Durrant – understand children’s behaviour

Each one of us has a theory of why people behave as they do. And so if our theory is that when my child reaches for that knife, it’s because she is defying me; I’ve told her not to touch that knife, and she’s defying my authority, then I’m very likely to respond with punishment and possibly quite harsh punishment because I take it personally.

If, though, I understand children’s development, I understand that at that age, they don’t understand danger, that they haven’t had enough experience with injury to know about pain, necessarily, that they are curious, and they need to touch everything to understand it, to learn about it, that they just don’t have the experience and the knowledge that we have to make those decisions about what to touch and what not to touch. So once they understand child development, they can come up with many more reasons why a child might reach for a knife. They understand that the range of motivations for that behavior is much broader than they might have thought it was previously.