HOW DO YOU RATE YOUR KIDS' BEHAVIOUR?

And I really do mean HOW? 

Is it case by case?

Is it an average?

Is it their "best behaviour" behaviour?

A number out of ten? Poor, average, excellent... ?

And what factors do you take into account when assessing you child's behaviour?

I think before we become parents we rate individual kids against our "Experience of Kids". If all the kids we've ever known were little angels, then a child who is even slightly stroppy convinces us that those parents must be clueless! When we meet with truly obnoxious children we recalibrate everything we know about kids, and everyone moves up a peg to make room for those kids at the bottom of the ladder!!

In our cluelessness, we might fail to take into account the company or the environment. In my experience children are most confident and relaxed in their own home. They become less so when there are other people visiting, depending on how well they know the visitors, and yet less again in unfamiliar territory, eg. other peoples' homes or public spaces. In an unfamiliar setting they will assess the adult's capability to deal before exhibiting testing behaviour, gently pressing forward to see where the boundaries with other people lie.

But they can only hang back in this way if they understand the difference between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. They can only activate self-discipline if they have had discipline. Only the child who is reprimanded for jumping on the couch at home can stop himself from jumping on someone else's couch. If your child is jumping on someone else's couch, they don't know it's wrong, because you haven't told them, and then kept telling them, repeatedly, monotonously, until they understand, and stop... Or they don't care. Which is worse?

I think as parents we might fall into one of two camps:

We are aware that apart from the occasional anomaly, what we are witnessing from other people's kids, especially when we first meet them, is usually their "best behaviour", eg. the behaviour that they know for sure won't get them in trouble with their parents. Their best behaviour is shaped by their parents' expectations for their average behaviour. And so we weigh our kid's best behaviour against their kid's best behaviour. If their kid is always screaming, crying, pleading (and probably getting his own way) we reason that this is what he is used to, that is why he does it in public. If their kid races straight over and starts shattering our kids' toys, well....

The only hope you have of keeping them in check in public, is that they are used to not running amok at home. I can't help but pity children whose parents don't have the energy or courage to correct them at home. Those parents make the overall experience of child-rearing miserable for themselves, bowing to the will of these tiny tyrants. And they seem to forget that they make their child intolerable to everyone else. It seems unfair on the child to find themselves in the position where everyone's charity toward them is damaged because of the parents' failure to step up and enforce the law.  Has their experience of children in general been shaped in such a way that allows for total obnoxiousness as a normal state? Have they expended all of their energies on lesser things and so find themselves without the will to discipline their child? Do they think that this is the job of society, school or daycare, to whip their child into shape?

Smart parents weigh their child's day-to-day behaviour against the best we know they are capable of (taking into account all the usual variables of course, hungry, tired, hot/cold...) and we expect a certain standard of behaviour at home. And because our child is used to limitations they are able to more easily accept limitations when they are even more necessary. We expect more and better of our children each passing week, rather than just more of the same.

As a bonus, those parents who lay down a standard of behaviour are also better able to see when certain things are out of step with their child's usual temperament. We often know (or can see in immediate hindsight) when our child is coming down with an illness because of a marked change in their behaviour. How do parents of children who communicate only through screaming and whining ever know when their child is sick, or truly upset?? Our children's behaviour can educate us, if we are prepared to lay down the groundwork. It is one of my deep fears for these children, should some real tragedy befall them, how are they expected to cope then?