I've spent the last 15 months watching what and how my baby girl learns, and I can definitively say that she does not learn only by example, which means that so

I've spent the last 15 months watching what and how my baby girl learns, and I can definitively say that she does not learn only by example, which means that some other form of guidance in necessary. It's certainly true that children mimic many things we do which become ingrained behaviors in time, but it is not the only way they learn. Case in point; my daughter has never seen a person touch a hot stove, run into a table at full speed, spit food across the room, pee on the carpet, bite someone's toe, chew a crayon, or any of a thousand other things she'll attempt to do until we teach her otherwise. Let's face it, at this stage she's a chemically fueled entropy machine. Her instinct is to try everything she can think of just to see what happens. In activities where she does behave by mimicking, for instance eating, we've adopted the behavior we'd like her to learn - we eat almost exclusively what she should, but this won't stop her from attempting innumerable dangerous or socially unacceptable behaviors before she can reason for herself, and in those case there is more needed than just leading by example. Of course, the children in this research are a little bit older, and I am very curious to see how her behavior changes in the next few years.