Do you want to know how to create good, simple consequences that work? It is possible. I'm
Nicoholeen Peck and I teach all over the world about parenting, good communication,
and how to create strong relationships. And in this video, I'm talking about consequences.
In this video, we're going to talk about why consequences are important, what makes a bad
consequence, what makes a good consequence, and how to make good simple consequences for your
family. So why are consequences important? Because they teach cause and effect. So this channel is
called the teaching self government channel. And we focus on teaching parents and children
how to create an environment where everyone learns self government or self regulation.
Self government is being able to determine the cause and effect of any given situation,
and possessing a knowledge of your own behaviors so that you can control them.
So you have to understand cause and effect is actually consequences that teach somebody cause
and effect. Also good teaching moments that are heart to heart really hit the heart. Now,
when a person learns self-government, hopefully, they are having a change of heart and not
just a change of behavior. But they need to decide that it's healthy and comfortable to examine
their own behavior and to make adjustments. Remember, the second part of that definition
is possessing a knowledge of your own behavior so that you can control them.
This means that we need to be utilizing positive consequences and negative consequences. So
positive and negative consequences are both great teachers. They're both usually synthetic.
But sometimes natural consequences can be utilized as well. A lot of people would love
to focus on just natural consequences. But let's be very clear, what is a natural consequence
and what isn't a natural consequence. So someone said to me the other day, well, Nicholeen, you
talk about artificial consequences, a lot like extra chores, but what about natural consequences,
like, if a person doesn't put their socks away, then you take their socks away. And like that's
not a natural consequence. That's actually an artificial consequence, the natural consequence
of not putting your socks away, is that now you have a sock mess all over the floor. Or maybe
when I'm looking for a particular sock, I don't know where it is, because it didn't get put away.
Those would be natural consequences. But if you take something away from somebody else, like their
phone, because they're on it too much, those are all synthetic consequences. So don't think that
those things are natural. Natural consequences are great teachers. But most children do not
acknowledge natural consequences very readily. So let's say a child doesn't do their dishes,
and they walk into the kitchen, and the kitchen smells like old rotten food, they're gonna say,
oh, it stinks in here and they'll probably walk out. They won't say, oh, it stinks in here,
probably because I didn't do my dishes two nights ago. So maybe I should start doing my dishes right
now and get all those old dishes done. No, they just noticed that something smells bad,
and then walks away, that doesn't make them want to do their dishes unnecessarily at that time.
It could take a long period of time for the dishes to finally get done. So what parents
do is they use synthetic consequences to help teach the child quicker, so that the child can
learn cause and effect in a more expedited fashion so that they can have a better learning experience
overall, and get better at some of their troubling behaviors. Teaching cause and effect is vital.
Natural and synthetic consequences can both be used. However, synthetic consequences are usually
faster, and can be used more immediately. Also, sometimes they're less harsh. Think about that,
if you tell a child don't run in the road and if you run in the road, then I will get you
out of the road and you will earn an extra chore. Let's say it's something like that,
because you're not accepting a "no" answer. Well, the natural consequence of running
in the road is what if you get hit by the car? That's a really painful natural consequence.
So wouldn't it be better to remove them and tell them that they didn't accept a "no" answer? And so
now they've earned an extra chore? I think, yes. So many times the synthetic consequences are
actually more merciful. Now, the trouble comes when some parents start using consequences as
the payback, right. Maybe the parent doesn't want to be doing the correction moment in the first
place where they were bothered by something. So now they start formulating consequences just to
cause pain on their child. Well, that's not good self government on the part of the parent. In
fact, it's emotionally manipulative. You shouldn't be using consequences to manipulate your child's
behavior. Instead, it's simply just to teach them a lesson of cause and effect, which means
they don't even have to hate their consequence. They don't have to feel any emotion toward their
consequence at all, they just have to accept their consequence. Which is why in our family, we
oftentimes use extra chores. I'll get to getting more to those negative consequences in just a
moment so that you can see what works and what doesn't work. But first, let's talk about what
makes a bad consequence and what makes a good consequence. Before we talk about what makes good
and bad consequences, and some of the consequences that I recommend, click the subscribe button now.
This channel is full of information on creating an environment where you and your children can
thrive in a self governing environment where you can be bonded together in unity, and seek greater
understanding from each other. So click on the subscribe button now to get more information
in the future when you need it most. So what makes a bad consequence?
If something is done to a child just to make a child feel a certain emotion,
then that is a manipulative consequence. And I would consider that to be a bad consequence.
If you are doing a consequence that lasts for many days, right, for a long period of time, such
as you are not going to have friend privileges for the rest of the month or for the rest of
your life or, you know, whatever it is that people say, those are just threats, okay, and they're not
great consequences. But also, if you are trying to pull your child away from something in that way,
for long periods of time, then that's not a good consequence either, because they can't do anything
to accept it. Now, this is what makes a good consequence. A good consequence is made when
a person gets the opportunity to accept it. If you want them to learn to evaluate themselves and
learn self government, then they need to be given the opportunity to accept a negative consequence.
These four books each teach one of the four basic skills to children. And this one here,
Big Win for Quinn teaches the skill, accepting consequences. When a person accepts a consequence,
they can look at the person or situation, keep a calm face, voice and body, say okay, or asked to
disagree appropriately, do the consequence. And then check back and drop the subject.
If your child is able to stay calm, say okay or disagree appropriately with you,
which is taught in this book here, then your child is actually getting the opportunity
to accept a consequence. Now, if they push and push, and then you fight and pull, then you are
going to get in a power struggle and they will ultimately end up having things happen to them,
especially if you lose control. What needs to happen is you stay calm, and they stay calm,
hopefully. And if they're not calm, you still help them get to a place of calmness, by using one of
your teaching skills that you use as a parent. Now in the teaching self government parenting program,
we teach the children every correction skill that we are ever going to use before we ever use it so
they know exactly what I'm going to say. In fact, they can say it back to me when we do role plays
to practice. So when that happens, then we're not increasing their anxieties or frustration,
during the moment that you are saying what needs to be said to calm them down,
they actually recognize it's up to them to choose the calmness, right at that time, they can't power
struggle their way out of it, they have to just pick it, that's one of the key things that makes
a great consequence is when the person recognizes it was their choice, they have to choose to accept
the consequences, they have to choose to be calm and to overcome it and fix the problem.
Everything comes back to their choice. This doesn't mean that I burden them with lots of
choices. Many parents will say, well, you can pick this, or you can pick this. And they give
the children the choices that they can pick ahead of time. And while that's not terrible,
it's much better to help the child understand the steps of what they need to do and just say,
these are the steps you need to do otherwise we do a correction. These are the steps, here's the
step you're missing. Let's focus on this step. So when the parent gives the child the exact skill
set they need to use, they don't need to try to get the child's stuck in this place of decision of
what's going to be better for me and not, it just points the child in the right direction.
Now let's talk about some other bad negative consequences such as timeout. Timeout is used by a
lot of people but it's actually not a really great negative consequence because it teaches detachment
from parents, which is not good. You go sit over there because you're not good enough to be with
me right now. I'm not going to give you any of my love or attention right now. It's very emotionally
manipulative to the child and it really does increase their anxiety. Many small children
will sit on timeout and beg and scream for hugs and caring because they feel like their parents
don't care about them at that time. And if that's the case, then you know that that consequence has
been manipulative. We do use a place in the teach Seeing self government program for small children,
we call it a calm down spot. And they are only there until they can be calm. And sometimes the
parent even stays right there with them, I don't have time to go into how to use all of
that consequence at this time, because the content places and the consequence, it's a trigger spot.
And what they do is they actually just get calm there, and then they get the opportunity to accept
a consequence after, that's why they don't have to stay there for a certain period of time, like
a lot of people prescribed to do, when you use a timeout. I also do not like grounding people,
those kinds of things, there could be a time for a large negative consequence. But that needs to
be articulated ahead of time what that would ever be, if a person goes completely out of control,
or steps over a boundary that might be incredibly dangerous, or needs something a little larger
attached to it. So the biggest thing with teaching self government is that you prepare
ahead of time for what might come and then you tell the children so they've been pre taught,
and there's no surprises, the best consequences are very predictable and don't surprise the
person. This decreases anxiety, and gives them a greater opportunity to be able to accept their
consequences, and thereby master self government. So how should we create good, simple consequences
that work? Well, Samuel Smiles, who wrote the book called character back in the 1800s said,
the work is the antidote for a sick character. And I completely agree with Mr. Smiles on that.
When you are working, there's this George ik thing that happens that you start to forget yourself,
and how you feel, and you just start getting the job done. And that's a great thing, it helps open
the mind to much more deeper thinking, and helps the person be able to just relax a little bit.
So extra chores are really powerful because not only do they improve character, but they serve
somebody else, not just yourself, and they create an opportunity for quick repentance.
I don't like consequences that follow a person around forever. Oh, you didn't make your bed,
so now you don't get snacks for the entire day. Why would that be a thing? How about you didn't
follow the instruction to make your bed. So you've earned an extra chore. So now we need to make the
bed and do the extra chore. But once that's done, it's over. I forget about it, you forget about it.
Isn't that what a merciful judge does? They forget about the transgression, or the mistake
right after it happened and allow the person the freedom to just repent from
it and be done. So I love that, it doesn't take a lot of time, it doesn't get into the whole day
and ruining the whole day. The family doesn't have to remember how bad that one person was,
when they hit that other person the whole day long, they can just let stuff go and give
somebody the opportunity to change and progress. That's what makes a great negative consequence.
So I use extra chores. Now for positive consequences, we use lots of things we use,
like special time with mom and dad high fives, praises. Sometimes there's money, there's snacks,
all kinds of things you could do for a positive consequence. And positive consequences teach just
as well as negative consequences. So keep that in mind. And don't forget to use them in motivation.
But don't use them as bribery because motivation and bribery are two different things.
So what if a child does something you know, really intense or bad or goes completely out of
instructional control? Well, we have three other negative consequences in our family that we use
for something called the Rule of Three, when someone goes completely out of control.
Meaning they will not respect mom and dad, they will not listen, they are having a
tantrum or something like that. Whether they're a teenager or toddler, tantrums happen, we know this.
I know this, especially because of all the years of doing treatment foster care for troubled teens,
I saw a lot of tantrums from older children. Anyway, so what do we do, we have three things.
One of them is a major maintenance, which is a larger job, still the same concept of the work,
which is great and then the second one is to problem solving exercises called SODAS.
These are written exercises that actually are productive for the person because they help
develop the prefrontal cortex and help them solve their problem better in the future and then the
third negative consequences kind of the biggest one that they can ever have and this is a loss
of privileges for 24 hours and what that means is that the person does not have friend time, snacks,
TV time, phone, computer, they don't get to just sit around the house and do whatever they want or
play with siblings for 24 hours, they get the recommended hours of sleep three meals a day.
And the rest of the time, they are doing extra chores. I mean, if it's a school day, they're
going to go to school if they're in control, but then when they get home, they are going
to be doing extra chores, the whole rest of the time, they will practice following instructions
because usually they got to that place because they would not choose to follow instructions.
Now obviously there are certain ages that we're going to modify some of these consequences for
because the loss of privileges for 24 hours might be a little bit too intense for a six or seven
year old. However, a six or seven year old is ready for using the words from the rule of three.
So I do have a modified rule of three and you can find that on my teaching self government support
group. If you've enjoyed learning about these simple but good consequences that you can use
in your family, you're probably going to want to learn more about the skills of self government.
There is a video that I recommend watching next, and it is called the not so known secret for
parenting success and it talks about a lot of the skills and principles for correcting your children
and learning self government. It's a full length class. I hope you enjoy it. Click
on the link to that class now.