A Good Child. How Convenient.

There are few compliments more reassuring to an adult than being told their child is good.

Quiet. Polite. Well-behaved.

Never causes any trouble.

Excellent.

We have established that the child is unlikely to interrupt a meeting, challenge an instruction or make the afternoon unnecessarily complicated.

A glowing performance review.

But of whom?

The child? Or the adults enjoying a relatively peaceful day?

The trouble with being good

Of course, there is nothing wrong with good behaviour.

Courtesy matters. Cooperation matters. Learning to consider other people matters.

But somewhere along the way, we occasionally confuse a child's ability to meet our expectations with our ability to understand the child.

A child who follows every instruction may be perfectly happy.

They may also be confused, anxious, bored, curious, frustrated or simply uninterested in making a fuss.

We wouldn't know from the behaviour alone.

And that's the interesting part.

We can describe a child as absolutely fine without knowing very much about what is happening beneath the surface.

An impressively efficient assessment.

The children who make us think

Some children ask questions constantly.

Some challenge instructions.

Some need additional support.

Some communicate without words.

Others observe quietly, participate differently or take longer to respond.

None of these things tells us everything about their intelligence, character or potential.

Yet we have a remarkable talent for deciding what someone is like based on how conveniently they fit into the day.

The child who asks difficult questions can be labelled challenging.

The child who asks none can be labelled fine.

Both descriptions may tell us more about the adult's experience than the child's.

An uncomfortable question

Perhaps the issue isn't that we value good behaviour.

Perhaps it's that we sometimes reward compliance with attention and mistake the absence of difficulty for the presence of wellbeing.

That doesn't mean every quiet child is struggling.

Or that every outspoken child is confident.

It means behaviour is information, not a complete biography.

And it means our expectations deserve the occasional inspection.

Especially when they're so familiar that we no longer notice them.

A rather incomplete compliment

So the next time someone describes a child as good, perhaps we could ask one more question.

What do you know about them, apart from how they behave?

What interests them? What makes them laugh? What are they trying to communicate? What might they be capable of if given the right opportunities?

Because a child is more than the ease with which they can be managed.

And being convenient has never been a particularly reliable measure of being understood.