David, a very curious and active three-year-old, empties everything out of his mother's desk and is drawing on her file folders with Crayola markers. Discovering this mess, his mother angrily pops David on the rear. David, of course, cries and looks bewildered.
When David's father gets home, he is greeted with the mother's report, "Our darling son certainly misbehaved today." Predictably, her husband asks, "What did he do?" His question is quite understandable because the message "David misbehaved" communicates nothing about what David actually did, only that his mother made an evaluation of David himself-he was a "misbehaving" child.
If parents only knew how much trouble this concept causes in families...