Your kid is less than two? Not a ton to do in my opinion other than manage situations - i.e., you don't take him out to restaurants where people want to relax because he'll want to run around; if he's blocking the slide, you re-direct him so someone else can get town; if he dumps out the blocks at a friend's you help pick them up; etc. I do agree that as they get older it's important to teach them to respect other people's rules. But with a couple of caveats:
The first is that kids really do learn best through modeling, so I focus much more on my own behavior (or try) rather than as managing my kids. I am realizing how much stuff my kids pick up from me and it's my efforts at being respectful that show how it's done.
Also, I do think we live in a pretty kid-unfriendly society and some of the rules/expectations are so arbitrary and not cognizant of children's level of development. In that case, I think I do do things that other find overly permissive. Just a few examples:
-a friend with a child a year older than my and my friends' 14 and 16 month olds had a gathering that our kids were at; big beautiful space with tons of room and toys; our toddlers went to play with the blocks (I think they were in a bag?) and she said "they can play with them as long as they don't dump them". my friend and I were like "they're going to dump them b/c that's what toddlers do so if you don't want that, we should remove them" - we weren't insisting that they play with them but if they were out then i think it's crazy not to expect babies to respond in an age-appropriate way to the toy; we would of course help pick them up after or make a game out of putting them back in the bag
-at the big chain drugstore, my son went through a stage of taking things off bottom shelves if i let him walk - it was when he was first walking and learning to explore things; now i realize this is annoying if you are shopping and he gets in your way or if you are the worker; but i let him do it a bit and trailed after repairing everything he took down; when i got tired of repairing or if it got out of control, i put him back in the stroller
-at the playground, i think it's good to let kids manage some of their own interactions so i don't jump in right away if there's a conflict - but i will if it looks like it's overwhelming for the kid
-i probably would have let the baby play in the car too; at the music store yesterday where we had to be for a while, i let him play with the demo keyboard; it's the floor model and i supervised him but pretty impossible not to let him touch something so picked the best, safest thing
Anyways, I also err on the permissive side. I'm all for teaching kids to respect other people's rules (and think i could have done more of this with my daughter) but I also don't like to bend completely to arbitrary rules. If it's in public, then if I think it's unfair I'll just flount it; in the case with the friend who I think is overly controlling, I'll just really limit visits because it's not worth it.
