I have two sources of childcare advice - for specifics, I mean, not for the moral universe, for which I consult Pingu - which are C's cousin and my sister. C's cousin is an actual childcare professional. It's like meeting a real GP in the pub, you hang on their every word. That must be why GPs never go to the pub (unless alcohol is somehow bad for you? Surely not).

Anyway, C's cousin says her cornerstone is never to make a threat you're not prepared to carry out. And the next time I saw my sister, after I heard that, I arrived just as she was telling her older daughter that unless she changed out of her pyjamas, S was going to go and do a poo on her pillow. Which was great, you know, because she was just about to go to work, so if anyone was going to make good on this threat, it would have to be me. It's not as easy as it looks, in other words, just cobbling together a strategy from other people.

Not my problem, I thought before. T does not listen to reason, and he doesn't do anything wrong. Other parents have to threaten and bribe; all I have to do is have a sunny nature and not always be reading the paper. Stupid, stupid non-childcare non-expert. That was his observational phase, where he worked out how to be bad. Now we're in his interim phase, where he unleashes all he has learned, but we're not yet at phase three, where I make threats that I definitely intend to carry out, and he understands them. So I'm still stuck with dog-training, and trying to apply it to human mischief.

This is how it's going: T pulled little D's hair, and then hit her, for no reason that either she or I could fathom - just testing the boundaries of human endurance. I went with the reprimand-then-ignore manoeuvre, where you then lavish love upon the victim, and you don't have to accuse the perpetrator, he accuses himself. Yeah. The first flaw in this is D's vivid sense of justice. She didn't think ignoring him really fitted his crime; I think she wanted me to stab him. So the love didn't soothe her at all, she just seemed to get more and more enraged at my incompetence. I felt like Geoffrey Howe, being bawled out by Margaret Thatcher . . . I knew I'd had a plan, but she'd got so cross I'd forgotten what it was. This is just presumptuous. Who knows how Howe truly felt?

T, meanwhile, does not like to be ignored - that much is true throughout the dog and human kingdom. Attention is currency. But he doesn't just sit there, thinking, "I don't like this withdrawal of affection, brrr, so cold, outside the sunshine of love, I must be less violent in the future." No, no, no, he quickly devised fresh attention-getting strategies. He sat in my friend's chives and bounced up and down. What do you do then, reprimand the bouncer and praise the chives? How's that going to help? I'd still have a friend thinking, "What will I put on my potatoes? When will they leave?"

If it were just you and the child in a vacuum-packed dyad, it would be straightforward. You'd be consistent because none of it would be an act, it would all come consistently from your consistent core. But largely, telling off your toddler is something you do for other people's benefit, because you want to look like you're doing it properly, dealing with your infant in a robust, mature way, not treating him like a spoilt hairless cat on a velvet pillow. And also you feel bad about their chives. Furthermore, most of the bad things the toddler does are aimed at the outside world, because there's a limit to how much fun they can have pulling the same parent's hair and trying to poke the same eyes out.

But it's a minefield, because there's an inauthenticity at the heart of your reprimands. You're just doing it for show, and every mug can see it, even an under-two who still insists that both cats and dogs say "wee-ow". So T scorns my fake authority. Or probably I'm just imagining it, and he's somewhere else entirely, wondering what you actually have to do to hair to get it out of a head.

It'll be different when they can talk. I'll dazzle them with my skills of reasoning. I won't have to stop them fighting, or defend plants pot by pot, I'll be able to prove, Socratically, that all herbs deserve respect. I'm not going to parent like the Dog Whisperer.

Or Geoffrey Howe.