Natural and Logical Consequences

Consequences are what happens after your child behaves in a certain way. Consequences can influence how your child behaves in the future. 

Some consequences can make behaviour more likely in the future. These include positive attention, praise, encouragement and rewards and other things your child likes. 

Other consequences make behaviour less likely in the future. These consequences are things your child doesn’t like. They might include the consequences you give your child for challenging behavior, like quiet time or loss of privilege. 

Plenty of positive consequences for positive behavior might mean fewer consequences for challenging behavior. 

How to use natural and logical consequences?

Follow the 3 Rs:  

1. Related to the behaviour

   Related: If your child throws a toy, you take away the toy 

   Not related: you send her to bed early 

   
   

2. Respectful towards the child and not involving shame or blame 

   Respectful: If your child spills a drink, you say, “Oops, looks like you spilled it, what should we do now?” 

   
   

3. Reasonable in both the child’s and parent’s perspective 

   Reasonable: If your child gets in trouble at school for not completing a homework assignment, you discuss it with him and agree to cut TV or play time by 30 minutes to ensure the homework is completed.

   Non-reasonable: you ground him for a month. 

   
   

Tips

• Use consequences as a response to behaviour: This means using consequences for your child’s behaviour and not using consequences as a response to your child themselves. For example, let your child know the consequence is for hitting or breaking a family rule, not for being a disobedient child. This way your child will feel loved and safe – even when you’re using consequences. 

  
  

• Explain consequences ahead of time : If your child knows what to expect and why, they’re more likely to accept consequences and less likely to feel angry about them. For example, "When you don't put on your mittens your hands will get cold."

  
  

• Use consequences fairly, according to children’s needs and abilities: You might use different consequences according to your children’s ages. But if you’ve decided to give your children consequences for challenging behaviour, it’s important to use them the same way for everyone. Even young children will be upset if they see other children being treated differently from them. 

• Keep consequences short, and consistent: Use short and clear instructions, and be consistent with them. If you provided consequences once, and did not provide it the next time, because child is doing the same thing again, just keep repeating and be consistent. It takes time for children to learn.  

  
  

Examples

Give them choices. 

If a child is not cleaning up after playing give them choices, “You can choose would you like to pick up 5 toys, or 4?", or “Would you like to pick up blocks so that I can pick up the cars?” Next time remind, before the play time, “Remember last time we cleaned up, we will clean up this time as well”. If it does not happen, then give a consequence. "I see you are not putting away your toys away like we talked about. The toys you don't put away don't get to come out next time.”  

Start with giving choices, providing solutions and then the last step is a consequence.  

A child is trying to climb up the slide when another child is sliding down, you could say “I see you are trying to walk up the slide, but there is another child trying to slide down. You can use the stairs or wait for the other child to come down.”  Here we provided an alternative/choices.

Read more about guiding positive behaviour in your children here.

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At Norwood Centre our team of qualified Early Childhood Development Subject Matter Experts work to provide tools that caregivers can use to support early childhood development. We hear you! If you have a question or concern, please ask us. We have a variety of Child Development Activities available on our website, find them at norwoodcentre.com/child-development-activities. For short-term one-on-one coaching, please call us at 780-471-3737.