Setting the table was one of our children’s first family chores. Samuel had gotten into a pattern of avoiding this task when asked. We explained the consequences: If you don’t do your job, you won’t eat dinner. Then the day came, after being warned three times, that he left the table unset. Consequently, he missed his meal and didn’t get another one till morning. Was it hard? Yes, but it was an important lesson to learn: in our family we all do our part.
Sometimes consequences happen naturally. If your child doesn’t eat, he might feel hungry or if she breaks a rule in sports, she might get sent off. Most of the time, consequences need to be imposed. It is best if the consequence is related. If a child is being silly and spills a drink, he must wipe it up. If children are fighting over a toy, the toy can be put away for 10 minutes. When it is not possible to have consequences that are logical, we can use other effective negative consequences like loss of privilege or time out.
Our Family Ways
Think ahead by agreeing what your family rules are and what the corresponding consequences will be. Our family aims to live by Our Family Ways which is a list of positive attributes we developed over the years. The older the child, the more he or she can participate in the process of formulating them. When our children know the rules and the corresponding consequences and we parents apply them consistently, our children have a much deeper respect for our parenting.
We are helping our children make important connections. If there are no unpleasant effects of bad behaviour, or positive effects for appropriate behaviour, in essence no practical understanding of cause and effect, we are actually training our children for failure. We are setting them up for some nasty shocks later in life and, like it or not, we will be implicated in their pain because we love them and are involved in their lives.
The Law of Sowing and Reaping
When we plant seeds in our gardens we usually get a result – a plant that comes up in the same botanical family of the seed. We don’t plant a daffodil bulb and get oranges. Why in life do we sometimes expect a different result to arise out of our parenting than what we plant? We might hope, for example, that our adult children will somehow turn out as reasonable, grateful, law abiding citizens, without having taught them with consequences when they were children to abide by some family rules.
Planting Potatoes
Meralisa's Musings 