Let’s imagine a toddler who tries to pull the glasses off of mom’s face.
The purpose of punishing the child (hitting or flicking them, yelling a big scary “no”, putting them in time-out isolated from others, etc) would be to make it unequivocally clear that the grownup is more powerful than the child, and can exercise that power to cause them fear and hurt. It does not matter how mild or “small” the hurt is; the point is to overcome the child’s innate drive to explore or be curious and instead replace it with a fear gate, a gate called “ask permission before you explore” or “check in with your parent visually before doing anything or else you might get hurt” or “better shut down to keep yourself safe.”
This can sometimes lead to what looks like immediate compliance (freeze or fawn, as a fear response) and can sometimes “backfire” (fight or flight, as a fear response) as the child tries to defend their core self by maintaining their autonomy rather than cowering in the face of even overwhelming power.
The purpose of limit-setting (or, what if we called it need-meeting?) with that child would be to keep the glasses from getting broken.
I feel like lots of confusion that I see in parenting and other childcare spaces comes from trying to make the first result happen from the second actions, but, like, “nicely.”
The first approach is to try to say, “you better do what I say, you better comply, you better learn a lesson,” and react accordingly.
The second approach is to try to say, “oh I better protect my glasses” (because I’m meeting a need…to protect my glasses!) and react accordingly.
If you find yourself getting caught in a spiral of, “what kind of consequences should I ‘give’ them, what would be logical consequences…” these are alternate ways of saying “how do I make them learn their lesson and never do it again?”
They are not alternate ways of saying “how do I keep my glasses unbroken?”
Everything that I talk and write about is in the “how do we keep the glasses unbroken” category. None of it is in the “how do I make them learn their lesson” category.
Because human beings are supposed to be curious. They’re supposed to be explorers. They come that way by default. (They might not be curious or explore in ways that are expected, but everybody starts off with that seed.)
It’s natural for them to regard their caregiver as, like, a cool source of potential advice to be considered alongside all the other input they also have to consider—sensory, emotional, internal developmental drives. It’s not natural for them to regard their caregiver with a fearful, shut-down nervous system override.
So, the example I gave was stopping a toddler from snatching the glasses off of your face. How do you protect glasses from a toddler without punishing them?
Well, there are a variety of ways. Some would work for some people, others would work for others. Remember, the mindset isn’t “let me teach you a lesson,” it’s simply, “how do I keep my glasses safe.”
-perhaps you could gently block their hand from grabbing your glasses
-perhaps you could stand up — most adults are taller than most toddlers and therefore their eyes are out of range of the toddler when legs are fully extended
-perhaps you wear contacts for a time because the glasses are just too tempting
-perhaps you get the toddler a set of cheap decoy glasses so they can satisfy their curiosity about what glasses are and how they work
-perhaps you take the glasses off and put them on the shelf or in your bedroom
As you can see, the solution might change depending on the person, the circumstance, the environment, etc. You may need more than one solution to account for this! Maybe “while I’m holding my toddler on the bus” needs a different solution than “when we are at home playing”, and the person who literally can’t see without glasses might need a different solution than the person who wears them occasionally for reading.
And yes, this extends beyond just toddlers and glasses.
The 3yo is sometimes hitting the new baby. The response isn’t “how do I make him regret that? How do I teach him a lesson?” but “how do I keep the baby from being hit?”
The 5yo is going through a toy-smashing phase when angry. The response isn’t “how do I make him feel sorry enough for what he’s done?” but “how can I keep the important toys/objects safe?”
The 8yo leaves food around the house and it’s attracting bugs. The response isn’t “how do I make her feel guilty about this? How do I get through to her that this is bad so she feels bad and does something different?” but “how can we keep the house hygienic?”
The 12yo is suddenly so extra sleepy in the mornings and can’t get their morning routine to happen in time. The response isn’t “how do we take things away or hurt her sufficiently that she cares about being late?” but “how do we get done what needs to get done?”
And again, each of these might have a list of 20 things that you might explore that might actually meet the need. And included in that list might be some surprising options, like “figure out what the 3yo can hit a lot of” or “designate some toys for smashing purposes” or “create new unexpected spaces to stash food/dishes that are bugless and convenient for the kid” or “drop some stuff from the morning routine” or a hundred other things. What I mean to say is that meeting the need might not look like you had pictured it if you were the only one in the whole equation.
When I first thought about this post, I thought about it in analogy form (as I often do). I’m an escape room aficionado. I love them and have done many on several continents. If you’ve never done an escape room, usually how it works is that there’s a themed setup of a place you’re in—a jail cell, a castle, a spooky attic, a mad scientist’s lab—and your job is to explore the environment, discover some puzzles and clues, solve them by trying things, and eventually (hopefully) get out.
In the process of doing that, you make some mistakes. You think something goes here and it doesn’t. You think that picture on the wall is relevant and it turns out not to be.
So let’s say you went to an escape room, and you picked up a weird looking book off the shelf and started looking through it for a clue maybe, and somebody came rushing out of a back door screaming at you, or hit you, or took you away from the rest of your party and made you sit outside.
And then you catch your breath from the terrifyingness of that encounter. Ok ok you get the point: you were not supposed to touch the book, for some reason.
You go back to your group and you much more tentatively pick up two bottles that look like they might interact. You start putting them together. Your shoulders are tensed and you’re looking uneasily at the door that the owner came running out of last time. You’re barely even thinking about solving the puzzle, or exploring, or learning, or curiosity. You’re thinking hypervigilantly about your every move and what if they’re the wrong one?
The bottles go together, they made a purple mixture. Very cool. You’re starting to feel like maybe you got the hang of this and that was a one-off. You find a blacklight. Maybe shining it at the purple bottles will make something glow? Nope, here comes the guy screaming at you and pulling you away again…
That doesn’t happen in escape rooms, because adults don’t treat other adults the way they treat children.
Children are figuring out how to approach life with a variety of resources: what they know, what they’re learning, what they’ve heard or been told, what they can see and experience in front of them. That doesn’t just apply to learning things like gravity or that red plus blue equal purple. It also applies to learning things like nuances of socializing, and what kind of a friend they want to be, and how different feelings feel, and what to do with those feelings. They’re exploring all of these things like an escape room, putting bits and pieces together, but instead of being able to see it as an unpuzzling and exploring process we often write it all off as “behavior.”
Let’s all just try to meet our needs together. There’s so many more creative ways than punishment (or “consequences”).
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Additional questions people commonly have when I talk about this:
“Does that mean you’re saying I can’t ever teach my child anything at all?”
No, I’m saying that if the vehicle you’re using to teach them is fear or pain, then that’s not the kind of learning you actually want, or is good or healthy. Of course you can teach your children, especially via modeling (what you do with your own body, emotions, reactions, etc).
“What if I do yell ‘no’ at my child because I was scared about what they were going to do?”
You’re describing your emotional reaction, not your measured, adult, logical, parenting decision. If your child reaches for your glasses and you, startled, yell “no!” and put them down, you weren’t engineering that situation in order to “teach them a lesson”. You learned something about your child’s developmental curiosity and you also learned something about your emotional reaction! That’s fine. Now you know new info for the future about how to keep your glasses safe. (And if they’re really scared you can always apologise for scaring them and explain why you yelped.)
“My child legitimately does not ever get yelled at, punished, etc yet still reacts with a fearful reaction to even super mild correction or suggestion, why do they do that?”
Nervous systems have a range of sensitivities. Some of them are really, really sensitive even without having been trained into that fear reaction. It’s okay to acknowledge that and to keep that in consideration as you interact with them, still with a limit-setting focus on “keep the thing safe” rather than “teach the kid a lesson”. In fact, it means you can authentically acknowledge, “nobody’s mad, I’m just [keeping the thing safe]!”
“What about natural consequences?”
Natural consequences = the literal result of what you did. You pour water on the floor and it’s wet. You snap the glasses and they’re broken. Natural consequences do not need parental involvement. If you’re pontificating about what consequences to “give” someone then you’re already outside the realm of natural consequences because it hasn’t just happened by itself. If you think “but wait, I don’t want them to snap the glasses and then them be broken,” then you agree with me: natural consequences here don’t make sense, focus on setting a limit, e.g., keeping the glasses unbroken.
“But aren’t they going to be punished by things in the real world? Like if they do crime then they’ll go to jail?”
Yes, we have a punitive “justice” system. I don’t want to model my household after the exploitative prison system, personally. This work is my work in trying to dismantle that concept from society from the ground up. If you want to join in that would be fantastic ☺️