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"Do as I say, not as I do” might be the dumbest thing any parent has ever said. That is just not how it works.

Kids are always watching the way their parents relate to everyone around them: spouses, parents, friends, bosses, teachers, police, and waiters. From those observations, they are building templates for how to deal with that sort of situation themselves. So, we have to pay attention to how our actions model stimulus-behavior patterns in thousands of everyday situations.

Nothing our children hear us say will change the mental templates they build as they watch what we do.