The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
The Labels That Teach Us Who We Are #64
This episode is a departure from Jon’s usual Q&A format—a reflective, narrative-style episode that zooms out to explore how words quietly shape who our kids believe they are. Beginning with the now-famous classroom experiment by Jane Elliott, Jon traces how labels don’t just describe behavior—they produce it, often long after the moment has passed.
Parents will walk away with a deeper awareness of how subtle cues, implied expectations, and everyday language shape a child’s nervous system, identity, and sense of possibility—and a gentler, more curious lens for noticing which versions of their kids (and themselves) are being invited to exist.
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In 1968, there was a school teacher in Iowa named Jane Elliott who did an experiment that you might have heard about before. The morning after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Elliot walked into her third grade classroom and made an announcement. Children with brown eyes would sit in the front of the room. Children with blue eyes would sit in the back. Brown eyed children, she said, were smarter, faster, more trustworthy. Blue eyed children were well less so. Initially there was some pushback, but quickly she ginned up an explanation, something to do with melanin making one more intellectually stimulated. Soon the arguments died away. The children rearranged their desks, and something began to happen almost immediately. The brown eyed children started finishing their work faster. They raised their hands more often, they corrected each other, while the blue eyed children grew quieter, more tentative, and made mistakes that they had not made the day before. Jane Elliot had not changed the curriculum. She had changed the children. She had simply pointed out a difference that they already knew existed. Some of them had blue eyes, some of them had brown. Then she attached a single idea to that difference. Better. Within hours, the children began behaving as if this new reality were the truth. What's interesting is that when people tell this story, they usually focus on what it says about prejudice. But that's not the part that we're zooming in on today. Today, we're talking about what happens after the declaration, after the word has been spoken, after the desks have been moved, when the room is settled. Because long after the moment itself, the label is still at work. This is the whole parent podcast. The idea for this episode started with a much smaller question. It began when I noticed how often we use labels when we're talking about our kids. You're smart, shy, confident, cautious, gifted, wild. We say these words casually, sometimes kindly, sometimes clinically, and we assume that they function like mirrors, reflecting something that's already true. But there's a concept in sociology and psychology called labeling theory that suggests that something deeper might be at play in these moments. Labeling theory argues that labels don't just describe behaviors, they produce behaviors. Which raises my next question: what if some of the traits that we think of as personality aren't really personality at all? What if they're responses? Responses to our expectations, our narratives, our off-ended comments, to the other parents at the park. And one of the most powerful labels aren't even the ones that we say out loud, but the ones that we simply imply. Before Jane Elliott began her experiment in the early 1960s, a psychologist named Robert Rosenthal conducted a now famous experiment in an elementary school. Teachers were told that a small group of students had been identified as intellectual bloomers, kids on the verge of rapid academic growth. What the teachers didn't know is that those students had actually been chosen at random. There was no special ability or hidden genius separating them from everybody else. But by the end of the year, those children had made remarkable gains. Why? Rosenthal discovered that the teachers, without realizing it, had changed how they interacted with those students. They smiled more, they waited longer before intervening, they corrected mistakes more gently. The label didn't change the child, at least directly. It changed the environment around the child, and the child adapted. This is where labeling theory begins to get a little bit slippery, because we like to think of labels as opinions, but in practice, they function more like instructions. Once someone is labeled, they're watched more closely, and the change is immediately perceptible. Which brings us to the next thing that I want to talk about. What labeling does to our nervous system. Imagine walking into a room where you know that you're being evaluated. It doesn't have to be blatant or obvious. You don't need to say to anyone, we're watching you. Your body already knows. Your shoulders tighten, your speech patterns shorten, and you begin to scan faces for signs of disapproval. We do this because at a biological level, we're staying attuned to the social approval that has always been a matter of survival. This becomes especially problematic when it happens in early childhood. Kids become vigilant, performative. This isn't because they've accepted the label consciously, but because their body has learned the rules of the room. Be careful. Don't make it worse. This is who they think you are. What's interesting and tragic is how quickly that this turns into a loop. Take the child that we label as difficult. Teachers brace themselves before every interaction. Their patience is subtly shortened, anticipating disruption before anything has actually already happened. The child senses this tension and reacts, often with dysregulation. And then everybody nods. See? They say, see, told you they're difficult. But the label didn't explain the behavior. It engineered the behavior. This doesn't stop in childhood. Adults do this constantly. We assign roles in internal family systems, the responsible one, often the oldest, the sensitive one, the problem child, the black sheep. We assign roles at work. The reliable employee. The wild card. The one who needs extra supervision. And once assigned, these roles subconsciously limit what people are allowed to be. The responsible one can't fall apart. The sensitive one can't be decisive. The problem can't suddenly just be fine, can they? Here's the paradox. Labels are meant to help us understand people, but they often function as endpoints, not beginnings. Once labeled, curiosity dies. We stop asking what happened or what changed or what context am I missing. The label answers everything in advance. In fact, halfway through researching this episode, I realize something interesting. You don't even have to agree with a label to let it shape your life. You just have to live in a world that responds to you as if the label were true. Labels are not psychological, they're relational. They don't always change who you think you are, but they change how others act around you, and eventually, behavior adapts to environment. This means that labeling theory isn't about self-conception, it's about context. Who gets patience? Who gets the benefit of the doubt? Who gets to be seen as a work in progress? Labels don't lock people in by convincing them that they're something. They do it by narrowing the range of responses available to them. Once you see it, it's hard to unsee. Entire institutions run on labels. Schools, prisons, healthcare systems, corporations. Labels create efficiency, they reduce ambiguity, but efficiency always comes at a cost. When systems label, individuals absorb the consequences, and the system can point to the outcomes as proof that it was right all along. The worst part is the most powerful labels don't even need to be spoken out loud. They live in microaggressions. They live in the tone, the patience withheld, in who gets interrupted and who gets listened to. You don't need to tell someone that they're too much. You just need to sigh when they speak, and they'll learn. And these moments accumulate until eventually they shape what we allow ourselves to want. As our environment consistently tells us what's even on the table for people like us. Simply because once upon a time a label was applied, and the room just adjusted. And maybe the hardest question of all isn't what label did I receive? But which version of me never got the chance to show up? Because the environment never expected it to exist. 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