I know a mom with a twelve-year old daughter who has over the last year become a lot taller than her mother. Girls often grow up earlier, and now the daughter looks like a young woman.

If you saw her across a room you'd put her at fifteen, maybe older and without anybody realizing it, the parents started expecting her to be like one in a - “you should be able to manage this” - type way.

It took her husband saying it out loud to stop it: remember, she's just twelve.

Her mom told me the realization landed hard. She'd been talking to her daughter like a peer. Not harshly, not unkindly. Just at a level her daughter had no chance of meeting, because she's in sixth grade. 

I've been thinking about it ever since, because it isn't only about height.

Think about the last time you caught yourself thinking, they're old enough to know this by now. Though, what was the evidence?

My guess is it was something like: she's nearly my height. His voice has changed. He can hold a proper conversation about something I'm actually interested in. She's funny or has got a phone now.

But, none of these tell you that they’ve become responsible or are now ready for more. 

There's another half to this too, and I think it’s worse.

They do something responsible - properly, unprompted and we as parents think - “Oh, they can do that now.”

So the next time, you don't check. Why would you? They did it last week.

Then they don’t hold up and you're let down, which is a completely different feeling, and they can hear it in your voice- “you did this fine last time, what happened?”

What happened is that one good week isn't a new skill. It's one good week.

They are not consistent yet. That's not a character flaw, it's the actual definition of where they are developed, mentally. The capability is there on a Tuesday and absent on a Thursday, and both of those are real. But we promote them on a single piece of evidence, and then hold the standards too high, which can be unfair. 

To be clear, I don't mean academics. Most of us are sensible about what a twelve-year-old can learn.

It's everything else. The managing of schedules, life and more.

Those are executive functions. We expect a twelve-year-old to run their life with the admin skills of a twenty-five-year-old, then act surprised every single time when they forget a form, miss turning in an assignment or lose their water bottle. 

You may have heard that the brain isn't finished developing until the age of twenty-five. That line is more contested than people realize, and I'd leave it alone.

What's much better established is more specific and more useful.

Executive function, like planning, organizing, prioritizing and self-control develops along a curve.

The steepest, fastest part of that curve runs from roughly ten to fifteen, that's when the heavy construction happens. It reaches something like adult level in late adolescence, around eighteen to twenty, and keeps fine-tuning after that.

So a twelve-year-old isn't a small adult whose skills have failed to turn up. They are in the middle of the most rapid period of building those skills that they will ever experience. 

Also, there's a detail inside which explains almost everything: the manager skills mature last. Planning, prioritizing, time management … those come in at the very end of the sequence.

A kid can be plainly bright and still be hopeless at tracking a deadline. Your kid being clever tells you nothing about whether they can run their own week. 

There's a second version and it's less comfortable.

We often expect our kids to handle things better than we handle them ourselves.

The parent who loses their temper and then asks their child why they're so angry.

The one who can't let anything go, raising a kid who holds a grudge, and wondering aloud where that came from.

The one who leaves everything until the last minute and is genuinely irritated to find the same habit in a twelve-year-old who has been watching them operate for twelve years.

We hold them to a standard we're not meeting and they learned most of it from us.

I'm not saying you have to be perfect before you can ask anything of your kids. But it's worth noticing when the thing that irritates you most about your child is a thing you do, because that irritation often has a different source than you think.

This isn't an argument for expecting nothing.

Kids need to be stretched, and the only way those skills get built is by being used badly at first, then less badly. If nobody ever asks a twelve-year-old to track their own deadlines, they arrive at sixteen having never done it.

So the point isn't to lower the bar. It's to put the bar where they are, and expect to be holding the ladder for a while.

Practically, for me, that means a few things.

1. Expect the forgetting: If it matters enough that forgetting would be a disaster, build in a check. If it doesn't, let them forget it and deal with the natural consequences.

2. Separate the two questions: Could they have done this vs Should I be annoyed?
Quite often the answer to the first one is honestly no.

Lastly, when I catch myself thinking ‘they should know better by now’ - the useful follow-up is: should they? But, based on what, not their height for sure. 

The thing about the early story that stayed with me is that my friend is a really great mother and just didn't notice what she was doing.

There was no decision. Her daughter got taller, started looking like a young woman, and the expectations drifted upward to match invisibly, over months. It took another adult in the room to name it.

I don't think most of us would catch that in ourselves either.

So the next time you're frustrated that your kid can't manage something, say their age out loud. Just the number.

She's twelve. He’s ten. 

It's a slightly ridiculous exercise and it works almost every time, because the number is nearly always lower than the one you'd been expecting in your head.

See you next week,
Lakshmi 💛

P.S. If you want a slightly uncomfortable version of this,  think of the thing your kid does that annoys you most, and ask honestly whether you do it too. I'd rather not tell you how that went for me.