The title is something someone on a parenting list said. I didn't come up with it though she and I had substantially similar attitudes about that aspect of parenting.
When my oldest child was probably still an infant (under a year old), I heard something on the radio indicating that about 80 percent of what most kids hear is no or some variation on it. So "Stop that." or "Quit it." or similar.
I decided right then and there that at least half of what my children heard would be what they could do instead of what they couldn't do. And I credit that decision with me getting told by people for years on two continents that I had remarkably well-behaved children.
In one furniture store I frequented, my small son would go sit and play with the display puzzle while I looked around -- because my children were actively taught from infancy how to stave off boredom without getting in trouble. I taught them how to stay quietly occupied in boring situations when adults needed to get stuff done instead of just shushing them.
When we were about to move to another state, the store owner gifted him one of the puzzles and told me "Oh, God, a lot of kids play in the dirt of the potted plants and then wipe their hands on the upholstery. Your kids are amazingly well behaved."
These are kids I thought of as little hellions. And I had experiences suggesting no one thought what I was dealing with was normal.
I long before gave the oldest nicknames like "Tigger" because the oldest never sat still and bounced everywhere or "demon child" because he just wasn't normal and made everyone nuts.
When he was two years old and I was pregnant with his brother, a friend of mine who had three kids under age five informed me she was taking my child home with her overnight so I could sleep because I was so exhausted. That one night of uninterrupted sleep until noon made the entire rest of my pregnancy easier.
One neighbor once casually commented on the fact that babies are no trouble and take hardly any time. You feed them and they just go back to sleep.
Yeah, maybe your infant is like that. Mine are definitely not like that.
When my sister visited and her infant had respiratory issues her last night there, I told her "You're leaving tomorrow and it will probably clear up when you get home. We can spend your last night here in urgent care or I can feed her a little caffeinated cola to open her airways." because my oldest had respiratory issues and I knew a lot about coping with such in a baby.
She agreed it made sense to do a home remedy and skip the doctor's visit. An hour later after being climbed on continuously by a manic caffeinated baby, my sister looked at me and very deadpan said "Your oldest was like this ALL THE TIME as a baby and you didn't kill yourself?"
So I have objectively difficult kids. That's the consensus from everyone who ever dealt with them, yet store managers and the like in both the US and Europe told me repeatedly they were incredibly well behaved.
The earliest instance of me trying to educate my child that he was doing something stupidly dangerous occured when he was probably something like six months old.
There was a paring knife he wanted to grab because "ooh, shiny!" and besides MOM got to play with it! Me moving it out of his reach was OBVIOUSLY a game of keep away and he was bound and determined to WIN it!
So I got up and took the paring knife with me and gestured with the "ooh, shiny!" blade to get his attention and made sure he watched me peel and chop a potato with it. I then gave him a piece of the potato to play with so he could see its size and how firm a material it was.
I accidentally gave him a knife phobia because, holy crap, the potato was as big as his forearm and harder material than his flesh! He tells me I did the right thing because he made it to adulthood with all his fingers.
It got substantially easier when he got old enough to talk. I tried to be humorous and informative about things that were dangerous.
I would say stuff like "If you get yourself killed doing that, I'm spanking you." Or "If you think math is hard now, just wait until you splatter your brains everywhere doing that."
But my goal was safety, not "You will RESPECT my AUTHORITY!" And I was clear he needed to understand WHY he shouldn't do that in a way that helped him decide for himself to STOP.
Because telling him no was actively counterproductive.
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