Author’s practical guidance
Walks in on you in the bathroom or the bedroom
Source named in the book: the range of ordinary body behavior in young children (Friedrich)
Small children follow.
Say this now
“I'm having private time. Wait outside, I'll be two minutes.”
Flat and specific. Waiting needs a stated end.
“Knock and wait for me to say yes.”
The whole rule. Waiting is the half they skip.
Do this
- Keep your face and voice ordinary. Cover up unhurriedly and without narration.
- Practice knocking as a game at a time when nobody is behind a door for real.
- Knock on theirs with the same ceremony you are asking for.
- Answer the question if they ask one, briefly, and then close the topic without a speech.
- Use a hook or a latch rather than a rule, while the rule is still being learned.
Avoid this
- Shrieking and grabbing a towel. Reads as danger, and they cannot tell what the danger was.
- "Get OUT!" Correct instruction, wrong volume, and the volume is what stays.
- Making a joke of it in front of other people later.
If it repeats
Repeated walking in at this age is a door problem, not a boundary problem, and the fix is mechanical. If it comes with persistent questions, answer them once in plain words rather than refusing.
Why the book suggests this
Small children follow. There is no plan behind it and no curiosity worth reading into it — you went somewhere and they came too, exactly as they do to the kitchen.
It is worth handling calmly because your reaction is the lesson. Work on ordinary body behavior in early childhood finds that children take their sense of what is shameful directly from how the adult responds, and a shriek teaches more in one second than a month of explaining undoes.
From this collection
Same Words: Their Own Body
45 prepared situations in this family area.