Why ‘Being Normal’ Is The New Advanced Milestone For Kids: Parenting Tips For Cutting Through Comparison
I’m sitting at my scuffed kidney-shaped third-grade desk last Wednesday, coffee gone lukewarm under my name tag that’s half covered in a student’s unicorn sticker, when Mia’s mom slides a printed weekly schedule across the table. It’s color-coded, block by block: 6 a.m. wake-up for swim practice, Tuesdays after school coding club, Thursdays private violin lessons, Saturday morning competitive art workshops, and biweekly speech coaching for what she describes as “mild shyness.” When I tell her Mia’s reading is right on grade level, she gets along with her classmates, turns in her homework more often than not, she leans forward and asks, “But the pediatrician said she’s totally developmentally normal. Isn’t that… not enough right now?”
The next day, I sat across from Jax’s dad for our conference. Jax is a wiggly seven-year-old who stops to pet every class pet we have and forgets his lunch box at home once a week. His dad told me he’d been looking into a $1,200 after-school “focus training” program because Jax gets up to sharpen his pencil four or five times a day, and the district’s benchmark screening flagged him as “below expected self-regulation.” When I said Jax shares his snacks, apologizes when he bumps someone, and can talk for 10 minutes straight about native salamanders (a skill I’d argue is pretty advanced), he shook his head. “He’s just normal, right? All the other kids I know are already doing advanced reading and have perfect focus by second grade.”
I’ve been teaching elementary school for 11 years, and I’ve noticed this shift slowly over time. Ten years ago, parents came to me worried their kid was behind. Now, parents come to me worried their kid isn’t far enough ahead—even when that “kid is just normal” line is exactly what we should be celebrating. Somehow, being normal has become the new advanced.
I say this as someone who fell right into this trap myself, with my own 12-year-old son. When he was in fifth grade, all the parents in our neighborhood carpool were signing their kids up for the accelerated middle school math track a year early. My son was getting solid Bs in his regular math class, said he liked it fine, but I panicked. What if he fell behind? What if he couldn’t get into a good college in 8 years? I signed him up, fought to get him placed, and within three months he was having stomach aches every Sunday night, quit the robotics club he’d begged me to join two years before, and stopped riding his bike around the neighborhood after school because he had too much homework. I pulled him out after one semester, and the first week he was back in regular math, he came home and asked if he could start robotics again. Last month, he told me he likes helping his lab partner with algebra, now that he’s in the regular 9th grade track. That’s normal. That’s also way more than I ever got when I was pushing him to be “advanced.”
What people don’t talk about is how much work goes into being consistently normal these days. Normal means your kid can handle a little disappointment without melting down. It means they can entertain themselves for 20 minutes without begging for a screen. It means they can ask a teacher for help when they don’t get something, instead of shutting down or having a parent email the teacher to fix it for them. It means they can go a whole day without a meltdown over homework, go to bed at a reasonable time, and have at least one friend they like hanging out with. All of that is way harder to pull off than teaching a 4-year-old to read chapter books or an 8-year-old to do quadratic equations. Those skills are just memorization and early drilling. The stuff that makes up “normal” right now is the stuff that sticks with them for life.
I started telling parents to do a 10-minute check-in once every three months, instead of poring over test scores or comparing schedules with other parents. The check-in has three simple yes/no questions: First, does your kid go to bed without a 45-minute battle most nights of the week? Second, can they tell a friend “I don’t want to play that” or “that hurt my feelings” without either exploding or running to an adult to fix it? Third, do they have at least one thing they do just for fun that no one gives them a grade or a trophy for? If you answer yes to all three, you’re doing fine. That’s advanced, right there. If you answer no to one or two, that’s okay too—you just pick one small thing to work on, instead of signing up for three expensive programs. For example, if they can’t go to bed without a fight, you just start screen-free 15 minutes earlier and keep the same bedtime every weekend, no exceptions. That’s low friction, and it works way better than any coaching program I’ve ever seen.
Another small trick I share: When other parents start bragging about their kid’s latest advanced milestone at the playground or the carpool line, you don’t have to engage in the comparison game. Just say “Mine’s doing great, he loves [their silly little normal thing]” and change the subject. I keep a list of go-to lines if I need it: “He’s perfecting his kickflip,” “She collects painted rocks from the creek,” “He can name every dinosaur that ever lived.” That shuts down the one-upmanship pretty fast, and it keeps you from panicking over something that doesn’t actually matter.
After Mia’s conference, she and her mom decided to cut coding and violin, just keep swim because Mia actually likes getting up early to be with her friends. Last week, I saw her at recess. She was playing tag, laughing so hard she tripped over a curb and fell down, then got right back up and kept running. On her way back in for lunch, she stopped to help a lost first grader pick up the crayons she’d spilled all over the hallway. That’s normal. No award, no badge, no one is posting it on Instagram. It’s also the most advanced thing a kid that age can do. Some nights, I still catch myself scrolling through my phone and seeing other 12 year olds’ accomplishments and feeling that old twinge of worry. But then my son comes in the kitchen, asks if we can make cookies, tells me about the fight he had with his best friend and how they worked it out, grabs his skateboard and heads out. It’s all normal. It’s also everything I actually want for him.
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