Great Expectations

Do you have a child who is struggling in school? Do you dread parent-teacher meetings where all you hear is bad news? Maybe you’ve received texts from the teachers all year about how your child is untidy, has bad handwriting, doesn’t complete homework, or puts in very little effort in daily tasks. You’ve tried scolding, nagging, taking away screen time, and now you’re ready to throw in the towel.

After years of negative feedback and failed expectations, it’s natural to want to just stop expecting anything from our children altogether. But don’t give up! Expectations are one of the cornerstones of a child’s healthy mental and emotional development.

The Pygmalion Effect

The Pygmalion Effect, named after a Greek mythological character, was also the inspiration for Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, on which the 1964 movie, My Fair Lady, was based upon. In one scene in the movie, the protagonist, Eliza Doolittle, encapsulates the gist of the whole movie in a single profound observation: “The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.”

The Rosenthal Experiment of 1964 demonstrates this profound impact of positive and negative expectations on children. Its conclusion was termed the Rosenthal Effect or the Pygmalion effect, where a person performs better when more is expected of them.

Besides this, it is more important that we provide our children with a system or framework within which they can successfully achieve the expectations placed upon them.

Expectations on Handwriting

The parents of one of my students had warned me on his first day that their child had ADHD, and as a result, had terrible handwriting. I’m always sceptical when I hear such correlations and find that it is usually an excuse for a child to behave a certain way. On his first lesson, I found his handwriting to be perfectly legible.

A few weeks later, he started to scribble half answers. I could have just dismissed it as his ADHD acting up, which I’m sure many adults in his life had, but I refused to lower my standards for him. Instead, I had him come an hour earlier for the next lesson and he redid the whole paper – in neat handwriting and with complete answers in complete sentences.

A few cycles of this later, and his ADHD was cured. The truth is, I never acknowledged it in the first place. What I acknowledged was that he had the ability to achieve a much higher standard of handwriting, and gave him multiple opportunities to do so.

Expectations on Attitude

I had recently conducted a series of English workshops for a group of foreign students. One of them, the only boy in the lot, was difficult from day one. He was loud and obnoxious, slouched in his chair and was generally uncooperative, even during games.

15 minutes into a worksheet activity I assigned on the third day, I noticed that the boy had stopped writing and started bothering the others around him. I checked his worksheet and saw that he had simply copied his answer in the first question into the rest of the worksheet. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I called him outside the class and gave him some real talk. He acknowledged that he was not taking the workshop seriously and did not reciprocate the respect that I had accorded to him despite his obvious disinterest.

I recognised that he wasn’t trying to be difficult. It was all a smokescreen to hide the fact that he wasn’t proficient in English. I told him that I was aware of his language ability and that I did not expect him to get the answers right, only that he tried his best.

For the rest of the workshop he did a complete 180 that surprised even me. He was engaged, asked questions when he did not understand, and was the loudest cheerleader for each activity.

I once heard an American pastor share an anecdote of when he was the chaplain of a college football team. He had taken them out for a steak lunch and noticed that they were tearing at their meats barbarically. He stopped them and introduced them to the cutlery, “Boys, this is a knife. And this is a fork…”

The team was puzzled and slightly offended. They asked what was wrong with the way they were eating and why they had to use the cutlery. To which, the pastor replied, “Because one day you will eat before presidents.”

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