Great Expectations Are Not Always So Great!
When we have very high expectations for our children, they start believing they have to achieve them to make us happy. This article relates the author’s experiences with her own high expectations for her son, Ryan.
Ryan, my first-born son, started reading when he was three. At four, he attended a Montessori School, and before long he was pasting continents on a map and naming all of them. My husband and I were so very proud of him, and we often asked him to demonstrate his talents in front of interested (and not-so-interested) friends and relatives. Amazed and overjoyed that our son could name all of the continents, we failed to pause and realize that at that age he didn’t really understand the concept of a neighborhood, town, city, or country, let alone a continent. So while his ability to dazzle us with his intelligence had great entertainment value, it really was little more than a parlor trick.
review is Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, authored by New York Times 
