Author’s practical guidance
Rough hands
Source named in the book: AAP · early conscience research (Kochanska)
A three-year-old poking the baby's eye is usually doing research.
Say this now
“Her head is soft here. Two fingers, on her foot.”
Gentle is an abstraction. Two fingers and a named body part are instructions a three-year-old can follow.
“I'll hold your hand and we'll touch together.”
Keeps contact allowed while keeping it safe. Forbidding touch entirely makes the baby more interesting, not less.
Do this
- Stay within arm's reach for the first months, every time.
- Give a specific permitted target — the feet, the back — instead of the word gentle.
- Move your body between them rather than shouting a warning across the room.
- Show the force on your own arm so they can feel what light means.
- Let them touch often, so it never becomes forbidden and therefore interesting.
Avoid this
- "Gentle! GENTLE!" shouted from across the room — arrives after the hand has already landed.
- Leaving them alone together to find out how it goes.
- "You could have killed her!" — a consequence they had no way to imagine.
If it repeats
Rough handling that continues while you are watching, with their eyes on you rather than on the baby, is no longer research. That is a message about attention, and it belongs in the section on your time.
Why the book suggests this
A three-year-old poking the baby's eye is usually doing research. They have no reliable sense of how much force a person contains, and a newborn is the first person they have met who is smaller than they are.
Curiosity and aggression look identical from across the room, and they are not the same thing. Treating exploration as an attack teaches a child that they are dangerous — which is both untrue and hard to get rid of later.
Related prepared situations
What happened next?
From this collection
Same Words: Two Children
45 prepared situations in this family area.