Why it might be worth lowering your expectations.
Guest Post written by Fran Liberatore from Radical Mothering
I am so excited to offer this post from my friend and co-conspirator Fran Liberatore from Radical Mothering. I first met Fran on Instagram and have had the pleasure of growing together through our unschooling journeys. While often an ocean away, Fran’s presence in my online community has helped shape my parenting practice by asking important questions around intersectional unschooling, consent-based education, intentional parenting, and how dominant culture plays a role in our decisions as parents. If you haven’t, make sure you go subscribe to her substack (she publishes much more regularly than I do!) for more great posts.
Every Monday, I do a weekly Day in the Life on instagram, where I share our day in stories, walking through the many ways I work to bring consent, autonomy and self-direction into our lives.
This week I mentioned the role of expectations in our relationships with our children.
We are told that we need to set high expectations so our children can rise to meet them. That if we don’t they either won’t do the thing, or they won’t know what to aim for, or they won’t feel like we expect much of them and they’ll act accordingly.
We are told that the best parents are authoritative: they are highly responsive, and highly demanding of their children.
We are also told we should set high expectations of ourselves, and of life in general. That’s how you achieve things, right? How you become successful?
I think this is projection, not reality.
From my personal experience as a very sensitive, undiagnosed neurodivergent child, I can’t remember a single time high expectations worked as per the instructions.
All my memories of feeling like someone expected a lot from me are of debilitating anxiety to the point of paralysis, of demand avoidance from the demands that expectations placed on me, of wanting to do the opposite - and consequently, of feeling a deep sense of shame for not living up to this picture others had of me, of all the wonderful things I was supposed to be and accomplish.
For me, high expectations actively pushed me down the overachiever to stay-at-home mother pipeline (I’m not sure this is really a thing, but bear with me): you excel in school and university, you do all the things and are all the things you’re supposed to be, and then.. nothing. You never really launch. You flounder, wonder who you are, what you even want to do, how you even got where you did, why you’re 24 and already so burnt out you can’t even handle a trip to the supermarket let alone a job.
You stumble around failing to meet any and all aims, objectives, expectations (because by this time you’ve gotten super good at setting yourself really high expectations and routinely not meeting them), and then you have a baby and “choose” to stay home with them, and attempt to excel at that instead.
So yeah. Overachiever to stay-at-home mother pipeline, there you have it. It’s admittedly one of the cushier pipelines, and I found my way out of it and into something eventually - but still.
But back to my point.
Good parents expect things
I’ll admit that low expectations are somewhat of a joke in our family - we intentionally go into a long day of travelling or a family event with super low expectations, knowing we will most probably end up pleasantly surprised. It’s a psychological tool, and has become a bit of a family mantra.
But the more I think about it, the more it makes a lot of sense in so many contexts.
We have read and been told so often that expectations are important, that we have a hard time distinguishing them from just having a set of values we hold dear, but pretty low expectations. We struggle to see how expectations and values might be different, and consequently believe having low expectations means we are also somehow lacking as people.
The vast majority of parenting books, for one, will have you believing that high expectations are key to raising a “successful” child.
Authoritative parents are apparently justified in having high expectations because they are also highly responsive - this somehow cancels out, or balances out, the expectations part.
Gentle parenting places itself under the ‘authoritative’ umbrella - and so many gentle parenting proponents go out of their way to be clear about how they expect a lot out of their children. They have standards. They have boundaries. They have a high bar.
Expectations are about parenting, not parenthood.
There are several problems with expectations. One of them is they are part of parenting as doing, rather than parenthood as being.
Parenting is actually a relatively recent concept, born sometime in the 1950s in the US, and constructed to mean, essentially, work - mostly women’s work, actually - that, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, began to rise in popularity at a time when more and more middle-class women were heading into the actual, paid, workplace.
Parenthood is a state of being, not a job, points out Alison Gopnik, and as such has no explicit expectations other than that of existing as a parent in the world. Of course it’s hard to generalize because parenthood was and is different everywhere, and children are still overwhelmingly mistreated and marginalized - so clearly adults have a way to go on this.
But is parenting, the concerted work of shaping a child, actually helpful?
Part of what it did is it set up a set of clear expectations both for children, and for parents (mothers, mostly), that have shifted over the decades but that remain pretty obvious to anyone parenting in any particular decade.
Children were supposed to develop in a linear fashion, and mothers were supposed to ensure they are meeting those milestones. Children are supposed to be able to do certain things at certain ages and stages, and mothers must expect those things from their children, AS WELL AS have high expectations of their own performance of motherhood. Mothers are supposed to get to work on shaping and moulding their children into the people they expect them to become (and the people they perhaps wanted to become themselves).
But what happens when none of this happens? The books don’t talk about that.
Expectations are a patriarchal construct.
They might not talk about that in the books because expectations in parenting are partly a patriarchal construct. An expectation is essentially a very concrete thing that you expect to happen, to yourself, others, or the world at large. You have a vision of what it’s going to be like, projected into the future - and you proceed with confidence that it will in fact pan out, just like that.
A quick google reveals that the dictionary calls expectations a “belief” or even a “strong belief.” And that is so spot on. We have literally no actual reason to believe they will happen, but we somehow still do, because that’s how belief works (as opposed to knowing, or acceptance). Expectations are about something that we believe will happen (whether we have reason to or not), or about something we believe we or someone else will achieve (without necessarily any reason backing this either).
When we go into mothering and caring for other humans with high expectations, we are embracing a mindset that is specifically patriarchal. Parenting as doing was predominantly constructed and championed by men (men as psychologists, pediatricians and parenting “experts” - think Dr Spock, John Bowlby, Dr Sears). But also, would it be ridiculous for me to point out that who else but (white) men assume and believe something great is going to happen in their future? That they will achieve great things?
It was entirely aligned with and in the interest of patriarchy and white supremacy, if not entirely intentional, to keep post-war middle class, predominantly white Western women at home, worrying about attachment and parenting ‘correctly’, rather than have them joining the workforce with not an ounce of guilt over leaving their children to be cared for by others. And parenting expectations have mothers in their grip to this day: they have created a situation where it is normal for women to work for pay, AND to take on most of the parenting heavy work.
Expectations are a capitalist construct.
Parental expectations are a capitalist construct because it frames parenting as something we do TO our children, in order to obtain ‘outcomes.’ Our child is our product, and we work on them tirelessly in order to shape them into the person who will go out there and meet all of our and society’s expectations.
Expectations only exist in a society where our focus is on the end product, rather than the process; where we believe we have more control over people and circumstances than we actually do; where we believe that investment in something (a child, say) will see a return. Where productivity, in the form of parentING, needs to result in a product.
Expectations can be oppressive.
The thing with expectations is they often come from something we believe about a group of people. Take children - we believe they should be able to perform in a specific way, in specific situations. This means that those children who don’t meet expectations often feel they are somehow lacking, and this can often lead to shame and harm.
I recently read the book Troublemakers by Carla Shalaby, and it’s a perfect example of how ‘high’ expectations of young children backfire massively when children are simply unable or unwilling to meet them.
These expectations are often inherently ableist, racist, adultist. Because high expectations don’t understand intersectionality, it seems.
And also, high expectations can be yet another expression of our culture of domination - they are something we impose on children, stories we tell ourselves and them about who they will be and what they will do.
Expectations reinforce the existing power over dynamics over our children, low expectations, especially when co-constructed, release us of them.
Expectations are not the same as demands (in my opinion), but they are related.
A demand is something we ask of ourselves or our children in the moment, that may or may not feel hard for them. To some extent, it is related to expectation. Often, the reason we demand things is BECAUSE of an expectation we might have. Something like this:
Expectation: I expect my child to be able to dress themselves at age X. I read this somewhere, or my mother-in-law told me, or a friend’s child can do it - somehow I’ve internalized this expectation, and so here I am.
Demand: I tell/ask my child to dress themselves in the morning.
Result: Well, for us personally, this backfires! My son is 9 and he does not dress himself every morning. Some mornings he jumps out of bed and immediately gets dressed. Some morning he doesn’t change into clothes until it’s time to go out. Some mornings I need to bring him his clothes and signal that he wear them.
I have no real, consistent expectations around the what, how, when and why of clothing because it just isn’t that important to either of us - so, low expectations sometimes lead to low demands.
Expectations give us a visual for how we want it to be, and demands are how we get there. When we lower our expectations, the demands we put on our children and ourselves are also lowered or released altogether.
Does this mean that we have no demands?
Nope, it doesn’t mean that at all. Not for us, at least. My priority is to live in partnership with my children. This means we’ll all have to do hard things at times, and we will walk through them together. Occasionally we’ll have to do things that feel way too hard, to the point of being really debilitating or dysregulating. This doesn’t happen often because we don’t have high demands over here - but it does happen because life itself is full of demands.
I will walk through all the hard bits with my children. I am fully okay being around their strong emotions, their anger and pain. We do not necessarily avoid hard things.
I accept what is, and the best they can do in that moment, to the best of my ability (and my ability is often not particularly high either!).
Ok so does it mean you DO have expectations?
Hmm. Yes, but very low ones. Mostly because a lot of the expectations we find ourselves having actually come from outside of us - from other people, society, institutions. Some of them are reasonable of course; they are about living in community and being in respectful relationship with others. But many others are entirely arbitrary! As much as possible, we let those go.
Isn’t that super defeatist though? Low Expectations sounds like the title of a really bad movie.
Well, I think it sounds defeatist because we’ve made it sound that way! We have made high expectations into unequivocally A GOOD THING.
But what have expectations ever done for us? Other than set us up for disappointment, failure, never quite matching up, shame? And even on the rare times we actually do meet our high expectations of ourselves, or our children meet our high expectations of them, does it feel good in the long-run? Or does it just set a cycle in motion where we are always expecting better, where nothing we or they can do is ever really enough?
We do have values though.
We have low expectations but we have solid values. In our family we discuss values often - things we hold to be true.
They are not future projections, or what we believe will happen; they are things that matter now.
We talk about them, add and modify them. We have them written down and pinned on the wall. One of our values is: “We believe and trust each other” and another one is “We make mistakes and that’s how we learn.”
We have strong values because it helps to hold us together as a group, it steers us in the direction we want to go, it reminds us why we do what we do, and it brings us back to what really matters most to us.
It reminds us that all of the noise aside, we care about these basic things. They come first.
Do we expect that we will be living out our values 24/7? Nope. It is written right there, in our values! Mistakes happen. We are not perfect. We embrace fear and imperfection and assume things will go wrong.
Expectations are projections; we live with what is right now.
Basically, we don’t tend to have high expectations because expectations get in the way of actually living. We would rather just live, and see how that goes. Moment by moment and day by day.
This part of Amanda Diekman’s book, where she explains low demand parenting, really resonated with me: “It says to the kid right in front of you: I see you, just as you are. I will release all the projections, shoulds, hopes, and dreams I’ve held tightly to. I will let go of all the plans I’ve made for you. And instead, I will see where you are, right now, and accept that this is an ok place to be. You are ok here. I love you right here.”
This speaks to how often our demands are entangled with our expectations of what our children should be doing or will be doing in future. The ways we project, aspire to, imagine, dream. I think that when it comes to dreams we have FOR others, it’s fair to say we need to let those go. It simply is not our life.
We are partners along the journey. We don’t get to choose the route.
Low expectations can always be raised.
The point of low expectations for me is to be honest about what we are all capable of and how something is likely to go.
The beauty of this is that my children will always meet my expectations, because they are exactly at the level of their ability at any given moment. I will always meet my own expectations because I’m honest with myself about what my capacity is at any given moment.
Low expectations can be raised accordingly - and I’ve noticed that the more accepting we are about our own and others’ abilities, the more regulated and confident we feel to slowly reach for what we want (and we increasingly know what we want, because no one is telling us who we should be and what we should do all the time.)
Dan Siegel coined the term “window of tolerance” and it applies here - low expectations meet us at our window of tolerance, the optimal nervous system state where we can experience, learn, and process new things. With time, we might be able to expand our window too - but there is no research that suggests that throwing us way outside of our window of tolerance is the way to do this. In my experience, impossibly unrealistic expectations do just that.
Buddhism says so
Okay I’m not usually spiritual and I have a healthy dose of cynicism when it comes to taking part in other cultures’ spiritual traditions, BUT, I will say that low expectations are kind of what Buddhism is all about, and it has a point.
“Life is suffering” can feel negative or depressing, but what does it really do? It sets up WAY low expectations for life. I remember this reframe helped me so much when I was in the midst of caring for a baby and a toddler. Just starting out the day with the baseline assumption that it wasn’t going to be fun, that in fact it was going to be mostly hard, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes a real struggle - meant that I felt grateful when things went well, I saw beauty and joy in ordinary moments, I didn’t focus so much on what we got done or how productive our day had been.
Writing this all down now, it feels a bit sad, frankly. But truly it wasn’t! In fact, it was one of the ways I stayed relatively stable and well in what was a really hard, sleep-deprived, unsupported few years of our lives. It was the reason I didn’t lose it on my children most days. I expected it to be hard. And I think that’s okay.
Low expectations not No Expectations
Psychology bears out the low expectations thing. Research shows that when we have high expectations, we are more likely to feel disappointed, and that when we enter something with low expectations we are more likely to be pleasantly surprised, or at the very least not disappointed. This piece quotes further research about this, and also indicates that going into an experience with no expectations is actually not as beneficial, ultimately, as going into it with actively low expectations.
This is also an interesting piece about low expectations and parent-child relationships.
I don’t have zero expectations of my children. I do have values that we often share, and we sometimes disagree on and that come up regularly as topics for discussion. I have *some* expectations of my children - mostly, that we just do what we can in any given moment. We try to live up to our values, but also we expect to fail daily. We try to meet some of our daily demands, perhaps with help and support, perhaps with some struggle, and perhaps by dropping what we can’t do.
There are some expectations, but they are intentionally extremely low because I know from my own experience of living, that life is just not easy. It was never meant to be, and it never will be, no matter how many layers of privilege and how much support you might have.
It’s capitalism (again), baby
We have been sold a story that life is supposed to be wonderful and full of joy and ease, and we go into it expecting it all to just happen. We have been brainwashed to think high expectations are how you achieve, how you self-actualize, are overwhelmingly a good thing - that “high” is always better than “low” in any context, right?
Wrong! When we believe this we are supporting a narrative of inevitable progress, of constant growth that has to follow a prescribed (often linear) pattern, of always aiming higher, marrying up, working our way up an imaginary ladder, clawing our way ahead in the world.
What if “low” was a good thing? What if low meant grounded, real, connected? What it was about embracing where we are on this earth, rather than always looking ahead to where we should be, to the time we will have perfect children and a perfect life, and finally be allowed to be happy? Finally be enough?
I think it’s extremely empowering to take back this narrative, begin accepting what is, and choose to stop projecting into an imaginary future that may never happen - for us, and for our children.
Fran is a mother, writer, unschooler, early childhood educator and graduate student. She write Radical Mothering, a newsletter about pushing back on the ways we believe children should be cared for, mothered (in the broadest sense of the word), educated and treated, and about centering consent in our homes and relationships. She shares a lot on Instagram @bigmothering.