Pencil Thin

A friend of mine is trying to implement the use of natural consequences with her children. She is really struggling with understanding what this means. For example she asked me what a natural consequence for not putting a coat away when asked would be?

The natural consequence is that people trip over the coat and the coat gets destroyed or damaged from being walked on.

In truth, “natural consequence” has become a really popular catch phrase in parenting, but actual natural consequence parenting wouldn’t be either safe or effective. Most of us don’t–and shouldn’t– allow our children to experience many natural consequences in real life because they’re too dangerous (touching a hot stove), they’re too distant and/or irreversible for the child to be able to understand them in time to learn (refusing to brush their teeth until they realize that cavities and social rejection due to bad breath really hurt), or the natural consequences actually punish or damage other people or property, not the child themselves (running around Mom’s living room until something gets knocked over. That’s the natural consequence, but does the child really care?). In other words, I think that what “natural consequences” actually means would not be safe or very effective parenting.

I think what people usually mean when they use the term natural consequences is “reasonable rule-based consequences for our micro-society,” which makes sense. After all, those are the rules under which we all function far more frequently than under natural consequences. The example Bluebooks gave is a reasonable social consequence, rather than a natural consequence, and it sounds like good parenting to me, too.