I’m curious… how many people here would say that they have or had a well-behaved toddler? (as described by the article - patient, didn’t interrupt, obeyed “no” the first time, played happily in the sandbox/park, and could sit through a restaurant dinner in their high chair?)
Pretty much (e.g., we didn't usually have 3 courses in restaurants when DS was a toddler), yes. We stopped while we were ahead - I can easily believe that our next child might have been very different. That said, I also have a strong intuition that parenting and cultural norms affect the odds. You can hardly travel in Europe and the USA without noticing differences in children's typical restaurant behaviour, for example. [ETA And I have to say that I don't think the idea that French children don't get taken to restaurants is right at all; they seem to get taken to restaurants a *lot* more than UK children do, anyway. In fact that's commonly given as an explanation for why they are on average better behaved in restaurants than their UK counterparts: they get practice.]
(Which is not to say that I agree with everything in that article - far from it. It nearly lost me, too, at babies sleeping through the night at 2-3 months!)
