Too Hard on Him

Not really much point to this, just needed to ramble somewhere other than inside my head...

My problem is that I am quite hard on Ethan, and I do expect a lot from him..much more than you should expect from a just 2 year old. I know this is a bit of a problem but I can't change my mindset on this.

There are two things that really contribute to this, number one is that I know he is a very clever boy and very advanced for his age, he has amazing language and very good comprehension, so because of that i forget that his little brain is only two. I am a trained early childhood teacher and I think a big part is the teacher taking over the mummy in me, I want to extend him to his full potential,

The other reason is the family history on his dads side, there a lot of boys (his dad is one of 6 boys and all the brothers have children, mostly boys) and all the boys have major behaviour and discipline problems, and I really don't want that kind of behaviour for my boy. They really baby their kids and never make them accountable for their behaviour, even at 6 and 7 the excuse is "oh they're just little and don't understand" (my ass). I know most of that is their parenting but all the boys do have excessivly high energy levels, and very low concentration levels...

See, there isn't much point other than a ramble, but any ideas how I can fix my brain would be awesome...sometimes after he goes to bed at night, I just sit down and think he is only two, he is not a baby but not the big boy I expect him to be.....

I agree with everything Jennz said.

We have high expectations of Michaela but we also have high expectations of ourselves as parents and we're very into positive reinforcement and anti-yelling and smacking.

I also think that many other parents have extremely low expectations of their children and some just seem to be afraid to parent iykwim.

IMO there's a lot of self fulfilling prophecies going on in the world of parenting.  Those parents that call their children monsters or leeches, or any other awful names I've heard people use, tend to have little monsters.  Not sure if it's because they have low expectations, generally see the worst in their kids or a mixture of both but IMO children are all basically good and it's the parents that need to adapt their parenting if their kids are constantly misbehaving.