It's all about expectations...
This topic...expectations...actually applies to both personal and business. But in this case, it’s about parents, babies, and doctors.
Sometime around now in 1998, Jesse had his one-year physical. He had grown so much...born at just around 6.5 pounds, he was now close to 20 pounds. He’d been walking for several months by this time (he was walking at WritersUA in March of that year, complete with a ring of bruises around his forehead where he kept running into walls). He wasn’t talking much...”mama”, “dada”, and “dama” were pretty much it by that point.
So Jim and I show up with Jesse at the doctor’s office. Jesse gets weighed and measured, and he’s all ready for the check-up when the doctor arrives. We talk for a few minutes while she examines Jesse, checking all those things they check on one-year-olds. Then she asks him where his nose is.
He looks at her as if she’s speaking a foreign language.
She puts him on the floor, where he runs over to the computer monitor set up in the corner. He sees the screen saver, so he moves the mouse to stop it. He sees a password field, so he taps on the keyboard to try to enter the right combination. When it doesn’t work, he tries again. Meanwhile, the doctor is saying to me...
“We can’t judge his intelligence if he doesn’t know where his nose is.”
Expectations. It’s all about the expectations.
No one ever told me that babies were supposed to be able to recognize their nose by the time they were one. As an older mom (I turned 41 less than a month after Jesse was born), I really hated people acting like I didn’t have a clue, but I expected them to tell me when there were tests, for heaven’s sake :-)
Obviously, Jesse had no expectations at his age. He was doing what he normally did as a one-year-old, and we never limited him when he tried doing things. (I’ll have to write about “independence” later.)
The doctor’s expectations were that not only he would know where his nose was, he would be able to point to it.
I’m pretty sure that none of the books said that he was expected to know how to use a computer. As a result, it wasn’t possible for them to measure his intelligence because their standards included body parts recognition, not mouse recognition.
So the next time someone is shocked at your accomplishments, find out what their expectations were. Sometimes only a realignment is needed.
PS By the time he was 13 months old, Jesse knew where his nose was. And his eyes, forehead, lips, teeth...it was a month of immersive, intensive study, but he passed the next text ;-)
