| > I'm 100% sure my kid would just start ripping and destroying the items on the shelving in that aisle. You think .. but you don't actualy know is what I hear you saying :-) In my experience small people indulge in a lot of performance art for the benefit of the faces they recognise in order to gather reactions and learn from that feedback - not as a front of brain delibrate strategy, more as innate "born to learn" pattern. If you get in a Mexican standoff with you're own kid you're almost certainly going to lose .. I know I would with mine .. you start "daring them" not to do something and they'll start inching that jar ever closer to the edge until it drops. "Young enough" kids will generally pull into best behaviour in a sea of faces they don't recognise, that's pretty much the time that you have a window to treat poor behaviour by simply walking away. After that period they're more confident in front of strangers AND (uh-oh) understand that behaviour not seen by you is still behaviour known by you .. and that can manipulate you. Child-parent relations are a non stop conveyor of escalating mirror awareness | peek-a-boo interactions .. and then puberty hits and you're into full Cold War MAD scenarios :-). But yeah, independence for kids is pretty essential, it's good to have them walking | riding to school, looking after pets, growing food, building radios etc. |