Kids and Consequences

Giving your kids consequences for their behavior can be one of the more challenging aspects of parenting. This is extra true if your child is neurodiverse. 

For a consequence to work on a neurodiverse child, they have to basically agree to care about you, the situation and their behavior. If you have not yet run into a situation where your child just did not care how you felt about their behavior, just wait. 

Why Punishment Often Doesn’t Work

Punishments are generally an arbitrary response to behavior. Your child does something wrong, and you put them in time out, or take away their favorite thing, or possibly spank them. The problem with these, is that they do not actually teach the child to be better behaved. Generally, they teach the child that if they do the crime, they have to do the time, and they may even decide to break your rules because they are fine accepting your punishments. 

Two of my children never cared at all about being put in time out.  One would even do things intentionally to get put in time out so they could examine the timer again. Another would bounce out of time out and go break the rule again as soon as possible, knowing there were only so many minutes of the day I could put them in time out. I never bothered with time outs with my youngest, I had learned they didn’t work. 

I should have known these methods wouldn’t work with my kids. I grew up in a very permissive home. I had almost no consequences of any kind as a child. In my teen years, I was once grounded from seeing my boyfriend for a week. I don’t remember why, but I saw him more that week than any other week during our brief relationship. Why? Because I didn’t agree with my parents that I had done anything wrong. At that age, I had experienced years of parentification and felt if I was going to be treated as an adult in so many other ways, I should be treated as an adult in this, too. But that is a whole other story. 

My kids have not been forced to act like adults before they are grown. And we gave up on punishments that weren’t working a long time ago. 

Consequences Instead of Punishments

What is the difference between a consequence and a punishment? A consequence is something that relates directly to what you did wrong, where a punishment is arbitrary.  I’m a fan of natural consequences where the consequence is a solution to the problem. For example, if your child makes a mess, instead of sending them to their room to think about what they did, instead I have them clean up the mess. This prepares them for adulthood when they will need to clean up all their own messes. 

Natural consequences can also include not getting to do something. For example, if my children misbehaved while out to eat, and we usually go out to eat on Sunday. The next Sunday, I may tell them we can’t go out to eat because they were so badly behaved last time. That I can’t take them places if they are going to embarrass me. Yes, this punishes us all, because now I have to go home and cook. However, missing out on this expected family time once, usually meant that my kids behaved better the next time we went out to eat. They came to understand it was a privilege.

Often, giving a natural consequence required sacrifice as a parent. I did not always get to do what I wanted. I had to stand firm on making it clear that poor behavior would lead to all of us dealing with consequences of their actions. Once, when I was grocery shopping with all of them, I had only gotten through the produce section when they stopped listening and staying with me the way I had asked. I had to gather them and point at our grocery cart and explain that if they couldn’t stay with me, we would only have vegetables to eat that week. To finish shopping, and get all their favorite things like cereal, they had to stay with me. Thank goodness I did not have to leave the store right then. I wasn’t really prepared to make a vegan dinner. But I would have, and my kids knew it. I didn’t make empty threats. 

More Complicated Consequences 

If one of my kids hurt a sibling, they had to fetch the injured child an ice pack, and read them a story or share a TV show or game with them to make them feel better. They were not allowed to just say they were sorry. That isn’t how you mend a relationship. I want them to do better than just saying sorry if they do something wrong to their friend or spouse someday, so I’m trying to teach this idea in childhood. 

Sometimes, there is no natural consequence. For example, if your kids are just fighting and arguing and making you crazy.  My consequence for that was to make them do some of my chores. Nothing helps kids learn to appreciate your time like having to clean the bathroom. At the time, I felt that if they learned nothing else, at least they got a life skill and my bathroom was cleaner. 

Teenagers

Does this method work with teenagers?  I have to say it has. However, sometimes I have had to get creative.  For example, one of my kids missed a zoom appointment that they had agreed to attend. This is something this child is capable of doing on their own, but they took a nap instead. After missing the appointment, we got a huge missed appointment fee. We had this child do yard work to help pay for the appointment fee. They don’t have a job, and I wouldn’t fee right taking their birthday money, but they can do chores to pay us back. 

But the truth is, I put in a lot of hard work when my kids were little. I parented with conscious choices and carefully chosen consequences. So, now that they are teens, we really have very few behavior problems. If they break something, they know they need to repair if. If they mess up, they work to fix the problem before I even ask them to, most of the time. I’m reaping the rewards of my hard work when they were younger.