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Natural consequences
Sep. 30th, 2007 09:13 pmI talked to S yesterday for a good two and a half hours. We haven't spoken since before we both moved from Kansas City to California in July. She's living a couple hours' drive away from me with her boyfriend, and she has a job caring for mentally ill people during the day, and she sounds really happy.
Something that kept coming up in the conversation was the fact that she's now responsible for herself instead of having her parents dictate her life, which is a huge change for her. She told me that it's wonderful to experience the natural consequences to her actions instead of always feeling ashamed and worrying about parental disapproval. Now she does things because it's to the benefit of herself and others to do them, not because she's worried about her privileges being taken away. She informed me enthusiastically that she has stayed up late and then been unable to perform to the best of her abilities at work the next day, and that that's teaching her not to stay up too late.
I didn't have a whole lot of context for this revelation, because natural consequences are the basis of my mom's parenting methods. She's always tried to let us learn lessons for ourselves, pointing them out if we didn't figure out the connections between our actions and the consequences, and trying to match the crime to the punishment when punishment had to be dished out. I remember my dad's punishments, way back when I was small enough not to know how to stop him bullying me, and I never learned anything from them besides to be afraid of him and to be dishonest when caught. Thankfully, he wasn't a large enough part of my life to cause much serious damage.
So thanks, Mom. You had the right idea.
Something that kept coming up in the conversation was the fact that she's now responsible for herself instead of having her parents dictate her life, which is a huge change for her. She told me that it's wonderful to experience the natural consequences to her actions instead of always feeling ashamed and worrying about parental disapproval. Now she does things because it's to the benefit of herself and others to do them, not because she's worried about her privileges being taken away. She informed me enthusiastically that she has stayed up late and then been unable to perform to the best of her abilities at work the next day, and that that's teaching her not to stay up too late.
I didn't have a whole lot of context for this revelation, because natural consequences are the basis of my mom's parenting methods. She's always tried to let us learn lessons for ourselves, pointing them out if we didn't figure out the connections between our actions and the consequences, and trying to match the crime to the punishment when punishment had to be dished out. I remember my dad's punishments, way back when I was small enough not to know how to stop him bullying me, and I never learned anything from them besides to be afraid of him and to be dishonest when caught. Thankfully, he wasn't a large enough part of my life to cause much serious damage.
So thanks, Mom. You had the right idea.
