Why should caregivers keep expectations high when teaching children, that's what people want to
know. I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach parenting and good communication all over the world through the
lens of self government and in this video, we're going to be talking about parent expectations.
In this video, we're gonna discuss expectations and the power
they have to create change in a child's life, and what caregivers can do in order to create the
right expectations for children. Expectations are very powerful. In fact, expectations can trap you.
They can lead you toward making the wrong decision, toward disconnecting from other people, and even
becoming very selfish in your behavior and your thoughts. But expectations can also lead a person
towards success without some sort of a plan or expectation in front of you, you don't know where
you're headed, so you can become stagnant. So caregivers, if they're wise will have the right
types of expectations for their children. When a person suffers from low expectations, they end up
becoming very unmotivated, lazy, they make a lot of excuses, stuff like that. So when a caregiver
offers good expectations to the children, that they care for, they're actually offering the child
an opportunity to self motivate, and to become empowered. So we do want to definitely make sure
that we give children expectations, but expectations that are laced with guilt, or fear,
or that are maybe intimidating can actually be manipulative to the heart of a child. And when we
are manipulating the heart of a child, it actually can tear them down instead of move them forward.
So the tone with which an expectation is presented to a child is really important.
Also, making sure that the expectation has some sort of skill or structure attached to it so
that the child has a planned course of action is going to be important. If you tell someone, well,
you need to be obedient, that's really vague. There is no course of action there. But if you
can tell someone, when I give you an instruction, you need to use the skill following instructions,
which means that you look at me, then you keep a calm face, voice and body, you say okay, to the
instruction, or you disagree appropriately about it, which is a whole other skill that I teach.
And then you do the task immediately, and then check back. And so if you tell your child that,
then the child goes, oh, obedience means I follow instructions from my caregiver. They are telling
me what needs to happen and I follow through with that. So you've given them something to hold on to
structurally, super important. We're also going to want to make sure that we prepare our children
for what might happen, if they don't follow through with the structure that we're teaching
them for the skill that is going to be most useful. I teach all about self government. Self
government is being able to determine the cause and effect of any given situation, and possessing
a knowledge of your own behavior so that you can control them. So what that means is that a person
analyzes themselves on a regular basis, and they make changes to make sure that they get the best
outcomes. So they may have a goal for what type of person they feel like they ought to be
and then they plan ahead for becoming that type of person. So when a caregiver gives a child
an expectation that leads them in a direction toward maybe a quality, a characteristic, a value
that they want to live by, then that child now has a plan for what type of person they ought to be.
Now they can course correct. If no caregiver ever, ever gives an expectation to that child, then the
child doesn't have a plan. They also don't have a reason to course correct, because nothing is wrong
with the decision they made if there aren't any expectations in the first place. There is a type
of parenting, I usually refer to it as modern progressive parenting. It's a very passive or
permissive style of parenting that has a loss of parental role so the children are pretty much
allowed to do whatever they want. And the parents feel like they're giving their children absolute
freedom, when in reality, the child doesn't have a lot of direction. This type of parent
oftentimes does not give very healthy expectations to their child because the child is left alone
to do whatever they want. And so the child's giving themselves their own expectations or not,
because they don't even know that expectations can be healthy. And I think we're seeing the results
of that in our society today because there's a lot of people who have have a failure to launch,
they didn't have expectations. Nobody formed them with this idea that they should make plans for
themselves, follow through, see how they do and then course correct if things aren't happening
correctly. Instead, they're just like, ah, this is what I want in the minute. So that's what I
should get. It's a very entitled, very immediate gratification type mindset, which shows you that
the people don't have many expectations except for the expectation of pleasure or self gratification.
I'd like to share with you some key things that you can do to better teach your children's self
government so that you can help raise those expectations, and be seen as a good parental
authority, or adult authority that can give them or help them understand expectations.
But before I do, click the subscribe button now. So the video content on this channel is designed
to help you have a better impact on the children that you are caring for.
That's the whole point to help everyone have better unity, better relationships,
and overall better behavior. So click on the subscribe button now. I remember years ago
reading a book to my children. It was by Alex and Brett Harris, and it was called
Do Hard Things. So this is two brothers that wrote a book. The subtitle to the book was
a teenage rebellion against low expectations. I thought that was so insightful. The two teenagers
would say, I think the world is giving teenagers low expectations and we are rebelling against
that by creating expectations for ourselves. Isn't that amazing? But you see from that very subtitle
of the book that these two, I think there were 16 year olds, that wrote the book at the time,
they determined that they were being hurt by not having high enough expectations. And we're talking
in everything. So we have behavioral expectations. There's academic expectations, social
expectations, value expectations, or expectations with your principles, the way you live, your life,
your morality, those types of things. High expectations actually produce higher results.
So this is what they were saying and I think they're spot on. So years ago, I did a documentary
with the BBC over in England, it was called The World's Strictest Parents. And we were kind of
scrutinized by the world because there was the two British teens, they were both 17,
they came to our home to stay for eight days, this film crew filmed it. So it was kind of a reality
TV show, actually. You can see that on my website, teachingselfgovernment.com in the blog section,
it's in the video blog. Anyway, we did this video. And what happened was people said, whoa,
that family, oh my word. They must be oppressive. They have, you know, guidelines for
modesty for how their children will dress. They have rules for how they're communicate with
each other, that they won't gossip about people, they have things they will drink and won't drink
and will eat and won't eat. These were a lot of expectations that we have for our children.
In our family, we call these standards. We call them family standards that we have for our family.
People thought that that was maybe oppressive. But you know, it was really interesting? Number one,
all of my children all live with great standards to this day. They're all adults
at this point. So if you ever see that video or that movie back from 2009, you'll see how young my
children were there. But now they're all launched from the home and they all have maintained all of
the standards that we taught them. They're very happy with those standards. And they look for
people to marry and to date that have similar standards. So did they matter to them? Yeah,
they gave them a sense of security to have those expectations or those standards. I thought it was
very interesting that members of the camera crew, even adults who saw that episode of The World's
Strictest Parents contacted me and said, you know what? I kind of want to change my standards. I
kind of want to have some of your standards. So now our family having expectations gave them an
expectation they'd never thought of having for themselves. Incredible, right? And what happened
by the end of that program, there were things like James and Hannah were like, you know what,
I think I'll take out this piercing. I think I don't want it. I think you know, we're all
removed it for this gala that we're gonna go to because I want to be more respectful. Suddenly,
they were following through with the expectations for our family and they were willingly doing it,
wanting to do it, they wanted to be respectful. They felt a lot of comfort. They were even begging
not to leave our home and asking if they could stay with us at the end of the program. We had
expectations. Those expectations ended up making a big difference in their condition of heart.
It was powerful to them. So should parents offer expectations to their children? Yes, it's
powerful. It gives them security. It gives them a compass and it helps them and know that we care.
I can tell you a lot more about expectations and how correcting your children is also a great way
to point them back toward productive expectations. So giving the children that you are taking
care of, giving them instructions to follow, "no" answers, giving them skills that they can use, and
then having them use those skills and correcting them if they don't use those skills, these are
all ways that we teach our children expectations. I would like to teach you more about that.
There is a video that I made a while ago, but I think might be interesting to you. The video was
called the expectation trap versus the cycle for success. So go ahead and click on the link to that
video now, learn more about expectations and how correcting children actually helps them develop
good expectations for themselves.