Natural Consequences

Instead of using punishments and rewards, Healing Through Parenting relies on natural consequences to help children learn how the world works and how they can function within the world to be safe.

Punishments by definition are something that you do to inflict pain on somebody else as a consequence for their behavior.  The thinking behind using a punishment like timeout, taking away privileges, ignoring, or yelling, is that if we can make a child feel bad enough then they'll be willing to change.  

Rewards and Punishments

Definition of punishment is to “subject to pain, loss, confinement, death, etc., as a penalty for some offense, transgression, or fault”

Unfortunately this is not how things work and it actually makes things a whole lot harder for your child if they grow up getting punished for behaviors and emotions.  If you start out using punishments you might find that overtime you have to use more punishments to get your child to cooperate.  You might find yourself escalating your punishments and they might start becoming ineffective as your child gets older.  This is called the Cascade of Punishments, and is the cycle that children get stuck in that leads to Juvenile Detention or Incarceration later in life.

Rewards on the other hand are when you use bribes, financial incentives, sticker charts, reward systems, or anything else that gives a child something in return for an action.  This teaches a child that they are going to be rewarded for doing things that somebody else wants them to do.  This does not create intrinsic motivation within the child, rather it creates external motivation and overtime you might find that your child will only do things if there's something in it for them.  You might run into a lot of stubbornness and you have to negotiate with your child in order to get them to do something.  This leads to Reward Dependency, and causes children to expect trophies for participation.

Favorable or Unfavorable Consequences

So instead of using punishments and rewards, Healing Through Parenting relies on natural consequences to teach children how the world works.  Every action that we do has consequences, these could be favorable or unfavorable

Favorable consequences could be something like feeling good about doing something or accomplishing something.  Unfavorable consequences could be losing items, feeling disappointment, or losing out on opportunities.

Natural Consequences help children learn cause and effect, which helps teach them intrinsic motivation.  They'll be more likely to choose pro-social behaviors knowing that when they choose misbehavior they're more likely to be faced with unfavorable consequences.