I was listening to Fresh Air the other day and Terry Gross was talking to a woman who had written a book about raising children (I think it was called, All Joy and No Fun). Anyway, they were talking about how it's impossible to reason with toddlers because they have a very undeveloped frontal cortex. That is, the part of the brain that is responsible for logic, and planning, and weighing alternatives, you know, making sense, isn't really there yet.
It occurred to me, though, that what's there in spades is the part of the brain that learns words. So the key to dealing with toddlers is to make what would otherwise appeal to their (absent) reason an exercise in new language. I'm not sure how (or if) this will work but it might go something like this:
So where you might want to say: You can't wear sandals today, it's snowing.
Instead you might say: Look, this is ice. It's frozen. If you freeze water, it gets frozen. If you freeze feet, they get frozen, too. When water freezes it doesn't bend. When feet freeze they don't bend either.
... And more like that.
I don't know if this is real or not but I bet I could sell a book...
