Actions and Consequences
Actions and Consequences
Types of Consequences & How to Manage Behavior Appropriately
In this newsletter, we provide you with notes on Handling Behavior With Appropriate Consequences, an episode of the Play Therapy Parenting Podcast.
Hosted by Dr. Brenna Hicks, a Play Therapist, Kid Counselor, and founder of Play Therapy Parenting podcast.
Read our notes below.
Topics Covered in this Summary
Handling Behavior With Appropriate Consequences
The Three Types of Consequences
The Goal of Discipline
Handling Behavior With Appropriate Consequences
A consequence is something that happens as a result of your child's behavior in a particular way. Consequences can be positive or negative.
If problematic behavior is causing you or your child distress or upsetting the rest of the family, it's important to deal with it. What we do as parents has to be right for our child, ourselves, and the family.
One of our responsibilities as parents is to teach our children proper behavior. It's a time-consuming and patient job. However, learning effective and healthy discipline strategies is beneficial.
Attention is the most powerful tool for effective discipline because it can be used to reinforce positive behaviors while discouraging negative ones.
Remember that every child craves their parent's attention, and it’s always best to focus more on giving our child positive attention for behaving in ways that we like.
The Three Types of Consequences
There are three types of consequences that deal with child behavior issues and appropriate consequences for negative behavior:
A natural consequence is something that happens without the intervention of parents. For instance, if your child refuses to wear a coat, the result will be that your child will become cold.
Sometimes it’s best to let children experience the natural consequences of their own behavior. This helps them learn that their actions have consequences and learn to take responsibility for what they do.
Although natural consequences can be useful behavior management tools, they aren’t always appropriate. Another example is the possibility that your child or another person could be harmed by dangerous or antisocial behavior. You must respond to your child's behavior in these circumstances.
It's up to you to step in and mentor your child, which might entail giving them the proper consequences.
A related consequence is when you impose a consequence that’s related to the behavior you want to discourage. For example: If children are fighting over a toy, the toy is put away for 10 minutes.
The advantage of related consequences is that they get your child to think about the issue, they feel fairer, and they tend to work better than consequences that aren’t related.
An unrelated consequence is when a child fights with a friend or a sibling and you ban them from watching tv or using a computer. There is no connection between the offense and the consequence.
Natural and related consequences work better than unrelated consequences but if you cannot have natural or related consequences then unrelated consequences will do if presented clearly.
The Goal of Discipline
Harsh punishment does not change behavior. If we need to enforce punishment, notice how the child's focus shifts from being angry at us to not thinking about why they were in trouble. They are thinking about how unfair we were to them and learn nothing.
Yelling and spanking will not work - what will work is making sure that the consequence is meaningful and related to the behavior, and that the consequence is consistently enforced.
As parents, we need to keep an eye on the goal of discipline, or we lose effectiveness. The goal of discipline is to teach self-control so that we do not have to intervene.
We want our children to develop self-control and self-regulation so that they can behave in ways that benefit them.
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Listen to the original episode