Let’s talk about the differences between “expectable” and “acceptable.”

Expectable means normal, typical and inevitable. It describes an outcome that can be anticipated and therefore should be prepared for.

The list of expectables about kids and families fills entire libraries. It’s entirely expectable, for example, that babies will interfere with their parents’ sleep, that toddlers will experiment with saying “no,” that preschoolers will pretend, that grade school students will make friends with great enthusiasm and lose friends with even greater angst, that siblings will argue, that teenagers will rebel, that some days you’ll wonder why you ever wanted children, but that most days, you’ll realize there is nothing more important in life than a child’s smile.

Expectables are sometimes handed down from experts like the Ten Commandments from God, but more commonly emerge in the course of casual conversation with friends.

A group of moms (Is that a flock? A swarm? A gaggle?) chatting in the waiting room at dance class. A group of dads (A pack? A herd? A troop?) hanging out after the game. Updates on FaceBook. Our own parents’ stories about raising children back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Rumors in the car pool line.

“My 9-month-old is using whole sentences,” one parent brags. “My teenager made honor roll,” another announces.

Each of us shapes our own unique mix of experts’ pronouncements and community scuttlebutt to try to reassure ourselves and each other that our family’s OK. Things might be tough, but that’s expectable. This, too, shall pass.

But must the expectable be acceptable?

We build our own unique model of what’s acceptable in exactly the same way. Bits and pieces gleaned from the Internet and celebrities’ stories told on “Oprah,” from our distorted memories of our own childhoods and from neighbors and friends at church and from your partner in the bowling league and from a shelf full of articles and books on parenting and child development.

All of these things together create a collage that somehow tells us what’s OK. What we should tolerate and what we should discipline and how much is so much that we should ask for help.

We probably agree on the extremes of what isn’t acceptable. It isn’t acceptable for your preschooler to play with matches, for your grade school student to smoke marijuana or for your teenager to refuse to go to school. It isn’t acceptable to leave your baby alone in the bathtub, to let your toddler play with power tools, to serve beer to your grade school students’ friends or to hit any child at any age for any reason.

Culture has done its job well if you feel a little bit queasy, a little but repulsed even just reading these things.

But short of these (hopefully) obvious extremes, the lines become blurry.

We must be careful not to assume that expectable defines acceptable.

It’s expectable, for example, that babies will wake often during the night, but is that acceptable?

It’s expectable that young children will resist separating to go to school and camp and play dates, but is that acceptable?

It’s expectable that every child will someday refuse to eat his vegetables, go to bed, do his chores, turn off the (insert a screen device of your choice here) and brush his teeth.

It’s expectable that every child will lie, will steal, will curse, will break the irreplaceable heirloom you inherited from Great-Aunt Milly and will practice writing his name in script with a fat, black Sharpie on your brand new couch, but it’s critically important to decide which – if any – of these choices is acceptable.

For that matter, it’s expectable that every parent sometimes wants to swear and scream and throw things, sometimes wants to run away, sometimes wants to curse his or her co- parent and sometimes has the urge to intentionally miss the exit to work, to just keep driving and to never look back, but none of these are acceptable.

One of the most important keys to being a healthy person and a healthy parent is the ability to distinguish between what is expectable and what is acceptable, and to know what to do with the discrepancy between the two.

Knowing what is expectable in yourself, your adult and co-parenting relationships and in your kids rids us of shame and perhaps defuses some of the anger. We’re all human beings, after all, with urges and emotions. We all make mistakes.

Knowing what’s acceptable allows us to make the world succeedable. Making clear both in your words and by your example what’s acceptable and what isn’t acceptable draws the lines clearly. All that remains from that point are the mechanics of how you reward your kids for choosing acceptable behaviors and how you respond to your kids when they choose unacceptable behaviors.

Dr. Benjamin Garber, Ph.D., is a New Hampshire-licensed psychologist, guardian ad litem and parenting coordinator. He speaks internationally and writes for popular press and professional journals on topics in child and family development. In all of these roles, he is an advocate for the well-being of children. Learn more at www.healthyparent.com or reach Dr. Garber at 400 Amherst St., Suite 407, Nashua, NH 03063. Copyright 2012 Benjamin Garber, all rights reserved.