The Hand Licking Incident
Hate to break it to you, but nobody was saying you should pour the alcohol on the fire. They said to put the fire out and you happened to be holding alcohol so you decided to throw alcohol on it.<p>Nobody said that the hand licking was "Bad Behavior [and] Absolutely Must Stop At Any Cost". They looked at you like you didnt know how to teach your child how to be polite in public, and you chose that you must do whatever it takes to stop yourself appearing that way.<p>The fact that you were trying to solve a problem without knowing the cause was silly, and I'm genuinely happy for you that you've learned from that experience, but the worst part is that you attribute the blame to outside forces.<p>Sentences like "They made me make the problem worse by telling me to fix it" and  "It's their fault I failed because I didn't know how to solve the problem and guessed" come to mind.<p>"It might result in worse things happening to my relationship to my child than him being mad at me about this one thing. So I tried to comply with this expectation that my child needed to stop and I needed to be the one to make that happen."<p>There is more shifting blame in this paragraph. Somewhere you missed the part where "to comply" is to achieve the outcome of your child no longer licking his hands, not to assault him.<p>Society views parents who hit their kids worse than parents whose kids lick their hands, so I have no idea where you got the idea of compliance being to hit your child.<p>It's nice that you learned one lesson, maybe you could learn something from how you wrote the article, and if you can remember, how you felt when you wrote it.