How often do we stop to consider the normality in our usage of the term ‘normal’ in everyday language, beyond developmental expectations?
For example, when a teacher pauses mid-sentence and says, “Let’s try to behave normally.” A parent who lowers their voice in public to ask, “Why can’t you just act normal for once?” A school report card that notes that a child is “generally normal, with some behavioural concerns.”
No one takes a moment to define it; no one really needs to. The word carries its own tacit authority in the way it influences perception. And for most people, it sounds neutral, reasonable, even kind.
But normal is not a neutral word, and it never has been.
It draws a boundary without explicitly saying so. And once that boundary exists, children begin organising themselves around it, whether they realise it or not.
We’ve spoken about how what’s considered normal in most learning environments isn’t random, and how it tends to favour children who can sit for extended periods, follow instructions quickly, regulate themselves without much support, and respond in ways that are predictable and easy to manage in a group.
What we want to touch on, however, is the why and how.
There’s a practical reason for some of it. Schools, especially, are built to hold many children at once. They need some level of order to function, after all. The adults there are trying to keep things under control. But over time, something subtle happens: what works for the system begins to feel like what’s right for the child. Convenience transforms and hardens into expectation, and that expectation hardens into identity.
This is where things start to get complicated.
This is because children don’t come packaged neatly into standardised forms. Some take more time to warm up, and some question everything. Some feel things more intensely than others, and some disengage when something feels hard to understand. Or some even take longer to make sense of things before they respond.
None of this is unusual in a developmental sense. But in a tightly structured environment, differences become visible very quickly. Once it’s visible, it tends to be given meaning.
It’s time to unpack our attachment to ‘normal,’ and our enforcement of it, even if it didn’t exist.
Like the labelling of the child who has more energy as “disruptive.” The one who questions instructions as “difficult.” The one who doesn’t respond quickly enough is considered inattentive. The one who feels deeply is “too much.”
These labels often sound observational, but they’re rarely neutral. They’re judgments about how far a child sits from what the environment has decided is acceptable. From there, this is what starts to happen: we try to bring the child closer to the line of “normal.” We prompt, correct, redirect, sometimes reward, and punish. We try to shape their behaviour so it aligns more closely with what is considered normal.
And often, children comply. Not because something inside them has fundamentally changed, but because they are very good at adapting when their belonging is at stake. They learn what gets approval and what doesn’t; they learn when to hold back; they learn how to smooth out the parts of themselves that “create friction” with the adults in their lives.
From the outside, this can look like progress. The child becomes easier to manage. And thus, the classroom runs more smoothly. Parents begin to feel relieved.
And, children begin forming a relationship with themselves.
If that relationship is built on the idea that parts of them are acceptable and others are not, they begin to organise accordingly. Some become highly compliant, very good at meeting expectations, while slowly losing touch with their own preferences. Others resist more openly, pushing back against ideas of them that don’t fit, and then they’re defined by that resistance.
Sounds unfair, doesn’t it?
We tend to see these as different kinds of children. In reality, they’re often responding to the same pressure in different ways.
What makes this harder to see is that normal feels so… reasonable. Appealing. It doesn’t sound like control, it sounds like “common sense.”
But don’t forget, normal is shaped by context. What is encouraged in one environment is discouraged in another. What is praised in one child is corrected in the next. It shifts depending on what a system values, what it can accommodate, and what it finds inconvenient. And often, in schooling environments, the goalposts shift while a child tries desperately to find their footing in what’s expected of them.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that all expectations are inherently wrong. Children do need to learn how to function alongside others, how to respect boundaries, and how to participate in shared spaces. But there’s a difference between helping a child develop those capacities and asking them to compress themselves to fit a narrow idea of acceptability.
But there’s a difference between learning how to exist with others and learning that parts of you need to be edited out to belong. Instead of teaching kids how to develop capacity, we teach them how to develop self-doubt.
So it’s worth paying attention, not just to what we say about children, but to what our environments quietly ask of them. Like, what gets corrected urgently? What receives more patience from us? What is labelled as a problem, and what gets overlooked?
Because that’s where “normal” is actually being defined.
When the range of what’s considered “normal” becomes too tight, we don’t just create well-behaved children. We create children who are constantly monitoring themselves, and who learn that ease of belonging depends on how well they can edit who they are, and that tends to follow them long after childhood.
As for us adults? Most aren’t consciously enforcing this. A lot of parents and teachers are working within systems they didn’t design, trying to keep things running and do right by the children in front of them. But it’s still worth noticing how much of it we partake in.
Because once you see it, it becomes harder to default to the word normal without thinking about what it’s implicitly asking children to do.
And sometimes, the more useful question isn’t how to make a child more normal. It’s whether our idea of normal is fair, realistic, and wide enough to hold them in the first place.
So it begs to be repeated: who decides what’s “normal,” anyway, and do we really need to hold on so tightly to it? More importantly, what’s the cost of it?
