But- What about a Consequence?!?! {EP 56}

Don't let the name of the podcast confuse you if you're way back at episode 56 This question, but what about a consequence, is very possibly one of the most common kind of word for word questions, I get. I mean, I get a lot of questions around very common topics, you know. A lot of folks ask me about lying, a lot of folks ask me about stealing, right? Like, there's some kind of hot topics that are asked most frequently, but this one is asked in these specific words, but but what about a consequence? And then sometimes folks will go on to clarify what they mean by that, like this feels like it's just really permissive parenting, you know. We're not holding any boundaries, kids are just getting away with really bad behavior, and those are really valid, really valid concerns that I think really highlight the overall way we often approach parenting, or just kind of navigating other people's behaviors, that it can feel kind of like there's this one or the other option, one, either we control someone else's behavior or two, it's just a free for all, and people are getting away with bad behavior and doing whatever they want. 

So I always think approaching this conversation with the awareness that, yeah, we often seem to feel like it's one way or the other, that actually tells us a lot culturally about what we believe about people and their behaviors, and how much control we should have over other people's behaviors, especially children. So we're just going to kind of hold that awareness in mind as we walk through this question, but what about a consequence? Most of us were raised through a very behavioral lens, and many of us began our parenting journey with a very behavioral lens, and if you're listening as a professional, or you work in a field where you're caring for kids in some way, or just humans in some way, like you're a boss or a manager, things like that. I think it's very typical for us to have this implicitly held belief that sometimes we're not even aware of that. When people behave well, whatever that means, when people behave well, it's because they've been rewarded or positively reinforced for that, and when people behave bad, it's because they weren't punished hard enough, like there wasn't enough of a painful reason for that person to avoid or not behave bad, and that's why you know they're behaving that way, which, if we're, if we get real quiet and we listen kind of underneath those thoughts, there's this belief that humans only act good if they're rewarded for it or if they're punished to not act bad, and I do think that's a very fascinating belief to ponder. 

Do we really believe that about humans? I don't. I don't believe that about humans, which is probably pretty clear if you've listened to other episodes. There's also a belief that underlies a more behavioral lens that sounds kind of like humans only be. Behave well when they're controlled by other people, so I do think as we move forward and think about possibly shifting away from a strictly behavioral lens, just getting curious with ourselves of do we believe those things, do we believe that people act bad unless they're punished to not act bad or rewarded for acting good, and do we believe that humans only behave well if they're well controlled by other people, and just sort of hold those thoughts in mind as we kind of not just move through this episode but move through this whole paradigm or this whole approach to parenting relational neuroscience and the science that's underneath how I have built my beliefs around the science of human behavior suggests that those are pretty incomplete ideas about human behavior and that behavior is not simply about rewarding good behavior, or rewarding behavior we want more of, or punishing behavior we want less of. That is just more complex than that. So, let's explore that today. 

The question, but what about a consequence, which I often get when I'm speaking, or when I'm teaching, or when I'm training. I get it from parents, I get it from educators, I get it, from professionals, and often sounds like this. Oh, I love the, I love all these ideas that you have. I'm totally on board with your approach, but what about a consequence? Like, sometimes there just has to be a consequence. It usually sounds like that. And what I have found over a decade of getting that question is it usually comes from one of two places. One, it comes from an adult who is just really fully not on board or in agreement with this relational neuroscience premise, or the way that relational neurosciences is viewing what behavior really is. And to be clear, that's fine. I totally support everybody's own autonomous right to have their own thoughts and ideas about what behavior is and where it comes from, but generally speaking, though, but what about a consequence question comes from an adult who's not fully on board with the theory yet, or it comes from an adult who's gotten dysregulated, because dysregulation shifts our brains to kind of old default neural pathways, and we shift back into beliefs that we've held for decades, right, these really well-worn neural pathways become more the defaults as we undergo more and more stress. So, when we get stressed, when we get dysregulated, we fall into our own past behaviors, our old beliefs. That's perfectly normal. That's exactly how the brain works, so as we get overwhelmed by our kids' behaviors, or as we approach to kind of that that line of where we just don't know what to do, these old beliefs will come online, and we'll then have that question. Okay, okay, but what about a consequence, there has to be a consequence to change this behavior. That's perfectly normal. This is perfectly normal. I'm not judging or criticizing. I do this. 

I mean, I regularly can still fall down the pathway of, oh my gosh, we're just letting this person get away with terrible behavior, and if we don't do something to punish them, it's never going to get better, so I, I am on the lookout myself for when I kind of fall down that pathway. Now, you may have noticed I just very intentionally use the word punishment, so I do think in this discussion about, but what about a consequence? 

We actually have to get clear about the difference between a consequence and a punishment. We're regularly using this language when we talk with one another, and we're not all agreeing on what those words mean. So, let's get some clarity around consequence and punishment. A consequence is just the thing that happens next, so I push the gas pedal on my car, and it goes faster. I oversleep in the morning, and I have a rushed morning, or I miss an appointment. I drink one too many cups of coffee, and my heart is racing. Right, so a consequence, just a thing that happens next, some consequences are positive, they feel good, and that will increase the likelihood that that thing's going to happen again in the future. So, for example, if I get up early, I have a calm morning where I can ease my way into the day, and I like that, so that reinforces my behavior of setting my alarm, and then actually getting up when the alarm goes off. Right, there was something positive that happened that increases the likelihood that I do that behavior again in the future, set my alarm and actually get up when the alarm goes off. Some consequences are negative, they feel bad, they're going to decrease the likelihood that I do that thing again in the future. 

For example, I really should not be drinking coffee after about 1pm these days. It actually impacts how I sleep, you know, 10 hours later, and if I want to avoid anything, it's having my sleep interrupted, and so that negative consequence decreases the likelihood that I'm going to choose to have a cup of coffee after dinner, or even in the afternoon, right? I don't like what happens when I do that. That's a negative consequence. It decreases the chance I'm going to do that again in the future. 

Now, in the examples that I've given you, the truth is, is that in order for me to learn from those consequences, positive or negative, and have them make a meaningful impact in the future. I have to be regulated enough in the moment for there to be a pause where I can one kind of notice the impulse that, for example, I'm about to reach for a cup of coffee, or order a cup of coffee, or get a cup of coffee with dessert, like I have to notice the impulse of, oh, I want to have some coffee. I have to be mindful enough for that to happen, and then I have to be mindful enough to choose something different, so I have to override my desire in the moment, and prioritize something that isn't even going to happen for a couple hours, still, that requires a lot of regulation, that requires a lot of owl brain. 

So, generally speaking, having, you know, a consequence be effective, yeah. Then I have to have enough regulation, enough mindful awareness to pause, notice, make a different choice, or the consequence has to be powerful enough, intense enough, negative enough, painful enough that it gets connected to the experience so intensely that not doing that behavior again in the future isn't like a thoughtful or a mindful choice, it's just this implicit automatic choice that means those two things have been tied together really, really, really intensely, right. For it to be an automatic choice that doesn't require any thought, and also, y'all, the reality is, is that you might decide that not getting a behavior to change in your child is actually far more dangerous or more risky than using a punishment, like you might very intentionally choose to use a punishment, so that this intensity of that negative experience gets very tightly tied to that experience, so that the autonomic nervous system does something different in the future without a lot of conscious awareness. Okay, you might make that choice, and I get that. What I really want to emphasize right now is that when we think about generally speaking, when we think about a consequence being effective, or we think about a child who did something even though they knew the consequence of it would be like they stole that candy, even though they knew they were going to get in trouble for it. We're really saying something like that child needed to have used their owl brain to override their desire, make a different choice to avoid something negative happening in the future. That is a lot of owl brain skill. That's a lot of regulation. There we tend to, as humans really overestimate how much conscious control we have over behaviors, we tend to believe that we can make behaviors change by making different choices, and that we can help kids learn to make behavioral changes, and we can, in a way, do that, but those of you listening to the podcast, you've tried that, you've tried it really, really, really hard, and it's not working, and it's not working, not because your kids are bad, but it's because their autonomic nervous system is just working so quickly. It's going so quickly that there's no pause, there's no owl brain, there's no mindful attention to, oh, I want that candy. Oh, I should pause for a second and think about what will happen if I steal that candy. Oh, even though eating that candy now will feel great, it will feel bad in the future when I get in trouble, or when I realize I really crossed somebody else's boundary, and I really care about that person, you know, and I don't want to hurt people by taking things that don't belong to me, right? 

That's a lot, a lot, a lot of our brain skill, especially if those are behaviors that are newly being practiced. I mean, eventually, if we do a behavior repeatedly enough, a lot, it, yeah, it can become implicit, but it takes a lot of conscious choice and a lot of thoughtful, mindful attention to pause, make a new choice enough times, right, that the behavior could one day become more implicit. I know plenty of adults who know the right thing to do and still don't do it, and it's not because they're bad people. 

Here's an example, a very minor, mild example in my own life, I have sensitivities to some fruits, especially apples. I know that if I eat an apple, I'm going to pay for that later. It's not gonna be great. And so I've gotten pretty good now about, because I really love fruit, but I've gotten pretty good now about remembering, like, oh wait, don't eat this apple, it's gonna make you feel bad later. But I also have this memory of being at, like, a fall fest with a friend, and she was like, hey, you want to get apples, right? Because there's apple orchards here where we live, and that's a big part of fall fists like picking apples, eating apples, and so you know one of the options was like let's eat apples, and I said, oh no, apples make my stomach hurt, and then later in that afternoon I was offered apple cider, but y'all know what apple cider is made out of apples, but I didn't even put the two and two together, I just chugged the apple cider, and then later I'm like, oh my gosh, why is my stomach hurt so bad? Right, it's not because I don't know that apples make me feel bad. It was about really lacking one, a lot of mindfulness, a lot of attention, and having my implicit habits take over, especially in that context, right? Like, if it was spring, I maybe would have had a pause before just chugging a big glass of apple cider, because being offered one would be kind of weird. But at a fall festival, you know, big glass of apple cider, and it's just like part of the experience, and I just downed that glass of apple cider. 

It wasn't because I didn't care about the consequence, or I decided feeling bad in the future was worth it, right? It was just my implicit was had taken over, and what I knew just kind of became irrelevant. It just wasn't even a part of the equation that happens with regards to the behavior with any behavior more often than we care to acknowledge, and it's true about our own behavior, and it's definitely true about kids' behaviors, that sure a part of their brain knows don't do this, but that's not the part that's being activated when they want to do it, and it's not because they're bad kids or they don't even care about the consequence, it's because of what's happening in their brain. 

Okay, let's go back to talking about consequences versus punishments. Now, the reality is, y'all, is that a lot of grown-ups I know use the word consequence just as a code word for punishment. It's like we all learned a while ago that, quote unquote, punishments weren't something we should be doing, and so we just kind of swapped the word out for consequence, and we still kept using punishments. Now, I say that with no judgment, I do this too, but I do think part of, you know, really shifting our approach, and we're shifting our approach, not just for the heck of it, but we're shifting our approach because we need to shift our approach in order for our kids, right, nervous system to be more regulated. 

One of the things I find really helpful is just to use the words that I really mean, and so I try to use the word punishment when what I mean is punishment, and I try to remove all judgment from it, right? I try to remove any self-judgment, social judgment, and just be honest with myself, like if I want to use a. Punishment, or if I am using a punishment, I just be honest and call it a punishment, as opposed to calling it a consequence. What I've also found is that that helps me even take a little mindful pause. If I use the word punishment, it really forces me to stop for a second and go, well, do I really want to do that, because generally speaking, punishments are conflict with my values, right? Like, they conflict with my integrity, and so if I'm going to use a punishment, I want to be really intentional about that, and make sure that that really is what I want to do. It sort of focus forces me to bring back into focus the question of regulation, connection, and felt safety. Right when I, when I use the word punishment, there's this way that my mind is is forced to say, hey, but wait a second, you believe in regulation, connection, and felt safety, so what's different in this situation. Why doesn't that apply? And, like I said, y'all, I'm open to it not applying. I'm open to the answer being because if this behavior doesn't change right away, what will happen instead will be significantly worse. 

Therefore, I really got to up the ante and use a punishment to get this behavior to stop, like I'm open to that being true, and I want to make that decision thoughtfully and deliberately, and the reality is, is that I have a lot of privileges in my life, and I almost never really need to resort to a punishment, but again, I have a lot of privileges in my life that grant me the opportunity to kind of be flexible with how long co-regulation connection and felt safety, how long they take to shift the nervous system. I know a lot of families that just simply don't have that luxury, so I just think we should make that choice from our owl brain. Then, with our owl brain on board, we can shift the question to not what punishment do I need, but what does my child need, how do I help my kid get more regulated now, as well as kind of like overall, how do I offer more co-regulation, so that my child can have more impulse control? How do I increase connection to how do I support my child's increased connection to themselves or to me? How do I really support and nurture their sense of connection to me? How can I support their sense of felt safety? Right, so I can shift my focus to from what punishment do I need to what does my child need, and if you've read Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors, you know I'm often asking the question, what would my child need for their success to be inevitable, and it's not because I think I can make their success be inevitable, or even that I think that it's my job to do that, but I have found that it's a really useful thought experiment, and if I can answer that question, it helps me make more sense out of what does my child need. Do they need more regulation? Do they need more connection? Do they need more safety? If we're responding with more regulation, more connection, more safety, we aren't being permissive. If we're responding from our owl brain, if we're responding from connection mode, we are not being permissive. 

Okay, let me give you some concrete examples. Let's imagine we've got two little kids, they're five and seven, and if they can't seem to play together unsupervised without eventually hurting each other, what they don't need is a punishment, right? They don't need to hurt in order to play together without hurting each other. Almost certainly, what they need is more adult co-regulation, right? So they might need to play in the main room that's near or closer to the adults, or right with the adults, they might need more supervision, they might need more scaffolding with shared play skills, especially if these are kids with vulnerable nervous systems, because they might be a little kind of developmentally delayed in all of the very complex skills that are needed in order to play together, right, to navigate their own frustration, to turn, take, to have impulse control. These are pretty complex skills for a five and seven year old, and they might need more scaffolding, right? They need to have their owl brain skills. Strengthened, they need to be able to share, right, have frustration tolerance, use their words to communicate their feelings, negotiate, ask for help. These are all owl brain skills. So, a five and a seven year old who can't play together without hurting each other don't need more punishments, they need more skills, they need more co-regulation. Maybe you have a preteen or a teenager who is accessing inappropriate material on the internet, and it can feel like we need to punish that. What they probably need more than a punishment is again more supervision. They need a regulated adult who is using their skills to manage access to material or access to content? Right, it's pretty hard for kids to really fully think about bigger abstract risks, you know, like what inappropriate content is doing to their brains. I mean, also the reasons not to access inappropriate content on the internet are almost always bigger picture reasons, right? Like, how they're impacting that child's developing brain. The reality is, is people are accessing inappropriate content on the internet because it feels good, they're getting like a dopamine hit from that, and delaying that dopamine hit because of the longer term negative impacts. That's a very advanced owl brain skill that a lot of our preteens just don't have yet, especially if they have a vulnerable nervous system. So that child needs more structure, more supervision, they need more environmental co-regulation, right? Where they don't have access to certain things, or you know, they don't have access to the internet, or you're tracking their logins, or those kinds of things, right. Essentially, we're talking about structure and co-regulation. 

Maybe you have an eight year old who can't play at recess with their peers without ending up in a fist fight. Right, what we might want to do initially is like remove recess, except when we take away social experiences or gross motor activity or fresh air, outdoors, sunlight behavior tends to get worse, not better, so an eight year old that's struggling at recess might need more co-regulation. They might need more adult interaction, be closer to an adult during recess time. Sometimes I find that kids who are struggling with social interactions with same age peers, they benefit from being paired up with younger or older peers, right. With the younger peers, it's there's a lot less social pressure, and there's a lot - the social play is much simpler, and so it's kind of easier to figure out or navigate. And with with older peers, there's less pressure to kind of figure it out, because the expectation is less, so that can take some of the stressor off, and then increase or improve regulation, which could decrease some of the physical aggression. 

We also might want to look at, you know, what else could be happening at recess. Is there other sensory things that we need to support this child with, is it too noisy, is it too hot, or too cold? Is recess at a time where this child is really hungry? Are they very overwhelmed? Is it super chaotic? Like, what other things could we adjust that would help this child be more successful? So, you can see here that this isn't about just ignoring quote unquote bad behavior, it's about looking at it through a different lens and believing that this child doesn't just need a punishment in order to behave differently, they need their success scaffolded better, they need more regulation, more connection, and more felt safety, and again, I'll remind you, this isn't a free for all, no boundaries. We want to keep our kids from feeling unhappy or uncomfortable kind of parenting. Kids are going to be unhappy, kids are going to feel frustrated. We're not trying to prevent that. We're trying to cultivate their nervous system in a way that they're capable of tolerating frustration, impulse control problems, and throwing a fit when you don't get your way, and not understanding that if you do x, y will happen in the future, or understanding it, but not caring about it either. I mean, these are often regulation challenges. We've really got to strengthen the foundation of the brain and strengthen the stress response system, oppositional and defiant behavior, verbal aggression. These are examples of being in protection. Mode of the owl brain flying away, and the watchdog taking over. Now, it doesn't mean we go, 'Oh, this kid's just mouthing off, and I guess they're in protection mode, and that just is what it is. That's not it at all. But when we look at a behavior and see it through the lens of regulation, connection, and felt safety, and this child needs support. It shifts our own nervous system, and it shifts how we respond.

 Now, I might respond to a child who is being verbally aggressive with something that sounds like, whoa, hey, listen, I want to hear all of your feelings, they're super important to me. I want us to work together, I want us to figure this out. We've got to find a way to talk to each other with more respectful words. Can we do that? Okay, now let's go back and talk about what the problem is. You know, it can sound like that. Our kids definitely need to learn and practice skills, but there is just no way around the basic physiological fact that you have to be somewhat regulated and somewhat close to connection mode in order to be able to practice skills in a way that could make them be accessible in the future, which is of course the whole reason for practicing skills. I've also noticed that sometimes we as grown-ups need to do just a quick check-in on whether our expectations are reasonable or appropriate, and I think that this can start to get really blurry the longer we've parented a child with so much vulnerability, because we're all living in pretty chronic protection mode, and so there's this tendency to one, either ignore, you know, quote unquote bad behavior, or come down really hard on it all the time, and always see behavior through this lens of it's always bad. So, for example, it's pretty common for kids to not want to do their chores. This is a typical human behavior, frankly. Now, of course, that doesn't mean that it's typical, common, or something we want to just deal with when kids become violent, when it's time to do a chore or collapse into a total dissociated response. We want to strengthen their stress response system, so that they can tolerate the stress of doing something that they don't want to do, but strengthening the stress response system doesn't mean we don't have a stress response, it means that the stress response is a little bit more congruent with the stressor, so when we ask our kids to do a chore or homework or get ready to go somewhere they don't want to go, it makes perfect sense to have a stress response that sounds like grumbling, unhappiness. I don't want to. This is crummy. You always make me right, like grumbling and complaining. That's a normal stress response. We don't want to accidentally kind of shift our expectation to believing our kids should respond to requests like, hey, time to do your chores with, like, a well, yes, I love to do chores, I'll be right on my way, right, like that's not reasonable, and adults don't do that either. I mean, I grumble about doing chores sometimes, and sometimes I don't, like, sometimes I just do them, I have enough resilience in my stress response system in that moment to just sort of like move through my expectations, but some days I don't have that, and I'm like, gosh, I really hate doing the laundry, the laundry is never ending.

There is a big difference between having a typical stress response, this stress response of grumbling, complaining. I don't want to do it slowly, negotiating. These are expected stress responses, and we're not going to get rid of them, nor should we be trying. What we want to do, strengthen the stress response system, so that we have grumbling and complaining, and then eventually movement towards completing the thing that's expected, as opposed to violence, right?

So, if you're thinking about trying to make some of these shifts, it is good to pause a moment and just ask yourself, does my child know how to express frustration? Do they know what words express frustration? Do they know what those feelings feel like in their body? Do they know that they can express those feelings of frustration, and I won't shut them down, that they can say, I don't want you, I'm so.. I hate emptying the dishwasher, I have to do this every day, and when we respond back with something like, yeah, I get it, I hate doing the dishes every day too. It's like these never-ending chores are so frustrating, right? Like, are we starting, are we responding back with something like that, or are we like really shutting down their feelings, because the more we shut down their feelings, and again. This is not criticism. This is just normal parenting. The more we shut down their feelings, the less we're going to strengthen their stress response system. 

Now, as we get towards the end of this episode, you may be feeling tired. I'm describing pretty active, pretty intense level parenting, and there's an expectation that we have as parents that as our kids get older parenting gets a little, I'm going to use the word easier, I mean, I have a 20 year old, so I know it just changes, but it's certainly less intense, he needs less consistent co-regulation, he needs less scaffolding, he needs me to have not as much brain power about thinking about all the things that he needs in order to be okay, like over the years parenting has gotten less intense, and there's this expectation, a reasonable expectation we have of that, and when we have kids with so much vulnerability, when we have kids who need so much support, so much scaffolding, so much co-regulation, which requires presence, right? That brings up a lot of feelings of grief and sadness, and sometimes resentment. There is a sense of it wasn't supposed to be this way, and that's a fair feeling to explore. There's other resources here on the podcast you can explore related to grief. It wasn't supposed to be this way, and it is, and it is, and this is the pathway forward, strengthening that stress response system, so that they have more capacity to tolerate stress will decrease the challenging behaviors in the future, and that is ultimately the goal when we use words like punishment and consequences, right. 

So we want to shift our thoughts from what punishment or consequence does my child need to what does my child need for their success to be inevitable, and I also want you to remember you're not responsible for creating inevitable success in your child. This is largely a thought experiment, because as we go down that path, and we're real curious about it, we start to get clarity around what our child is missing regulation, connection, felt safety, or skills. Then we can look at the situation and go, okay, can I offer those things? And if I can't offer those things, fair enough, but I can't not offer what my child needs for them to be successful and continue to expect them to be successful, right? Those two things just don't go together. 

So, we might have to shift our expectations. Regulation connection felt safety strengthens that stress response system, and as we strengthen the stress response system, we are going to find more opportunities to be able to support our kids through stress, as opposed to reducing the stress for them, and that is ultimately the goal. There's no question about the reality that life is stressful, and we want to get to the point where we're helping our children navigate the regular everyday stressors of life, while also using their voice and their power to set a boundary around stressors or expectations that frankly are unreasonable, and probably a lot of us grew up or got through our working adult life sort of just tolerating, and we can teach our kids that they can be powerful advocates for themselves about how much stress they really should be tolerating, right, but before we can get to helping our kids really regulate through stress, the regular, reasonable, everyday stress of life, we have to strengthen that stress response system, so as we can shift our lens from that question of but what about a consequence to what does my child need for their success to be inevitable. How do we go about strengthening, strengthening that stress response system, and I have so many episodes on the Baffling Behavior Show that address all of these questions. Head to RobynGgobbel.com/podcast And even though this is only episode 56 I'm actually re-recording it around the time I'm about to release episode 255 so by the time this re-record airs, I have an enormous bank of resources for you. Just go to RobynGobbel.com/podcast and search for what you're looking for, search for strengthening the stress response system, search for co-regulation, search for felt safety, search. 

For some of the curiosities that have been put in your mind as you've been listening to this episode, and remember that the transcripts are available for my episodes, so you can also look through those transcripts, look for keywords, look for things you want to search for and learn about more, of course, if you're over in the club, you can use our search bar inside the club to find things related to that. You'll get forum posts, you'll get videos, you'll get master classes, you'll get recordings from Ask Anythings, you'll get things from the resource library. Right, so you can use the search bar in there as well, or you can just ask, you can ask in the forum, and we'll guide you to where you need to go, or you can, of course, DM the team, and they'll serve as your personal concierge and help you find what you're looking for, so there's a lot of ways to get to what you need in your unique family without having to add to your own stress. Y'all, I love podcasting. I love prepping for the podcasting. I love writing my outline. I love recording. I love airing it, and I love hearing from y'all about how the podcast is helpful. So, thank you for continuing to press play on the podcast, and also for sharing it with other folks who could use some support, some new tools, some new strategies, some more co-regulation, and navigating how they are supporting or caring for kids with really big baffling behaviors in these vulnerable nervous systems. All right, y'all. I will be back with you again next week. Bye bye.