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GREAT EXPECTATIONS FOR ONLY CHILDREN: How Pressure to be Perfect Can Backfire

Look at Yourself

Parents impose unrealistic expectations on their children for various reasons. Parents face their own childhood when they watch their children grow, and in doing so they want their children to have the successes that eluded them in childhood. Only child-parent Evelyn Hanna spent long periods of time agonizing before she understood. "The first blow came when my son entered second grade,” she says. “The teacher put him in the slowest reading group. I was sure she had made a mistake and insisted that Neil be retested. In my head he was going to be the academic fireball I had dreamed of being. With the help of the school principal I learned to focus on his positive attributes--his popularity, his athletic abilities and warm personality. Those should have been enough for me from the beginning."

There is also a pronounced tendency on the part of the parents of only children to take responsibility for how a child turns out instead of accepting that that's how the child is.  Such parents might make statements like, "She's not reading because I didn't spend time with her each evening teaching her the sight words" or "he's not slamming the ball out of the park because I didn't have batting practice in the backyard twice a week." 

Easing Up and Backing Off

Pressure intensifies when both parents excel because the parents, not siblings, are the only child’s performance models. To ease the burden of living up to your level, make it clear that he should make his own path by choosing something that particularly interests him. Tell him you understand that his choice may be quite different from yours. When you don't explicitly give a child room to be himself, the situation can appear hopeless and impossible to him.

Whether or not your child excels academically, she probably has strengths you can encourage and in which you can take pride. Being proud is very different from living vicariously through your child. Being a role model by expressing contentment with your own pursuits is more effective than expressing your hopes for your child or being a tough taskmaster. Demanding performance from a child who may not be capable of meeting your expectation or interested in it is frustrating for everyone and could create a backlash whose effect might not be seen for years.

Parents of Onlies would be wise to keep up their own activities and interests so that they have less time to focus on every inch of their singleton's progress. It's a step in right direction just to be aware that putting all your energy into your child may not be the best thing for her. 

For more suggestions on raising singletons, see Parenting an Only Child, The Joys and Challenges of Raising Your One and Only (Broadway Books).

Social psychologist Susan Newman, Ph.D. teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and is the author of 13 books, including The Book of No: 250 Ways to Say It—and Mean It—and Stop People-Pleasing Forever  (McGraw-Hill), Little Things Long Remembered: Making Your Children Feel Special Every Day (RandomHouse/Crown), ), Little Things Mean A Lot: Creating Happy Memories with Your Grandchildren (Random House/Crown), and Nobody's Baby Now: Reinventing Your Adult Relationship With Your Mother and Father.  Visit Susan’s website: www.susannewmanphd.com

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