Natural Consequences

by jesusvegan
for MotherSpirit

Life contains millions of natural consequences. Our jobs as parents is to walk down the road of life with our children by our side. We are to teach them through modeling and correction of behavior. And we are to look at life's bumps and carry our children over the ones they aren't ready for and let them get over the ones they are. This means determining what natural consequences our children are prepared to handle--let them handle the ones they're ready for and block them from experiencing the one's they aren't.

Any time a parent *imposes* a consequence on their child they are being punitive. Even if a consequence is logical to an adult mind we must remember that children do not share our *logic*. Until we get over the idea that we must *do something* we will continue to be punitive. Anything we *do* only takes away from life's lessons. The creativity this requires from us is to think outside the box and start to really see how many lessons there are out there. For example, you break all your toys you have no toys to play with. Most children are not ready for this lesson so we teach them to play appropriately with their toys and verbalize for them what they natural consequence is. If your child refuses to play appropriately then you decide when they're ready to experience the natural consequence and you let them break their toys. Then they have not toys to play with. If they are unhappy with this then you can help them brainstorm ideas for replacing the toys and maybe they'll treat them with more respect. Another example, if your child speaks rudely to you tell them you don't deserve to be spoken to like that. If they continue then tell them that you will leave the room until they're ready to speak politely to you. The natural consequence of speaking rudely to people is that they won't want to be around you. You don't have to be nasty about it. You don't have to add a whole bunch of verbal correction, threats, "I told you so’s". Simply tell them you don't want to sit there and be spoken to rudely and model how you'd like them to react to someone who speaks rudely to them.