My son likes to make messes like this and come tell me about it. He sees that it upsets me and he still continues to do it every day. At first I thought he was just doing it because it's fun and he doesn't understand how much of a problem it is for everyone, including himself. I can see by the look on his face here that there's no malice going on. He's genuinely excited to show me, but why?
I've come to the conclusion that the reason he does it is because it upsets me. It's not because he wants me to feel upset, it's because he wants to clean it up, therefore fulfilling that need he's created, in turn making me happy, and he feels a sense of accomplishment in doing so. It's actually a very creative way of connecting. You see, Henry here hasn't figured out the broken window fallacy yet. It's tough explaining that one to a 2-year-old. Hell, most adults I've talked to don't seem to understand, so I can't really fault him for that too much, although I will try to teach him as he becomes more capable.
That's beside the point though. The most important lesson about this encounter is to understand that kids of this age aren't really capable of malice in the way we see older children and adults being malicious sometimes. We live in a culture where the first assumption people make is that people are bad, and I'm a product of that culture, and so seeing malice where there isn't any is a weakness of mine. Combating that thing inside of me with my children has been one of the most difficult aspects of raising children for me.
Before I had kids I decided first that I wouldn't spank or hit my future children as part of my parenting. I eventually came to the conclusion through reading up on peaceful parenting techniques (mainly Parent Effectiveness Training, or PET, but also some others like Laura Markham's Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids, and Montessori teachings) that no kind of punishment is appropriate, especially for young children. If you can't give someone of that age responsibility to make their own decisions about everything in their lives, which you certainly can't, how can you be justified in holding them morally responsible and punishing them when they make mistakes in their decision-making? The answer is, that you can't because it's a self-detonating moral argument, and makes zero logical sense.
That doesn't mean that understanding this intellectually makes stepping outside of old patterns of behavior easy though. I find myself often experiencing feelings of righteous indignation when one hurts the other, or sensing malice when they do something that upsets me, like unraveling the whole roll of toilet paper onto the bathroom floor. The whole last five years of my life has been a constant repetition of those events in which I talk myself down from those feelings, relentlessly deferring to what I know to be true; my kids are good people and they love me. Hopefully I'm not screwing it up often enough that they will have such a hard time with it when they're parents of their own children. I want this kind of thinking to feel unusual and foreign to them. At the very least, I will fight with every fiber of my being to succeed in this task, although I know I will also make mistakes, but I need to persevere in the face of my own shortcomings. It is the only path to world peace in my opinion, and it's a damn worthy cause. I hope you feel the same.