Have you ever told a child not to do something, only to have them do that very thing one second later? Infuriating, isn’t it? The child, it seems, is being belligerent and willfully disobedient. But things aren’t always as they appear. You see, children are very suggestible. Once they have a mental image of a behavior, they are very likely to try it out. That mental image may come from something they saw on TV, read in a book, or that we have described to them with our words. Our words create a mental picture for them, and we want that picture to be of what they should do, not of what they should not do.
