There is a certain art to deciding just what will happen to your kid(s) when they get in trouble. It’s difficult to get right but if your hope is to have your kids listen to you and to respond to the imminent threat of what you have in store then it’s something to spend a little time focusing on.

First off, it’s probably a good idea to refer to it as “consequences”. A punishment implies an external locus of control. When a child is getting punished it’s because someone else is doing something to them. Misfortune is being visited upon them. But a consequence is something you bring upon yourself. You’re not being punished, you’re just reaping what you have sown. It’s a semantic difference, but might help get you in the right headspace for crafting suitable consequences.

Janelle and I used a pure carrot and stick style approach to consequences. We would just grant or withhold things that the boys liked to do. Not listening? No iPad. Hitting your brother? No TV later. Didn’t clean up your stuff? No dessert. Each of these items may work from the pure negative incentive standpoint — but if you think about it, none of them make sense. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it, which gives enforcement of house rules an arbitrary feel. These are known as illogical consequences, because, well, they aren’t logical.

Logical consequences are basically consequences that are thematically relevant to the crime in question. I’ll give an example with Joshua from a week or two ago. We’ve been trying to work on his not using his hands with his friends too much during recess at school. Historically this would be something that, if a note came home, we would just tell him he can’t play iPad. Again, illogical. Well, this time around I took a different approach.

“Joshua, which one of your school’s character pillars does using your hands on your friends deal with?”

“Respect.”

“Right, that’s a good one. And what are you trying to do by following all the pillars?”

“Be a good citizen.”

“Yeah, so, since you chose to not be a good citizen at school today, I think when we get home you should spend some time showing me how you can be a good citizen. So, what do you think you could do that would mean being a good citizen?”

“I could do the dishes!”

This was a logical consequence because it followed a clear line of reasoning. The effects were directly related to the problem. There are a couple of corollaries to mention here. First is that this was a consequence that I didn’t come up with. Ultimately what was chosen was Joshua’s choice and I just put my stamp of approval on it. Second is that he was legit excited to do the dishes, so that’s a bonus. Third, and perhaps most important to note, is that this consequence is not intended to be punitive. It is intended to prompt reformation. Too often we pick things intended to make our children pay, not to make them change. Take our usual go-to punishment: taking away the iPad. It has nothing at all to do with what he did wrong. It was essentially just a thing we did because kids aren’t supposed to be allowed to just get away with things.

The holy grail in discipline are known as natural consequences, but they’re a bit harder to pin down. They’re probably less something you’d use in a “punishment” kind of scenario and more just you not sweeping in to rescue your kid all the time. They didn’t bring a raincoat to school? They’re going to get wet. Forgot their homework? Their teacher will talk to them about it.

I find that the best way to combine a logical consequence and a natural consequence is to establish certain standards. Work with your kiddos and talk about, for example, what time everyone should be ready to go to leave the house in the morning. We have settled on 6:55. Before the boys can play on the iPad in the morning they need to have gotten dressed, had breakfast, packed their things into the car and gotten their shoes on, and then they are clear until 6:55. If they cannot turn the iPads off at 6:55, then they do not get to play them later in the day. For me, what makes this a sort of natural-consequences hybrid is that if they aren’t ready on time or don’t comply we can essentially play the “Hey kiddo, I’m sorry you’re upset. I’m sad you won’t get to play later, too. But… we all agreed awhile ago that the clock sets the rules and it’s past 6:55. Next time you can make some better decisions to get all set on time.” Basically, it’s not us, man, it’s just the way it is. (And by the way, you helped set this particular rule.)

A final note on punishment deals with duration. Length of punishment should scale with age. This probably makes sense, but still bears mentioning. Kids have memories like goldfish. If you take away TV from a 5-year-old for a week, by day 3 they have no idea why they are still in trouble because that action is ancient history for them. For littles, you’re looking at 24-hours. When you start getting into the pre-teen realm then you can start talking in the week range. And it’s basically open-season on teenagers. Though, I’m not even going to attempt to start spouting off on how I would discipline a teenager. Check back in 7 more years for more posts about how I still don’t know what I’m doing.

It’s been a long time. There are reasons. I am busy with the boys. I am also lazy with some things and easily distracted always. I also was not inspired. I don’t mean that I was waiting to be struck by the Muse. This is, after all, just a blog. I just never felt like I had much to share.

When the boys were small, I was making discoveries all the time. Practical aspects of caring for them at their most helpless and hapless. Emotional realizations about how things affected me and might be affecting other parents out there. These were thoughts that felt worth sharing because they might spur some good ideas in someone else or at least be something to commiserate with for someone down in the trenches.

That feeling tapered off and it has felt for a long time like we have been treading water. The boys are growing and are wonderful boys, but they each have their quirks (one perhaps too aggressive at times, the other perhaps too sensitive at times) that seemed to be aspects that our parenting was only exacerbating.

Recently Janelle and I took a parenting class offered at Joshua’s school. 2 hours a week for 4 weeks. It sounds silly, taking a class on something you have been doing full-time for nearly six years. It sounds like a doctor treating patients for half a decade and then deciding, “You know, maybe I should actually find out if I’ve just been slowly killing people all this time…”

The class I think will be transformative for us as parents. We learned a great deal from it and I’ve absorbed a wide variety of the items taught into my daily routine. I’ll write a few of those things up later. One of the things that I felt made the lessons taught in the class so effective is that it was clearly produced in the 80s. There were a lot of bad decisions made in the 80s. My kid-mullet, for example. What the 80s didn’t have, though, is the strange media culture that we have today around parenting. There is a constant barrage of sort of fad-parenting, just as there are now infinite variants on dieting that you can take on. The message imparted from the class felt clear of that noise. The entire point is learning to treat your children like actual other human people with lives and dreams of their own. It sounds totally dumb to say it like that, but I have always considered myself a good parent and I was fairly shocked to realize the various ways I was selling the boys short.

But the indirect lesson I want to cover this week (because it wasn’t specifically something talked about in the course) is a favorite saying of mine: Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

I suffer from this in nearly all aspects of my life. I don’t write scripts because I can’t just throw things at the wall to see what sticks and revise until I’m happy. If it doesn’t hit the page as a filmable script, why am I even writing it? It occurred to me that’s why, really, I stopped writing these blog posts. I wasn’t being the perfect parent. I wasn’t solving all of the problems, so what’s the use of my even talking about it? I’d just be telling everyone else how to not be the best at something.

And it was affecting how I treated the boys.

I never did anything so obvious or dramatic as yell at them about how they weren’t good enough, or make Joshua practice letters until they looked perfect and his fingers hurt. Nothing so nefarious, but certainly more insidious — I didn’t let them do things for themselves.

Take something simple like prepping the table for dinner. If Joshua asked to help set the table, I’d tell him no because I didn’t want him to make a mess. Or I’d tell him the plate was too heavy. Or too hot. Or I’d tell him that the milk was too full and he’d spill so I would do it myself. I’d serve them the food they asked for so they wouldn’t take too much or drop some all over the table.

Every single one of those things come off totally harmless. You’d likely never bat an eyelid at a parent saying that to their kid. Dishes can be super hot. Milk is very easily spill from a full container. Salad can totally get all over the table if you aren’t careful. But the underlying message is “You can’t do this thing.” You teach them to need the support of authority. You teach them that not being perfect at something means you might as well not even start trying.

If you want to get all fancy about it, self-respect and self-esteem are pretty chief on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. After having things like food and shelter and love, humans need to feel like they are capable and that they matter. They need to understand that their actions have value and worth and an effect on those around them. It might sound overly dramatic to apply this to a 5-year-old and 3-year-old setting the table at dinner, but there are lots of very formative things going on in a kid’s brain. They are training themselves in how to see the world for the rest of their life.

So now, when Matthew wants to put the hummus away and his method involves grabbing the hummus from the table, walking to the kitchen, trying to grab a stool, not being able to, putting the hummus container down in the middle of the carpet in the dining room, dragging the stool over to the fridge, grabbing the hummus, putting the hummus down again so he can open the fridge, picking up the hummus and tip-toeing up super high so he can get it back to where he saw it before instead of just putting it right on the easy-to-reach spot right in front of his face, I don’t do anything other than not have to put the hummus away myself. A part of my brain calls out that you shouldn’t put hummus on the carpet — but that’s just perfect rearing its head. The hummus is sealed. It’s not getting anything dirty at all. Who cares if that’s not how I would do it. I don’t tell him not to use the high shelf because if he can reach it, great. It’ll be back where it should be, and he’ll feel good he was able to reach something so tall by himself.

Just by allowing them to do little things like this, in their own way, I am telling them that it is okay to try. It is okay to find your own way. It is okay to ask for help when you decide need it. It is okay to want to help. They are important enough to be in charge of something. They are trusted enough to not be micro-managed. On the selfish side of things, they will start to have helping with little household tasks just be a part of their life.

I’m going to try and take another tack for this post about tantrums. The others all lost steam for me, perhaps because I wrote them in too close a proximity to an actual tantrum. They ended up feeling like a play-by-play breakdown of a tantrum and how it starts. And they read like I was trying to justify my own inability to solve them as a problem. It was very “See what I put up with?” Those details are a bit beside the point. It’s just me wallowing.

There’s still something to be said about tantrums, and I’m going to have Kyle Reese help me with this one. During a tantrum your kiddo “can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop.” Your only real option is pretty similar to Sarah Connor’s in this situation: evade until you get to a more advantageous situation.

You don’t want to give in to your child and, in our experience, giving them the benefit of trying to reason with them just feeds the fire. The only tactic we have found with Joshua that “works” is that we tell him that we’re done trying to convince him to calm down and when he’s ready to come and find us and get hugs, he can do so. Then we go about our business as best we can. He’ll come around eventually, be it 2 or 20 minutes later and we’ll do hugs and try to make everything okay. Sometimes he thinks that just deciding he’s done panicking is enough to get his way, and when he learns it’s not going to work, we often end up starting the cycle anew… but we don’t really have another choice. Until he’s decided he’s done, it’s just how it’s going to happen.

We have tried to be very focused on communication and honesty. Leaving a tantrumming kid alone while we went about our routine felt like giving up on all that. It had the feel of emotionally distant parenting. And so Janelle and I fought against that while we fought against little out-of-control Joshua. Early on, we learned that you cannot hold on physically to a child lost in the throes of a tantrum. They are angry and confused and sad and now also trapped and they react like a caged animal. It has taken us much, much longer to realize that the same applies for trying to hold onto that child emotionally.

Whispering, yelling, bargaining, distracting. None of these tricks work, not consistently. I’ve found that if they do, you’re not dealing with a tantrum. You’ve out-maneuvered a child trying to work themselves into a tantrum. A critical distinction. But we fought for so long to be able to talk Joshua through tantrums that he grew accustomed to our sitting by him and trying to reason with his insane little demands (“I want you to give me a hug!” “No, I want Mommy!” “No, I want Daddy!” “I don’t want you to sit there! I want you to sit here!” “I don’t want you to say that to me! I already know that!”). He never would hear us, because he never could hear us. He was stuck in a spiral of what started as sadness and anger and then got all wrapped up with embarrassment and shame. We set a precedent though that there was some manner of response that Joshua was able to get from us, rather than his learning that tantrums just lead to nothing at all.

That was the trap that we fell into. We always assumed that by not giving in to whatever caused the tantrum—most typically things like wanting to watch another TV show, or play more of a certain game—we were holding strong and abiding by the rules of parenting that tell you to hold fast in the face of these outbursts so you don’t teach your child that crying and screaming is an effective tool to get what they want. But Joshua was changing the rules on us and we didn’t realize it. Tantrums became less about getting what he wanted than about holding us captive. He had lost control of the situation before him… but he could still gain control of us.

The hope is that now that we don’t entertain him for as long that this will fade. He gets a couple minutes of “Do you really want to do this?” or “Is this really how we’re going to end a super great day?” before hearing “If you can’t calm down, we’re just going to leave you over here to cry it out and you can come find us when you’re ready.” Then we have to hear him cry like his world is ending for sometimes as long as 20-30 minutes. The best is when he plays the “I don’t want to be alone!” card and wails that over and over and over without stopping (Protip: This is also a tactic. If you go in the room and ask if he wants a hug, he’ll yell at you and demand you get the other parent, too, or something else tyrant-ish.). That makes you feel like a great human being, trust me.

I feel like in general we get fewer tantrums these days, and fewer of any great length. But who knows if that’s really true. And who knows if we have had anything at all to do with their getting worse, or getting better. He’s growing up. Quickly. He may just be figuring this out all on his own.