Using Empathy and Natural Consequences to Raise Responsible Kids
The empathetic use of natural and logical consequences is the heart of Love and Logic. Literally thousands of parents have shared with us how Love and Logic parenting techniques have worked miracles for their kids and strengthened their relationships with their kids.
Our approach is built on a simple but powerful truth: parents are most effective when they allow natural consequences to do the teaching, instead of relying on lectures or punishment.
Consequences vs. Punishment in Parenting
Punishment, anger, and threats tend to travel together, and they simply are not effective for teaching our kids how the world operates. Punishment tends to create an adversarial interaction, resulting in resentment on the part of the child. The hard feelings created by punishment often linger and can drive a wedge between parents and kids.
How Consequences Teach Children Accountability and Life Skills?
Love and Logic parents hand the responsibility for a child’s behavior and decisions to the child. With the Love and Logic approach, consequences do the teaching, not the parents.
This prevents hard feelings from arising between children and adults and allows children to experience how the real world works. They learn that poor decisions lead to unpleasant consequences, and good decisions lead to desirable outcomes.
To maximize the teaching power of consequences, Love and Logic emphasizes that empathy must precede consequences. There are many reasons for expressing genuine empathy before delivering consequences. These include:
The child is not distracted by anger displayed by the adult.
The child owns the outcomes instead of blaming the adult.
The relationship between the adult and child is maintained.
The child learns through modeling to use empathy with others.
The Myth of Immediate Consequences
Many people think that if consequences are not delivered immediately after kids have an outburst or misbehave, then they won’t learn from their mistakes. This myth is based on the idea that the impact of the consequences might be lost if time passes after the incident. In contrast, Love and Logic focuses on the advantages of delaying consequences.
Delaying consequences is a powerful technique that does two important things for parents. At first, it gives the parent a chance to calm down so that they don’t respond inappropriately and allows plenty of time for thinking of appropriate consequences. Later, when consequences are delivered, the parent is prepared and can deliver the consequences effectively, with the most important element—empathy.
Whenever a kid misbehaves, and you don’t know what to do or you are too angry to think straight, delay the consequences by responding in an empathetic way with something like:
Oh no, this is sad.
I’m going to have to do something about this.
We’ll talk later.
Later, you can develop a plan that fits the misbehavior and make sure that the consequence is appropriate.
At first, it might be difficult for parents to use these techniques effectively. This is especially true when kids deliver unexpected challenges that understandably cause frustration and even anger for parents. Our audio, Oh Great! What Do I Do Now?, specifically focuses on this issue and provides tips on what to do when these situations arise.
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