5 things parents expect their kids to do way before it’s appropriate, revealed by a parenting expert

A parenting expert has revealed the five developmental things parents often expect from their kids at too early of an age - and all of them are pretty surprising. 

No matter which parenting style you've chosen to adopt as your bring your kids up, there will be certain pressures you put on your child when it comes to their childhood development. 

But while the age at which kids should be crawling, walking and talking are well researched, one parenting expert has revealed that the emotional development many parents expect from their kids often isn't age-appropriate and that they're pushing youngsters to achieve things way beyond their ability at certain ages. 

"These are all things I expected my children to be able to do before I knew better," Rachel Rogers, a parenting expert a mum, revealed on TikTok before listing the five things she's noticed other people also seem to expect from kids too early on in their lives. 

1. Expecting children under the age of three to share with their friends. "It ain't going to be happen," Rogers said candidly of the expectation. She explained, “One-year-olds are in the onlooker play stage, and two-year-olds are in the parallel play stage, and in both of those stages, they have a bubble. 

"Around three to four-years-old is where we see them move into associate play where they can share with each other," she added.

2. Expecting young children to be able to control their impulses and emotions. She explains that both emotional and impulse control are 'such advanced skills' and that most children won't be able to get their big feelings under control until they're at a surprisingly old age. "[The skill] is not fully matured in the brain until the child is in their mid-late twenties," Rogers said. 

3. Expecting children under eight to be able to calm themselves down. Similarly to her previous point, Rogers advised that expecting kids under the age of eight-years-old to not only control their emotions but to understand and recover from them too is not age-appropriate. 

“Children under the age of eight require co-regulation, having a calm adult to regulate with in order to learn how to self-regulate their own emotions," she said. "And if we don’t give them that, we stunt their emotional development.”

@theconsideratemomma

♬ original sound - The Considerate Momma

4. Expecting children under 25 to think logically and reasonably. "When you try and reason with your four-year-old and ask them why they did something, and they’re gonna say, ‘I don’t know.’ And they actually do not know,” she explained.

She added, “The decision to do the thing was not made out of logic and reasoning. They didn’t think it through; they just impulsively and emotionally reacted.” And parents can't expect kids to properly do this until their frontal lobe, the area of the brain that's responsible for rational decision-making, is fully developed - and that won't happen until the age of 25!

5. Expecting children under the age of 12 to be empathetic. Empathy is a skill every parent wants their child to have but, Rogers said, most kids 'do not care' about what others are experiencing. This is simply because they haven't learnt that it's necessary to do that yet but will in time as they pick up more and more lessons from their environment.

Learn more about childhood development from the experts, with insight like the 8 types of play your kid needs to support their development and the big 5 traits that kids develop in the first 10 years of their life. Plus, do you have an 'oops baby'? Experts explain how being unplanned shapes your child's development.