I do not wish to be vehement or toxic with anyone as I genuinely like, appreciate and enjoy everyone posting here in the Coffee Room
I did have to get physical with my eldest son, twice, after exhausting all other avenues. The first time he was around three or four and would not stop playing with matches. We spoke with him, removed and hid all the matches in the house, put the matches in protective custody… he waited for his opportunity, pushed a kitchen chair to the stove, climbed onto the stove and onto the top of the fridge where he accessed the matches from their plain box within another another plain box from behind a box of old mail in the cupboard behind the fridge near to the kitchen ceiling. He then waited for me to get busy with something else and sneaked himself off downstairs to the fireplace where he thought himself well and truly out of sight for his nefarious little games.. Thankfully he forgot to factor in the smell factor and I laid a spanking on him with my own hands that neither one of us has ever forgotten. I had to. I was so afraid he would seriously injure or kill himself by setting himself or his clothing on fire that I had to make sparking up matches for his amusement entirely un-amusing and making the consequences sufficiently not worth the risk of continuing to defy us.
The second time was a chilly, windy, late autumn day and he got it into his head he wanted to go swimming. No. Tired of being thwarted he took off out the backyard gate and hit the sidewalk with the announcement he was running away to a place where he could go swimming. Ya. Not in my house. That’s not how we do, we don’t run away in search of greener pastures when we don’t get our way, we deal with it until it’s dealt with. I didn’t spank him but I didn’t walk him back home any too gently either. I guess he was around five at the time. There is a dangerous world out there just beyond the backyard gate and you don’t just get to make a run at it when things don’t go as you think they should. He learned.