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Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

This is possibly a good long term approach, but what to do when you need to put the situation under the control quickly, and kids just don't cooperate? I had such experience when my 4yo kid was at some point fascinated by kitchen stove, turning the gas knobs on/off. It's just something that you can't slowly teach him not to do, you need to draw the line right away, for his own safety. You can't reason with kid that small, and it's too dangerous to let him learn the lesson by trying, so you just have to scare him out of it.

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In my experience our natural reaction to the actually dangerous stuff was scary enough by itself. Our kid immediately dropped behaviors that were plain dangerous and somehow kept on those that were merely "bad".

Edit: by natural reaction I mean the quick leap towards the child while screaming "NOooooooo!", not anything purposefully scary.

In such a case you still have the option to make the behavior physically impossible, by placing a physical barrier around the dangerous object; no different from a fire-guard in front of an open fire, or a childproof gate at the bottom of a flight of stairs. In my own experience, my kids got the message about the stove by being told sternly not to touch it and why it was dangerous, calmly but firmly and seriously. Other stuff took repeating, but never more than 3 times (kids have moments when they're just not taking information in, and we're constantly telling them what to do, so factor that in, you need to repeat the really important stuff)

A workmate once told me that he found his young son fiddling with the dials next to a hot stove. So he took his son's hand and briefly placed it on the hot part. The son ran away crying but he learned his lesson.

This is what rational me says I should do, because it makes sense. But I can't imagine my wife understanding, and the questions at pre-school, etc. Assuming it was a small burn, because that's what would cause a child to cry. Plus I might hate myself for doing it. It's a short jump from "I touched my son's hand to the hot stove to teach him it's bad" to CPS knocking on my door.

Intentionally burning your kid is not good. Also, you run the risk of teaching them that it's mom or dad that's dangerous, rather than the stove. If you're willing to burn them, let them do it to themselves. If not, then teach it without hurting them.

That's a good way to build trust with your son. And to be a decent human being. But, sarcasm aside, there is a huge line between scaring / yelling at your kid and physical harm and this is way over the line.

Kids often has a reason for doing things, including not cooperating. Where he trying to get attention? emulating? You can't reason with kids out of those.

Trying to scare kids into compliance is rarely a effective method, and has some very nasty side effects. If long term approaches can't be used, child proof gas knobs exist.

Child proof knobs exist, yes, but there are million of other dangerous things all around us. In my eyes, trying to fix the world instead of teaching the kid to follow some basic rules is a completely wrong approach. It's like the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, you just can't hide all the spindles in the kingdom, it never works.

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