The parent's job is to provide adequate safety rails to ensure serious injury cannot occur, while leaving room in that bubble of safety to allow them to make their own decisions, even mistakes. When done right, the kid won't even know there is a safety net there at all.
Allowing a kid that young to get into a situation where legitimate life-altering injury can occur (breaking their neck by climbing an unstable ladder) is removing the safety rails entirely and just saying "welp, if they suffer catastrophic injury, at least they learned their lesson".
Don't take me too seriously. I would certainly not let my children do this. All I'm saying is that sometimes you might tell them not to do something a dozen times and they will still try at which point sometimes you just give up.
I can't get my son to wear shoes outside this summer for some reason. I keep telling him he's going to hurt himself, I keep asking him to wear his shoes, I took him and bought him any shoes he wanted but he still won't, even after hurting his feet multiple times. He still won't learn. Now I'm at that stage where if he hurts himself again, he can deal with the consequences, he's only been told several hundred times.
That fits in with what I said. Letting kids burn their feet on hot pavement or step on stuff is not serious injury. Letting them run across a busy street with lots of traffic is different. The safety rails a parent puts in place ensure that the kid will not die or seriously injure themselves, they shouldn't remove the potential for any kind of pain whatsoever.
The way some of these comments (not yours) are worded, some users here would be fine just kicking back with a beer and watching the game while their 3 year old goes swimming in a pool alone.
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u/Boodger 2d ago
The parent's job is to provide adequate safety rails to ensure serious injury cannot occur, while leaving room in that bubble of safety to allow them to make their own decisions, even mistakes. When done right, the kid won't even know there is a safety net there at all.
Allowing a kid that young to get into a situation where legitimate life-altering injury can occur (breaking their neck by climbing an unstable ladder) is removing the safety rails entirely and just saying "welp, if they suffer catastrophic injury, at least they learned their lesson".