Consequences

Teenagers are tough.  I mean, they’re also amazing and funny and FUN to be around… until they’re not.  

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that they’re still kids.  They might be HUGE kids.  They might even LOOK like adults.  But they most definitely are not adults.  They are literally unequipped to make smart choices because they don’t have fully functional frontal lobes.  

We try to teach them.  We try to model for them and train them and talk to them but ultimately, they are going to be out in the world without us and they will be faced with thousands of choices.  Sometimes they’re going to make the wrong one.  

Maybe you’ve got one of those teenagers that just always makes good choices.  Bless your heart.  You can probably stop reading now. 

Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to find out about them later, when your kids are ‘safely’ in their 20s and 30s.  Hearing stories from our older boys, we cringe… and we’re grateful that we missed out on all the worrying that would have accompanied awareness. 

Or maybe you’re IN IT right now.  Like we are.  And being IN IT means that we have to make choices about how to handle it.  I’m lucky to have a husband who is right there with me, because he makes it easier to stick to it when we’ve decided on a consequence.  But deciding on a consequence is so freaking hard. 

Sometimes I wonder if being a teacher makes me overthink these things. When I was in undergrad, aspiring teachers learned about positive punishment, negative punishment, positive reward, and negative reward.  In this case the positive and negative aren’t emotional states.  They simply refer to giving and taking away. Positive punishment adds something.  Putting your kid on dish duty for a week is positive punishment. Negative punishment takes something away.  

When my kids do something wrong, the easiest and most immediate punishment is to take away their phones.  It’s a thing I can control, and it’s REALLY upsetting to them when I take it away.  For a while, it was my go-to.  

Taking the phone is definitely a punishment. A punishment is designed to make them miserable.  It makes an impact because it makes them feel bad.  Presumably, that bad feeling will make them avoid bad decisions in the future.  Sometimes it works.  

It took me a long time to figure out what wasn’t working about punishment in our house.  I struggled with it as much as the kids did. If I took away their phones because I was trying to punish them, and then they wound up painting murals or catching frogs or building shelves, I was so torn.  I loved that they were doing great, creative, fun things but weren’t they supposed to be miserable?  Was I teaching them that all of these great things are a result of being ‘punished’?  The whole thing became more about screen time, and I realized I needed to address that as a separate issue… not as a punishment, but on the regular. 

Another concern was social isolation.  I have one child who struggles with friendships and has been through periods of depression.  When that kid was grounded, without his phone, I’d cut off all of his budding friendships.  It didn’t feel responsible.  It didn’t feel healthy.  

The more I thought about it, the more I went back to those undergrad lessons.  I assume they use different language now; we talk more about consequences than punishments.  We talk a lot about natural consequences.  The result of a bad choice should be related to the bad choice.  In some cases, the natural consequences are apparent. If you threw your phone in a fit of anger, now you have a broken phone.  Sometimes we can create consequences that seem to be the obvious ‘result’ of a bad choice. If you graffiti a wall, you have to clean it or repaint it to fix the damage you caused.  In other cases, the natural consequences are so far removed that the kids don’t see them.  The natural consequence of vaping might be lung damage, but that’s not concrete enough to a 13 year old.  They don’t care about that yet.  So you have to come up with something. 

Most parents I know have two go-to options.  Ground them.  Or take their phone.  I definitely do these things.  Those are negative consequences.  Taking something away.  

But recently, I’ve had more luck with positive consequences.  GIVING them something.  A new responsibility.  A daily chore.  A way to prove themselves and earn back our trust.  

We had a recent shoplifting incident.  I was beside myself.  I honestly believed that my kids would never… but they did.  They were banned from the store and from the mall.  They were grounded.  They lost their screens.  They had extra chores.  But the most impactful consequence was that I assigned them a writing prompt each day for a month.  What is integrity?  Write about a time you felt proud of yourself.  Why do we have laws?  These writing prompts opened up a lot of important, meaningful conversations and debates.  They got our whole family thinking and talking about our values.  (Thanks to my mom for the great idea). 

What I’m learning is that positive consequences give me more opportunities to engage with my kids about their choices.  I feel like I’m teaching them instead of just punishing them.  A kid who has a stack of dirty dishes in his room might get put on dish duty for the whole week.  It teaches him something.  He’s building a skill.  Bonus that it helps me out.  Instead of giving me another job, it takes one off my plate. 

A few other things I’ve learned:  

-I don’t have to give them a time frame.  That’s freeing.  I used to think I had to give the consequence an end date.  Now I’ve found myself saying things like, “We’ll revisit in two weeks,” or, “You haven’t earned our trust yet.” 

-I can ‘tweak’ things as I go.  If something isn’t working, I explain why and make a change.  

-I can ‘do it my way.’  I always thought of grounding as social isolation.  But it doesn’t have to be.  If my kid is making bad choices when unsupervised, then they can’t be unsupervised.  But I could decide to still let them have friends over here when I’m around.  

I’m learning as I go here… and I’d love to hear from other parents about what works (or worked) for you!