The Hand Licking Incident

Oh my god... I'm many years removed from childhood, but the last scene of the movie "Time Bandits" still chills me. Little Kevin yells, "Mom! Dad! It's evil! Don't touch it!"

...and the adults, thinking themselves smart, reach right in, touch the glowing chunk of pure evil, and evaporate in a puff of smoke.

To this DAY I am so angry at those parents...

> I have an entire childhood of other experiences I could relate to you that tells me that I do, in fact, know how I would have reacted in I had just been talked to. And I am genuinely grateful for the (very few) times I was swatted, because there are things in this world that fear is the appropriate response to.

Sorry, but with all due respect: You do not. You know that with the accumulated past experience you had, you acted a certain way in a different situation. You do not, for example, know if the reason you acted differently when just talked to was that you'd gotten accustomed to more serious reactions for something serious and therefore interpreted the talking to as less important and dismissed it. You make the point yourself that it was rare, and is something you tie to really important lessons, so it would make sense if you dismiss being talked to as implying something isn't that dangerous.

Of course, again, we can't know.

> You understand the innate survivorship bias in this example, right?

Yes, I do. But you do not seem to have understood that the point of giving that example was that your example is also down to survivorship bias, and to illustrate why that makes anecdotes like this (both of our anecdotes) worthless as a means of determining how well either alternative works.

My point was not to prove that "my" alternative is better, but to illustrate why personal experience is a poor basis for drawing conclusions about this (and again: yes, that applies to my experience too).

This. If parents expect their kids to obey for fear of punishment, they’re teaching the lesson that you obey people who are stronger than you.

Out in the real world, when someone tells you to obey because they are stronger, you tell them to stuff it. It is widely agreed that in society, people need better reasons to be obeyed than that (even if the strong do tend to get their way more often...).

I think what you said about understanding future actions and disconnecting them from punishment is spot on.

> As if that is always possible.

Were your responding to 'make it physically impossible for the child to access a hot oven.'?

If yes, then you're wrong: its (99%) always possible. Just buy and install a kid's barrier and park the 2yo in his room during the cooking. Or use a cold door oven. No need for a 'big enclosure padded out with cotton wool'.

> Many dangers in the real world, you can maybe stop the kid touching an oven, but you won't be always there to stop him/her from dangerous situations.

100% agree, unfortunately. My point was that, agreeing with the parent (no pun intended), at 2yo, you don't loose sight on your child if it's environment is not 100% safe, end of the discussion.

While I agree with the comment saying the only thing you can do with a two year old is prevent them from accessing it, your 2 year olds reasoning also demonstrates why spanking them does not work reliably in that kind of instance either.

Kids that age are in some respect smarter than we often think, but in other respects they're totally helpless.

So he's understood that the oven is hot, but not that it being hot means he will hurt himself if touching it and that as a consequence he shouldn't. That's reasonable for him. He needs to make several other connections to determine it's bad: Many other things are hot, but not hot enough to be dangerous. He needs to also realise that too hot equals pain, and this means realising that touching the plate equals pain, not just hot. That's a step or two two long from starting premise to consequence for a 2 year old.

You'll see the same with kids that refuse to dress up when going out when it is cold out. It's hot inside. They've been told it's cold outside. But they also need to realise that this means they will be cold if they go out without dressing up even if it's hot inside.

Sometimes what works with very young children is to help them connect those dots. With my son I'd open the door, step out, so he can feel he's cold, and then tell him we needed to put warm clothes on to stay warm. Or you can be explicit in explanation: "we need to put clothes on so we stay warm when we go out" instead of "we need to put clothes on because it's cold outside".

For things that can be painful, try expressing that: that the oven will hurt. That it is hot, that's a separate thing (for now).

With a two year old you're not getting away from trying to prevent access, but my son certainly responded to just having the causal chains from "do things adults consider dangerous" to "will hurt" shorter.

Another strategy that keeps giving even now that he's 9, is to give constrained choices, and make him decide or decide what he thinks the right answer is: "Do you think the hot oven will hurt a lot or lots and lots?" (or when facing a 9yo that wants to decide everything: "do you want healthy dinner A or [marginally more popular] healthy dinner B?" as opposed to "what do you want for dinner?"). Choosing a specific framing is a scarily effective way of guiding them to where you want them to be (and it works scarily well on adults too; we're not nearly as much smarter than a toddler as we'd like to think).

I certainly can't say if the above works for you, but it's worth a try.