Go and look at what your toddler is standing on right now. I'll wait.

Seriously — go and look. If you have a toddler in the house, there is a reasonable chance they are standing on something right now that was not designed to be stood on.

Mine was on the arm of the sofa. Again.

I had spent about four months saying “don't climb there” in an increasingly tired voice, and I had started to think something was wrong with him. Other people's children sat and played with toys. Mine treated the furniture as terrain.

The sentence that reframed it

A paediatric physiotherapist said something at a parent session that I have thought about ever since: once a child is crawling confidently, the next stage is not walking — it is climbing. And climbing is not just muscles. It is a child learning to judge whether something is within their ability, and adjusting halfway when it is not.

Which meant my son was not being difficult. He was doing exactly what a two-year-old is supposed to do, in a house that gave him nowhere to do it.

The swap

We did not childproof harder. We added one thing he was allowed to climb, and left it out permanently in the corner of the living room.

I am not going to tell you it made him calm. He is two. It moved the climbing somewhere I did not have to police, which at that stage was the only thing I wanted.

See what we use

If you went and looked at the start of this and found your child on the furniture — that is the normal stage, not a behaviour problem. The question is just what you would rather they practise on.