One day I got a call from a number with an area code I didn't recognize. Turned out to be the daycare director. My kid had gotten a nosebleed.
My reaction was basically "okay, and?" Nosebleeds happen. It happened at home plenty too, so I didn't think much of it. Nose feels stuffy, hand goes to the nose, nosebleed happens.
That's when something shifted for me. I stopped telling my kid to "stop picking your nose." Thinking about it, that phrase is pretty irresponsible. A kid doesn't pick their nose to be bad, or as a game. It's genuinely stuffy and itchy, so their hand goes there. Even adults can't stand it when their nose is blocked and end up sniffling all day — telling a five-year-old to "just hold it in, don't pick" is basically asking them to white-knuckle through discomfort with willpower alone.
So instead of nagging them to stop, I decided to build an environment where they wouldn't need to pick in the first place.
Tracing it back to the cause, it turned out to be something small. It was hot, so we'd point the fan at their face while they slept. The airflow dried out their nose all night, making it stuffier, which made the nosebleeds worse. So I turned the fan toward their feet instead. Kept the A/C from blowing directly on their face too. In winter, I made sure to run the humidifier every day.
Nothing grand about it. There's exactly one thing you can do tonight: before bed, check whether the fan is pointed at your kid's face. Just turning it toward their feet changes the next morning.
Weirdly, the nosebleeds dropped off dramatically after that. Nagging "stop picking your nose" a hundred times did a lot less than turning a fan around once.