Happy Families

Consequences

Written by Dr Justin Coulson

Picture this. You’re at the playground having a picnic with some friends. Your toddler starts throwing their food on the floor.

“He needs a time-out,” one friend mutters.

“Take his lunch box away” another advises.

“He needs to learn the consequences of his decisions,” counsels another.

Consequences have become a buzzword lately in the parenting field. There is talk of ‘natural’ consequences, ‘logical’ consequences, ‘applied’ consequences, and ‘imposed’ consequences. Yet for all these labels, 99% of the time when people are talking about consequences, what they’re really talking about is punishment.

As far as behaviour modification goes, we know that punishment works. But the real question is…“works” to do what?

Often a time-out or taking his lunch box away would be effective ways of stopping your child from throwing their food around. However, these actions are based on Behaviourist principles developed from studying pigeons and rats. They’re effective… in the short term, and only for as long as we’re willing to keep imposing the consequences.

Furthermore, what do you want the reasons to be for your child going along with what you’ve asked? If compliance is your only goal, then punishment makes sense. Of course, you would have to be there all the time to impose that punishment. If you want your child to do something because they want to do the right thing, deep down, then we need better approaches.

I believe that we can do 99% of our parenting without imposing consequences of any kind. There are two reasons for this. The first is that a lot of the time, natural consequences occur to teach our child the negative results of their behaviour without our intervention. If your child throws their food around, the natural consequence is that they have no food left, and they’ll be hungry. You might even need to go home early to get more food. By explaining the link between their actions and the consequence, you can reinforce the learning without shaming them. “Oh no, you threw all your food and now there’s none left for your tummy! If you’re hungry, we will have to go home from the playground.”

However, we can’t always rely on natural consequences. After all, the natural consequence of throwing sand is that it could get into someone else’s eyes, and the natural consequence of running into the street is getting run over.

When we’re unable or unwilling to let our child experience the natural consequence of their actions, we need to try something else. Many people advocate for ‘logical’ consequences–that is, a consequence somehow logically linked to the behaviour. For example, taking the lunch box away would be a logical consequence, while a time-out wouldn’t be. However, both of these ‘consequences’ are really just punishments. Their goal is to deter the child from undesirable behaviour by imposing a penalty.

Which brings me to the second reason that consequences aren’t necessary: we don’t need to make our child feel worse for their behaviour to get better.

Instead, we want to explore, explain, and empower.

By exploring, we connect with our child and seek to understand the motivation behind their behaviour. Once they feel seen and heard, we can move to explaining what our expectations are. Most of the time our kids already know what we expect from them, so we don’t need to lecture them. A short and simple explanation is all that’s necessary. Then we can empower them to collaborate with us in finding solutions that work for everyone.

With our youngest kids, they’re probably not going to be a very active participant in this collaborative problem-solving process. However, we can still work through these steps in a way that sets them up for success.

Here’s what that looks like in action:

• Explore – “It looks like you feel like throwing things!”
• Explain – “I can’t let you throw food around. Then we would have nothing to eat later.”
• Empower – “What would you like to do instead? You can throw this ball… or we can play on the swing.”

Contrary to what anyone may say, our children rarely need to learn the consequences of their actions. They just need to be supported to choose better ones.