House Rules

As we look more into the idea of introducing children into our household, I’ve been reading up on ways to create order (or at least some semblance of managed chaos) in making rules and having children stick to them. In reading one article on the matter recently, I came across these statistics – I’ve seen them before, but I never put them in the context of modeling behavior for a child before:

• 55% of the meaning people make in their interactions is based on what they see.
• 38% is based on how it sounds (voice tone, volume, speed)
• 7% is based on the actual words that are being said.

Now, I think those numbers are people “in general”. I wonder if they differ (I strongly suspect they do), and how much, and in what direction, when it comes to an audience of children.