“But What About Consequences?”

Mara sat in her minivan at 7:42 a.m. googling “how to be consistent with consequences” while her seven-year-old screamed in the back seat that he was not getting out of the car. The school bell would ring in eight minutes. She’d already done the standard script: calm voice, firm tone, choose-one option. She’d pointed to the laminated sticker chart on the dashboard—sparkly stars for “great mornings,” a promise token for a popsicle trip on Friday. She’d started counting. One… two… two-and-a-half…

It was like pouring gasoline on a bonfire.

By 7:46, his socks and shoes had been thrown across the car, his backpack was dumped on the minivan floor, and the four-year-old was crying in her carseat. Mara’s partner texted from a business trip, “You’ve got this. Make him go. Stay consistent.” The behaviorist the school had recommended said the same thing in a report a few weeks before: “Stay firm. Do not waiver. Planned ignoring for attention-seeking. No screens on home days. He needs to learn that refusing isn’t an option.” Mara had nodded dutifully on the Zoom call and wrote it all down in her notebook on a page titled “School Boundaries.”

So Mara tried. She removed screens “until the morning routine is complete.” She withheld the bedtime story “to follow through” when her kid wouldn’t brush his teeth quickly. She sat in the hallway, neutral and silent, while her child sobbed on the other side of the bedroom door because she had said she was done comforting him for the night. She tried a mantra—sturdy, not scary; calm, not cold—and still, the nights ended with two people crying: her child and her.

Within two weeks the sticker chart was ripped and crumpled and the “earn it back” language was acid in her own mouth. Mornings turned into negotiations punctuated by panic. Afternoons were nurse calls for headaches and stomachaches. Evenings held a shaky peace until homework appeared; then the lid blew off. Her oldest started hiding under the table when the timer beeped for homework time. Her toddler began to flinch when Mara’s jaw clenched. The house felt like a lab experiment that she was desperately failing.

When Mara reached out to me, she sounded both exhausted and defensive, braced for judgment. “Everyone keeps saying kids need consequences,” she said. “Be clear. Be firm. Follow through. We’ve done all of it. We have charts and tokens and timers and… my kid is more aggressive, I’m more brittle, and our home feels like a hostage situation. If I stop using consequences, am I just…giving up? Am I being permissive? Do I let him do whatever he wants??”

I asked what she wanted most in those hard moments. She didn’t hesitate. “To keep us safe. To stop this from getting worse.” Then she whispered what she was afraid to admit out loud: “None of this is working, and I think it’s breaking us. I can’t keep doing this.”

If you’ve felt that knot in your stomach—the one that tightens every time a professional says “more consistency” while your whole body knows it’s making everything worse—you’re not failing. The model is.

The failing reward/punishment lens (and why it keeps us stuck)

Most of us were handed a parenting story that says: kids do well when they feel like it—so our job is to make “right behavior” pleasant (with rewards) and “wrong behavior” unpleasant (with punishments). 

Sometimes these rewards and punishments are obvious, like sticker charts, prize boxes, time-outs, or spanking. 

But often it’s pretty subtle: approval vs. withdrawal, warm attention vs. cool distance. 

If you’ve ever worried that comforting a melting child will “reinforce” meltdowns, that’s the reward/punishment paradigm whispering in your ear. If you’ve been told “don’t give in or they’ll learn this works,” that’s the old paradigm.

Here’s the rub: that whole framework assumes a motivation problem. But the primary issue is almost always capacity. Our expectations are not aligned to our kids’ real capacity. We think they can or should be able to do something that is actually out of reach for them, and the presence of these demands creates an embodied threat response. When the body is in threat, survival circuits take the wheel (fight/flight/freeze/fawn). No amount of prize box magic (and definitely not angry yelling!) can pull a brain out of survival mode; only safety and attunement can.

A few places this shows up:

• School-Can’t. The standard paradigm says, “Make home uncomfortable or they’ll prefer it to school.” So we withhold snuggles, screens, connection and comfort. But the child’s body isn’t gaming us; it’s collapsing. Withholding connection deepens the collapse and leads to more and more difficulty in the long-term.
• Sibling aggression. One kid hits, the other screams. The paradigm says, “Don’t ‘reward’ the hitter with your attention.” So we ignore the dysregulated child to “teach a lesson.” But nervous systems don’t learn from isolation; they learn from co-regulation and repair. They often need our stable and loving nervous system in order to recover; when we send them away to recover alone, they feel ashamed and isolated.
• The McDonald’s conundrum. After a brutal day full of dysregulation, your kid begs for fries right now. The paradigm insists, “They didn’t earn it. If you give them a treat after a terrible day, they will think they can act like this whenever they want.” But sometimes that tiny yes becomes a bridge back to each other. It tells them that you have compassion for their suffering, that they are giving you a hard time, they had a hard time. It says, “I had a really hard day and you got me my favorite food because you see me and love me.” Compassion and love > “teaching a lesson.”

Underneath the reward/punishment machine are deeper messages many of us carry: Good people earn good things. Bad people get bad things. Maybe we learned it at home, in church, at school, in a relationship. Unlearning it is slow. It can stir grief, anger, and the voice in your head that still wants to shout, “You can’t talk to me like that and then get McDonald’s!” I get it. And: our kids’ behaviors make sense in light of their biology and history. Yours do, too. When we shift from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you—and what does your body need now?” the whole landscape changes. (Thanks for this idea to Bruce Perry and Oprah’s wonderful book on healing childhood trauma called “What Happened To You.”)

Brain science backs this up. What “reinforces” human beings most reliably isn’t stickers or threats—it’s felt safety and trusting connection. That’s what lights up reward circuitry, expands executive functions, and makes new skills possible. When we drop what’s too hard and say, “You are safe with me. We can try again tomorrow,” brains soften. Capacity grows. Curiosity returns.

So if rewards/punishments don’t teach what we hope, what does?

“Low demand for them” can feel like “high demand for us.” So then what?

This is where so many of us get stuck. Making life accessible for our kids often means more effort, flexibility, and creativity from us. It can feel like we traded one trap (constant battles) for another (constant accommodation). You’re not wrong to feel stretched. Let’s re-engineer the problem so you’re not hooking your well-being to your child’s capacities.

Step 1: Name the real demand (for them and for you)

• For your child, the demand might be anything from leaving the house to wearing sunscreen to doing one more math problem. The demand is whatever is “too hard” for this kid in this moment.
• For you, the demand might be loneliness, boredom, lack of adult contact, noise, visual clutter, decision fatigue, or the ache to feel like a “regular adult” who gets stuff done.
  
  

When we don’t name our own demand, we accidentally make our kids the gatekeepers of our needs. (I’ll get friendship, movement, fresh air, purpose after they can handle X.) That’s a surefire path to resentment.

Step 2: What matters most right now?

Get specific and small. Name your real, concrete, doable needs. Not “I need a social life,” but “I need ten minutes of hearing a friendly adult voice and some humor today.” Not “I need a clean house,” but “I need the kitchen island clear by 4 pm so my eyes have somewhere calming to land.”

Step 3: Find the levers you do control

When my child was in burnout, I had very little freedom outside our four walls—but inside them I had levers: what I looked at, what I listened to, what tiny rituals I kept. So we look for where we do have control, and begin there.

• If you crave adult connection: trade 60-second voice memos with a friend during dish duty; join a group chat that actually gets you; ask one neighbor to wave at your window at 3:00 like a goofy ritual.
• If you need order: create one “no-kid zone” surface that stays clear; sort your books by color; meal plan your meals (not your kids’ ones).
• If you need out-of-the-house time and your kid can’t go: swap with a friend for 20-minute porch exchanges; open a window and feel the air on your face; watch travel videos from your favorite locations and daydream; cultivate a 60 second ritual of laying in the grass, and do it as often as you can.
  
  

Step 4: Design micro-boundaries that protect the relationship and your nervous system

Boundaries here aren’t about control or leverage; they’re concrete acts that protect the relationship and ensure you can care for yourself.

• “I won’t debate while we’re yelling. I’m taking two porch breaths and will be back.”
• “I’ll keep my body safe. I’m holding a pillow in front of me. I’m not leaving.”
• “I can do two pages of Lego sorting, then I’m done. We can dump the rest in the ‘mixed bin.’”
• “Screens are done for my brain. I can listen to the video with you, but looking at the screen is making me feel bad.”

Step 5: Build tiny “yes” plans that shrink the hard thing

Micro-steps create safety. The key is to stay inside the safe-zone. Work collaboratively with your kid to figure out what feels doable for them, and believe them when they tell you what their capacity is (even if you think they could do more). Don’t push them, and quit while you’re ahead. This builds safety and trust, and creates a collaborative, teamwork environment. 

Step 6: Repair, don’t lecture.

After the storm passes, lead with accountability and care, not shame. Own your part in creating expectations that were not doable for your kid. Don’t mention the distress behaviors that you saw (e.g. hitting, screaming, name calling, hiding), but stay focused on the skills and expectations that weren’t aligned for this child or teen. Think about what is in your control and what you would do differently next time. Repair, repair, repair. You don’t have to get it right. Meltdowns are not a failure; they’re just more information for how to make a shift for next time.

• “That got big. I moved that wobbly lamp so it’s not right there when you need to kick; next time I’ll find some boxes or paper for you to rip up, if you think that might feel good.”
• “I’m sorry I added pressure—next time I’ll try a smaller plan and a shorter time.”
• “I wasn’t listening when you told me this wasn’t doable. I kept pushing, and you got hurt in the process. I’m so sorry. Next time, I will listen the first time.”
  
  

Real-life swaps

• The School-Can’t
  Old: “No screens or snuggles; I can’t ‘reward’ staying home.”
  New: “Your body says ‘no’ today. That’s ok. I’ll email school and let them know. Want to watch a cozy show together while I make grilled cheese?”
  
  
• The sibling blow-up
  Old: “I’m ignoring you until you learn how to act right.”
  New: “I’m keeping everyone safe. I’ll stay here with you; your brother can call grandma or play on the Switch. We’ll repair when our bodies feel ready.”
  
  
• The McDonalds moment
  Old: “No. You didn’t earn it.”
  New: “Today was brutal. Let’s do drive-thru and sit in the parking lot with the windows down. We’re celebrating making it through a hard day.”

Notice what all of these share: less shame, more nonjudgmental support and honesty. We don’t teach through shame, judgment, and pressure. We teach by modeling repair and making regulation possible.

You’re not “giving in.” You’re following the science. 

Rewards and punishments promise control, but control isn’t the same as care, and it’s not how human nervous systems learn. Consequences almost always raise a person’s sense of threat and shrink their capacity to trust. When we swap leverage for low-demand boundaries, connection, and tiny, doable steps, capacity grows. Skills show up. Repair sticks. And we—the adults—stop selling our souls to a paradigm that never fit us, either.

You don’t have to earn love to get good things. Neither do your kids. We do kind, beautiful things together because we belong to each other. That’s the culture we’re building at home—one small, liberating choice at a time.

Want to read more?

• Ross W. Greene, The Explosive Child– collaborative problem-solving over punishment.
• Bruce D. Perry & Maia Szalavitz, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog– regulation before reasoning heals and prevents trauma.
• Bruce Perry & Oprah, What Happened To You– how understanding our lived realities brings compassion and understanding 
• Stephen Porges, Polyvagal Theory– how cues of safety unlock learning and connection.

Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards– why rewards/punishments undermine intrinsic motivation.