There's no such thing as a moral "expect". That's just a guilt-enducing ploy by the parents. "I expect you to be on good behaviour. If you're not on good behaviour, it will show that you're not as good a person as I think you are, and I'll revise my expectation of you so that I think of you as a worse person from now on."

Perhaps "moral" wasn't quite the right word, but the sense I'm stretching for is "I will be outraged if it doesn't happen", as opposed to "I will be surprised if it doesn't happen".

Yes, and that first sense is just an abuse of the second in the way that I described. It's a passive-aggressive guilt trip.

Only in some scenarios. I still think they're perfectly good concepts, and not so awful as to be denied words to describe them by.

In particular, the two senses of 'expect' can perfectly well come up in cases that have no guilt-trip dimension at all. Network protocol design, for example: a server might expect{1} its input to be well-formed (and is justified in abandoning the entire connection if it isn't), but expect{2} 99% of its input to consist of the three most common requests (and therefore implement a fast path to provide cached answers to those three, but must still contain the more general code that handles the remaining 1% of cases correctly).

Hmm, that example makes me think even more that "moral" was a poor choice of word on my part, but I'm not sure what should best replace it...

Fair enough. I think the interpersonal use you described is a third, emotionally manipulative case.

I don't see what's passive-aggressive about it. Telling people that a particular behaviour will outrage* you sounds like fairly straightforward boundary setting to me.

*or upset, or disappoint**, or whatever
**generally what I would mean by "I expect you not to do this" if I don't mean surprise

Well, that's good, if it inspires the kid to try to be a better person (though not if taken so far so that the kid decides there's no point in trying to be a better person).

S.

Not really. Inspiring kids to be better through threats of loving them less is a great way to raise unhappy adults. A lot of counselling work (which I'm partially trained in) focuses on helping people identify and untangle these kind of guilt trips.

But inspiring kids to be better by making them aware that they will disappoint you if they aren't is exactly what a parent should be doing. Are there no situations where you are helped to do the right thing because you know that if you act wrongly you will disappoint someone you care about -- be that parent, friend, lover or child?

Anyway, if they're a bad person, guilt is the correct reaction. And the idea that people should be happy rather than good is a silly modern notion that can't pass soon enough.

S.

Certainly I try to phrase what I want from my son in terms he can follow, and I try to give reasons.

"Please sit quietly on this bus because it's not safe to stand up while it's moving, and there are lots of other people that don't want to hear you making a loud noise."

(We are still working on that; also on the horrific idea that other people may want to sit in his favourite seat.)

But honestly, if one of my parents said to me "I expect you to be on your best behaviour" I would take that as an instruction at face value without the guilt-inducing subtext you have added. In a more destructive parent/child relationship I can see that subtext existing, but the word 'expect' doesn't have to imply it.

(We are still working on [...] the horrific idea that other people may want to sit in his favourite seat.)

Heh. Sounds familiar.

Made even worse by the fact that Amy not only wants a window seat, but (a) it has to be at the back (where the floor is higher up, so that she can actually see through the window more easily) and (b) it has to be next to me.

There are, in many busses we take, exactly four seats satisfying criterion (a), and hoping that both they and the adjacent seat are free is, well, a good setup to frustration.