Today I want to discuss child discipline, particularly the difference between consequences and child punishment.
Very briefly, punishment as we all know is retribution. You are getting a punishment for doing something wrong. This can be is a smack, slap, or something that you give to your child as negative reinforcement.
A consequence is entirely different. A consequence is the natural outcome of the incorrect behavioral choice your child made. For example, if your child is late for the school bus, the natural consequence is that he leaves for school 10 minutes early so he makes the bus.
If your child is late coming home or late for dinner, the natural consequence is he must come home a half-hour earlier than he did before. It is the natural consequence growing out of the child’s behavior. The consequence is connected to the behavior.
When you connect the consequence to the behavior, you encourage your child to make a positive behavioral change. He connects what is happening to him as the result of a mistake that he made. It makes sense in his mind and he learns to avoid the negative consequence he needs to develop a new pattern of behavior.
To accomplish this, you must deliver the consequence correctly.
For example, if your child was staying out late, it is not a natural consequence to take away video games. A better choice would be to have your child come home at an earlier time until he shows you that he is responsible enough to come home on time.
That is the basic difference between consequences, which you might want to call child discipline and child punishment. It is very important you understand the difference between consequences and punishments because punishments don’t really work. They do not change behavior. Consequences do.
Your job as a parent is to help your child to behave better and grow up to be a respectful and successful adult. You must help him to get over these behavioral hurdles and change his behavior. That means using consequences effectively as part of your child discipline strategy rather than using punishments.
I have for you a video about the #1 problem parents have when giving consequences and the mistakes they make and what you can do to correct that. It is located at http://ccparenting.com/discipline . Go there right now and you can see the video.
