Life with Nin

Expectations and Labels

I think labels are rather interesting things.  Giving something a name is a very powerful event; remember the look on your child’s face when they finally figured out how to ask for something by name instead of gesture?

I feel that when you name something you have power over it.  If you can call something by its name, then you have more power over it than if you call it whatchamacallit, or thingamajig.  For instance if you are in a room of people it is much more effective to say “Hey, Laura” than it is to say “Hey, You,” because either everyone will respond or no one will.

A Fable, by Chase

I think that Labels start to become names and when they become names they also become expectations.  Say for instance, you just met this guy named Joe (apologies to all the Joes out there, but I had to pick someone’s name), and let’s say in the course of conversation you find out that Joe (his words) is musically hopeless.  So your brain collects that bit of information, fills it under Joe and moves on.  The next time you see Joe, you say “Hi, Joe, the musically hopeless.”  Okay, so maybe you don’t say the last bit, but you think it.  In the course of this conversation you find out that Joe loves the colour blue.  So now when you see him it is, “Hi, Joe, the musically hopeless, lover of blue.”  Next you learn that Joe hates trucks so now you think of Joe as “the musically hopeless, lover of blue, hater of trucks.” And each time you learn something new about Joe you file it under Joe and put it after his name until finally you see Joe after a long time on the street.  And you go “Hi, Joe, the musically hopeless, lover of blue, hater of trucks, prone to catastrophes, drinker of wine, whiz at math, awful cook, hater of cats, lover of dogs, claustrophobic, always wears a silver chain, wonderful artist, long time no see.”  And Joe, goes “Who are you talking about?  That’s not my name and that’s not me.”  You see, you had gotten so good at labeling Joe that you can’t find Joe for all the labels and you missed the real person entirely.

I guess that is why I try very hard to avoid using labels, but I find they are very insidious things.

Walking around at a homeschooling meeting recently (with apologies to the guilty), I heard some of the following labels:  “I’m musically hopeless.”  “Oh, I couldn’t teach high school math; I was never any good with it.”  “All teenagers who go to school do not know what they think or feel.”  “Middle school are the years from hell.”  I wonder if any of the people who said these things thought about what and who they were labeling.  And what the result of that labeling might be?

The power of labels was brought home very personally to me a few years ago when my daughter said of my describing her brother as having “special needs,” “I know that people use that description as a way of trying not to negatively label people, but it ends up making me wonder about MY needs?  Aren’t they “special” too?”  She’s right, you know, and it really started me thinking about this issue of labels and expectations.

When we put a name on something, we categorize it.  In doing that we attach to it certain expectations.  Even when the category and the expectations are positive, I have come to realize that we are really limiting the thing we are labeling simply by labeling it to begin with.  Chase was my “healthy” child for the years when her brother  went from one ear infection to the next.  Little did I know at the time the effect that would have on her when she was confronted with an illness.  Goes under the category of “if I’d only known then what I do now, I never would have done it.”  Does the person who calls herself “musically hopeless” ever give herself a chance to see what abilities or interests she really has aside from the label?  I know I don’t when I label myself.  I’ve always thought “I can’t draw” until my son’s 4-H club decided to start a drawing project book and I realized that I could do that, too.  So far I’ve only read the book, but at least I’m thinking about it differently than I used to.

How very important it becomes, then, when it is our children that we are inadvertently labeling.  They look to us for so many things and our opinions are so very important to them.  My purpose here is just to raise the issue so that maybe you’ll stop and think twice before you describe a child, especially in their presence, but also in your own mind, because it really does not matter if the child hears the label or not.  It WILL affect how both how you view that child and how the child views himself.  All of us are far more complex than the labels that are attached to us and labeling can only diminish us all.

Yes, I am as guilty as the next one about using labels.  Sometimes I even do it deliberately as a kind of shorthand.  It’s far easier to talk about “the terrible twos” than to describe the kinds of behavior and attitudes we are really talking about.  But I’m coming to see that even that use of labels is far from benign.

A few months ago in the newsletter was the story “The Cat Years.”  While I think there is some benefit in stories like this in that it reminds us that our children’s needs change as they grow, I also worry about the expectation that this story encourages; the sense that our children’s teen years will be stressful and uncommunicative and something to be endured not enjoyed.  I have two teens and, while I have been known to say (and feel!) that teens take as much if not more time than toddlers (time of a different sort, of course), the “expected” turmoil of the teenage years is not inevitable or necessary.  It’s all a matter of what our expectations are.  If you expect those years to be difficult, I promise you they will be.  If you expect them to present new challenges and opportunities for both you and your  teen to grow, than that is what you will experience as well.

Labels?  Expectations?  I certainly  think they are something to think about anyway.

copyright 1998  Carol Burris  Originally published in the April 1998 issue of the HELPS local homeschooling group newsletter.