I know a university professor who has a habit of coming up with more work for students to a point where many would try to find alternate routes for completing the courses. Extreme case of this was his insistence on grad student's doctoral thesis. For some reason, it always needed just one more publication - with the professor as a co-author, of course - before completing the overall work. This didn't end until the student left for another university, at which point the threat of losing the thesis to another university was so strong that the professor facilitated a quick completion.

This troper had it happen with his parents. He got yelled for basically not being a perfect child, and then once that was accomplished, yelled at for not being perfect enough.

Apparently, you're ChristopherTitus.

I know exactly how you feel.

This troper's dad used to do this. He stopped when I bluntly told him "If you keep moving the goalposts, I'm not playing your game anymore"

As a student, this used to really stick in this troper's teeth - you said to do this, I did it, why are you suddenly changing the rules? Then she became a teacher and realised that sometimes a student manages to complete a task's ExactWords while clearly not understanding the purpose of the exercise and thus learning what they were supposed to. The goalposts have to be shifted so the ''actual'' goal is met. (Less charitably, sometimes it's just that something that was supposed to take half an hour was completed in five minutes and now the teacher is scrambling to fill the remaining class time.)

When I was ten, I went to Switzerland for a family reunion and, while in Zurich, my father brought me to a knife store. I have always had an obsession with knives, even when I was a kid, and when I saw the Victorinox Swiss Army Hunter (a knife with a ~4 3/4 inch blade), I begged to get it. Instead, I was promised it for my 13th birthday. Three years later, no knife. After three years of begging, I was promised one immediately, and never got it, promised one if I became emotionally stable (my parents are moving the goalposts on that one as well), and, most recently, one if I got through 9th grade of the therapeutic school I am now in. When at the end of the school year, my parents told me that since I entered half-way through, I'd get one at the end of summer school, after that, when I got through 10th grade, then that summer school. I am turning 18 this year and have just finished 11th grade, still no knife and now no goalposts.