[UncleChis]

Natural consequences: What if the child doesn't care about consequence, or what if he/she likes the consequence? In the example of being late for school, the child could consider it as a reward, that he/she doesn't have to go to school anymore.

[AlexTWithBeard]

Ugh.

The method of natural consequences looks great on paper, but its practical application is extremely limited, because:

- many consequences are prohibitively dangerous (Dear son, surely the choice is yours, but I would suggest not to play with your toys in the middle of the road)

- many times the consequences are worse for parents (No, you may not play with grandma's golden necklace. I know you'll be careful and will never lose it, but, sorry, nope)

- children have much shorter time horizon: from hours at two years old up to months for late teens. Anything more than that is "infinity" and all consequences disappear at such distance.

[pdonis]

I think the assumption was that the child would arrive late at school and would suffer some unpleasant consequence as a result, such as being marked tardy where a certain number of tardies results in losing privileges of some kind, or in some kind of punishment like having to stay after class. That was probably a reasonable assumption in 1967; I'm not sure how reasonable it is now. :-)

[sesteel]

Few parents are equipped to raise sociopaths and nearly all people respond to self-preservation. I would hope a child would be able to empathize if communicated with in way they could easily understand. 'Love and Logic' is a parenting technique where the use of natural consequences are used heavily; when kids understand you are their teacher, failure becomes an opportunity to learn. If you are simply there as an enforcer, you are viewed as a warden. They focus on not getting caught rather than gaining wisdom.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

> I would hope a child would be able to empathize if communicated with in way they could easily understand

As the parent of a four year old, I hate to break it to you, but this is not commonly true. It is not true for us, and it is not true for any of our friends who have kids this age. The child has their own order in which things are prioritized, and they do not care if that is different from your order. Unless you're willing to let your entire life be dictated by what your child wants to do from moment to moment, it's not going to work to just talk to them about why what they're doing is wrong or unacceptable.

[taneq]

All kids are sociopaths to some degree, they don't really have fully functioning empathy until 6-8 years old at the earliest.

Being "a teacher not an enforcer" sounds like one of those approaches that only works on kids who are already well behaved. Many kids won't give a crap what you're trying to teach them once they've established that there are no consequences for ignoring you.

[taneq]

Find a consequence that the kid does care about and use that instead. It doesn't have to be related, it's just neater if it is.