Need advice!

I do a polite threat. When we are in the parking lot you have to hold Mama hand or touch the car. Your see those cars that are moving? They can't see you so if you get too close they can cause bad boo-boos We reinforce it at home. Nana is pulling into the driveway. You gotta freeze! You don't want her to hurt you Paw paw is on the tractor. Stand still and wave at him to get his attention so he knows your there before you move Dada is on the side by side coming at us. Let's move out the way and wait for it to stop. Alright he's stopped you can go to it and climb in it I use the same general formula for most safety issues. Especially the big ones that can cause injury. If it's a small safety issue that would only cause a boo boo. I let natural consequences be the lesson there

He's hurt himself enough with mindful supervision that he's fairly mindful if I ask him if what he is doing is safe. Most of the time he tells me yes it's safe and then scares himself before he actually hurts himself. I've been reinforcing all this since he could walk. Plus I practice situational awareness by having him look for things without help and collecting things without help. And when we watch traffic I always make sure he knows why we are far away. And as far as your example of him running away when y'all are going someplace. A natural consequence for that would be we don't get to do the thing. Oh, you want to run away and not hold Mommy's hand fine. We'll go back to the car and We won't do the exactivity. Or if it's an activity that you have to do like shopping. Oh you want on the ground. You can only be on the ground if you hold Mama's hand and if you don't hold Mama's hand then you are either being held by mama or you are in the basket. You can only do x if you follow x

A real life example I have of this that I did recently that I can think of. Is when I went to Sam's club with my mother-in-law. He really wanted to be with us and he really wanted to do his own thing. But he was so tired that he was not listening. He didn't want to be held. He didn't want to be in the basket. He didn't want to be any bribe. He wanted what he wanted and didn't want to listen. If I only got to the point that he could not follow, direction would not stay nearby and was just screaming. So I took the screaming child outside the store and put them in his car seat, locked them up and put on soothing music. He didn't like that because he wanted to be with his Nana but he wasn't behaving to be in the store.

I give two choices. You can hold mama’s hand and walk or mama will carry you. She always chooses to hold my hand. If she doesn’t want to choose, I say “okay we wait until you are ready to choose.” Then I’ll ask again in a few seconds and she is ready!