I think I rather quickly disabused my parents of the notion that protecting their offspring from bodily harm was possible - or even advisable - so baby sis' reaped the benefits of that. They settled on hiding the knives and plugging the electrical sockets, which was probably wise.
Not that I was a wild child, or a disobedient one - I was a little ADHD dreamer kid (and a horrible klutz) and parental advice tended to have ... unforeseen consequences. Like the one time I found out that spring mattresses made excellent trampolines, and got it into my head that mine should be just as excellently suited to simulate a skydiver's jump out an airplane door - Mom is standing right in front of me, trying not to smirk, sterning
"If you boink your head on the corner of the bed, you'll get a good thrashing, you know that, right?"Guess what happened. That's how we learned that
"the body will follow the eye". Forty years later, I still got a one-inch scar on my forehead (three stitches).
Mom never made good on the promised thrashing. I got a front-row view of how parents look when they try their best to suppress a panic attack while hustling their screaming, blood-covered offspring to the ER. It wouldn't be the last time. Aaaaaand it laid the foundation for my abiding hatred of hospitals. I decided to maybe pay a
little more attention to parental advice, so I never tested whether putting my little mitts on the oven would really hurt. Ditto on on putting knitting needles into the electrical sockets.
Compounding the danger was my budding engineering/science aptitude, which was rapidly evolving due to a series of
"well-intentioned" gifts (especially various
Fischertechnik construction sets). I think at some point, Mom must have realized that warning her little scientist of the dangers of anything even remotely techy could be unwise, especially when he got 'that look' on his face.
We lived next door to Mom's sister, and the younger of my two cousins was a prodigy with anything mechanical (He's turned out a car mechanic, me a physicist). From age ten onwards, young Case started advising the grown-ups, e.g. on the proper way to start NYE-rocketry. The resulting mockery soon subsided when Uncle Yogi discovered that the little loudmouth was actually right, and ignoring him could lead to burned mitts (who'd get the idea that starting NYE-rocketry out of their
hands was a good idea? My uncle, that's who. Grownups ...). My cousin took apart-, and re-assembled his first bicycle before we enrolled in elementary school (today, he scratches that itch by buying esoteric wreckage and selling it on ebay as soon as it is in perfect condition).
Warning us lot of dangers could be ... dangerous. And our two sets of parents were far too busy keeping up with the disasters resulting from ideas they wouldn't have dreamed warning us about, so they soon settled on a combination of loving mockery in less serious cases ("Rotting flesh. Good it's gone" - an inquisitive, excellently schooled child tends to take parental fears as inspiration for experimentation. Parental mockery, on the other hand ...), impromptu emergency-room skills in more serious ones (Uncle Yogi once peeled a cupload of gravel out of my knees & elbows. Turns out that pitiful wailing didn't impress Uncle Yogi to the same degree it impressed Mom - that is to say: At
all - so I was forced to learn to drive more carefully), and exploiting our unsettling skillset as soon as we hit puberty and became actually useful.