior could wait a few minutes. My responsibility to control myself could not.

Correcting a child in anger is one of the worst habits a parent can develop because anger has a nasty way of turning discipline into retaliation. Suddenly the consequence is about how irritated, embarrassed, inconvenienced, or disrespected the adult feels. Your child becomes the target of your emotional state instead of a human being who needs guidance.

You are the grown-up.

That means emotional regulation is part of your damn job description.

Children are going to annoy you. They are going to forget things you literally told them yesterday. They are going to test rules. They are going to make terrible decisions. They are going to embarrass you in public at least once because apparently that comes complimentary with childbirth. They are going to push exactly the button you did not know existed until five seconds before they pushed it.

You still have to be the adult.

This is why I say raising children takes more discipline in yourself than in them. You have to control your reactions. You have to communicate clearly. You have to follow through when following through is inconvenient. You have to remember what consequence you established. You have to stop moving the damn goalpost. You have to recognize when your approach is not working for a particular child. You have to apologize when you screw up. You have to teach the same lesson again when their developing brain apparently filed yesterday’s lesson under “information I will temporarily pretend does not exist.”

That is parenting.

I also talked to my children about everything. I wanted them to understand that they could come to me when they screwed up instead of becoming experts at hiding things from me. I knew they were eventually going to encounter alcohol, drugs, sex, relationships, peer pressure, and a thousand other things whether I approved of those things or not. Pretending those subjects did not exist was never going to protect them. Information gave them something useful to work with.

That philosophy started when they were very young. I talked to them about their bodies, personal boundaries, inappropriate touching, and their right to say no using language appropriate for their age. I had personal reasons for understanding how dangerous silence and confusion around those subjects can become. Children are going to learn about their bodies and sexuality somewhere. I wanted accurate, age-appropriate conversations to begin at home, where they could ask questions without being shamed for asking them.

The same philosophy applied as they got older. I told them that if they ever found themselves curious about alcohol or marijuana, I would rather they talk to me than sneak around, get into somebody’s car, accept something from someone they did not trust, or end up somewhere unsafe because they were terrified to call home. Plenty of people thought that approach was ridiculously liberal. I heard predictions about drugs, delinquency, jail, and everything else supposedly waiting for children whose mother actually discussed uncomfortable subjects with them. Well, the children grew up.

None of them became drug addicts. None of them were arrested. None of them ended up becoming the disasters people confidently predicted my parenting would produce. Most importantly to me, they learned that uncomfortable subjects could still be discussed with their mother.

I am not claiming four children constitute a scientific study, because they obviously do not. I am saying I have something incredibly valuable after raising them: decades of lived parenting experience followed by the opportunity to see the adults those children became. And I learned something from that outcome.

Children cannot meet expectations nobody bothered to explain. They cannot learn consistency from an inconsistent parent. They cannot learn emotional regulation from watching an adult lose control every time something goes wrong. They cannot learn responsibility when consequences depend entirely on whether Mom or Dad happens to feel like parenting that day.

Communicate your expectations before your child screws them up. Make the rules understandable. Make the consequences predictable. Follow through. Adjust your teaching to the human being standing in front of you. And when you are too angry to handle something appropriately, handle yourself first.

Raising children is work. It requires sacrifice, attention, repetition, patience, self-control, and an absolutely ridiculous amount of consistency. It can also be the best damn time of your life when you stop treating parenting as controlling a child and start treating it as raising a human being.

I have heard people say you should never be your child’s best friend. I have a few choice words about that too, but I will save most of those for another day. My children are grown now. I cannot ground them. I cannot send them to their rooms. I cannot make them call me. They choose to have me in their lives. That is the part I care about.

Raise your children like you are raising a billion dollars. Protect the investment. Pay attention to it. Put your time into it. Learn everything you can about it. Treat it like the extraordinary treasure it is.

Because these kids are your greatest treasure, and parenting will demand more discipline from you than you will ever have the right to demand from them.

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