Physical punishment is out of vogue, though I bet the vast majority of parents spank or otherwise use punitive force against their kids, whether they admit it or not. The notion of punishment, however, is still as american as apple pie.
Alex was visiting his cousin. "She is in time-out," he was told by her older sister. He looked puzzled. "She was punished," Hunter explained. Blank stare. "Well, she is in trouble!" Alex began looking vaguely concerned. At the age of two, he had never been exposed to the idea of punishment or any terminology that went with it.
Our family learned the method of natural consequences long before he had the capacity to misbehave. The idea is simple to learn, but it requires self-discipline, patient practice, and a willingness to make mistakes.
Consequences are what happens when you fail to bring your umbrella and It Rains. These are the natural consequences - what happens when you ignore nature & reality. Rain does not get mad. It just rains. It does not try to make you feel bad. It rains. Frankly, it does not mind if you choose to make the best of it and jump in the puddles. It simply pours water on your head! Most importantly, it never attempts to teach you a lesson. The choice is yours: next time you can take the umbrella or get wet. And if getting wet is a-ok - it is your decision and your skin.
Rain has much wisdom to teach us: be patient, be kind, be firm. Allow your child to learn the lesson in his or her own way. And for heaven's sake, don't preach!
Consequences are also what happens when you fail to pay the phone bill. You were warned about paying it on time. (Yep, it was in your contract! Your failure to pay attention doesn't alter the consequences.) The phone company didn't call your friends and call off your party, nor did it destroy your phone. It simply issued a polite warning, and, when ignored, quietly stopped providing the service.
Positive consequences are different from punishment. They are not intended to make a child suffer, feel bad or pay for his mistakes. Instead, they teach a young person to evaluate risks, make decisions and prepare him for functioning independently. There is no doubt, punishment usually works faster for the specific transgression. If I were to hit you every time you said the word "I", you'd find a way to communicate without it quite quickly, as long as you believed I could overpower you. Fear-based learning, however, does not work in general. It destroys the child's self-esteem and prevents him from applying the learned principles to similar situations, resulting in surprise punishments and starting a vicious cycle. Fear of punishment does not create great artists when applied to he study of art, nor great mathematicians, and certainly not great individuals.
To implement positive consequences successfully, one needs to be aware of a few factors:
- Plan in advance. Until you get the hang of it, plan specific consequences for specific problems. Don't improvise on the fly. It's ok if the child does something wrong once in a while. Take the opportunity to teach him what's wrong with what he did and move on. Once it becomes a consistent problem, think of a good consequence for the next time it occurs.
- Explain what the consequences of an action would be. Do so with kindness. "If we do not get our teeth brushed by the time the clock says 7:00, we won't have time to read a book tonight. Does this make sense?" Don't nag or cajole after that.
- Apply the consequence without anger, skip told-you-so's and any lecturing. Do so matter-of-factly: "Sorry, honey, it's 7:15. It's too close to sleep time. What do you say, we try to get to bed a little earlier tomorrow? Perhaps we can read a book before breakfast, right after you wake up!"
- Remind yourself that mistakes are an opportunity to learn; that consequences are not a punishment that comes out of failure, the child's or the parent's, but a way to teach the child to live in a logical and rational world that is full of cause and effect
Best of luck! This is my favorite topic, and I'll be writing about it a lot.
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