Your child/teen will naturally test limits, break rules and hurt others. This is a normal part of their development at each age and stage and is necessary for their learning. As a parent or someone in a parenting role, you can choose to be purposeful and deliberate in the ways you apply logical consequences, communicate your expectations, and guide your child/teen to repair harm when needed.
On a typical day, a child’s/teen’s behavior or action may result in a natural consequence. Natural consequences are those that happen naturally as a result of a child's/teen’s choice or action without any intervention from a parent or those in a parenting role. As an example, a child isn’t paying attention at the dinner table and tips over a glass of milk. The natural consequence is that their clothes are wet from the spilled milk.
In addition to a natural consequence, there may be times that adults need to set a logical consequence in response to a child’s/teen’s behavior or action. Logical consequences are those that are set by an adult and are related to the child's/teen’s behavior. Logical consequences are not a parent-invented punishment for a poor choice. Instead, they are a consequence that is tied to a behavior and allows for a teachable moment. Logical consequences provide parents or those in a parenting role the opportunity to teach a child that choices have an impact not only on themselves but also on others and the environment around them. Sometimes the impact of a choice is immediate (like spilling juice in another person’s lap) and sometimes, it’s either subtle (cannot always be physically observed like hurt feelings) or the impact is felt over time (such as, stealing a toy when a sibling is not around).
When you, as a parent or someone in a parenting role, allow for natural consequences to take place without rescuing your child or imposing or inventing new consequences that may not naturally occur and then follow up with logical consequences and guidance to repair harm, you are offering opportunities for learning and building your child’s skills.
While for some adults, it can be a simple process to connect decisions to outcomes, in fact, consequential thinking is a higher order thinking skill that is learned through experience and practice. As a child/teen grows, their brain is reorganizing from their childhood magical thinking processes to a more rational and logical thinking process. Their higher order thinking skills are not fully formed until the early to mid-twenties.
How parents or those in a parenting role model, teach, practice and support children/teens as they think through the impact of choices before they make them and then respond in ways that repair the harm they’ve caused can make a big difference in cultivating your child’s ethics and sense of responsibility. This is the essential skill of responsible decision-making.
This document on how you facilitate logical consequences and help your child/teen learn to repair harm is divided into two parts. First, logical consequences and repairing harm is defined and specific real life examples for skill building are provided. Then, how paying attention to logical consequences and repairing harm is essential and different than punishment is explored.
