“Telling her that she can’t have dessert if she hits you again isn’t a natural consequence.” 

My wife makes a good point.

“Well what would a natural consequence be? It’s not okay for her to hit me in front of the twins. They copy everything she does.”

“You need to tell her you won’t play with her. And if she hits you again, you just walk away.”

Natural consequences, on paper, is a sensible approach to discipline. Assuming your child is not darting into the street or trying to taste test some freshly poured cement, I can see the appeal of letting them experience the direct results of their own actions. 

It’s pure empiricism. 

Contrast this to the more Rationalist approach to parenting which would involve long, logical explanations of why you shouldn’t swing your arms around like a monkey right after asking for a “glass of milk, but like, full to the very top.” 

One critical piece to this disciplinary style is the absence of any “I told you so-ing” — you’re not supposed to reinforce the discomfort the child experiences, you just have to let them do a really bad job at cleaning up the milk they spilled and then clean up the remaining milk yourself at some later time. 

Unlike my wife, who is naturally gifted at doling out punishments that fit their crimes, my problem is that I have a very hard time evaluating which consequences are “natural”. Apparently saying “yes” to a family trip to Kansas to prove that some destinations aren’t exciting or fun even if they’re in the Wizard of Oz is not a good natural consequence.

So the next time my daughter hit me in front of the twins I gave her one firm warning. 

“If you do that again, I’m not gonna play with you anymore.”

Evidently, she thought I was bluffing. 

“Alright, I’m done.” I get up and walk away. And honestly, it felt good. Granted, I did leave a baby balancing precariously at the apex of a triangular climbing structure, but you have to be okay with that. 

“So if she refuses to bring a jacket, she just has to be cold at the park?”

“That’s the idea,” says my wife.

We arrive on the earlier side of the morning (because our entire lives are organized around the twins’ nap schedule).

“I’m cold.” She is shivering.

“Sorry kiddo. You, uh… you made your choice.” Other early-park-going moms and dads look on.

“Can we please go?”

“We just got here! No, you have to play for a little bit.” 

A random mom edges into my line of sight, “Does she need a jacket?”

“No. Thank you.” I say.

“I do need a jacket. I really need one,” says my daughter in the meekest voice you’ve ever heard.

If she gets a jacket she learns nothing. But, hold on a sec. If she doesn’t get it, she might catch a cold and pass that to the babies, then they won’t sleep very well, and my wife and I will be even more tired than we already are. 

Nobody talks about the second order natural consequences!

The other day my wife spent about an hour getting some beef into a marinade replete with all sorts of freshly chopped herbs, garlic, shallots—the works. It went into our garage fridge to sit overnight. 

I also put something in the garage fridge that day. Leftover pizza, if you must know. It took a little bit of maneuvering to get that box in there. And apparently I didn’t check to make sure the fridge closed all the way. The next morning my wife entered my office with a look on her face that said, “you’ve done a bad thing.”

“The fridge didn’t get closed. So the beef was ruined.”

Shit.

“I’m so sorry. I guess… my… natural consequence is that I don’t get to have dinner tonight?” My joke lands completely flat.

Later that night, once the kids are down and we get into bed, I do some light initiation for our semi-regular tryst. 

But something is off.

“Are you still upset about the beef?”

No reply. 

I pause, and weigh the pros and cons of the thing I want to say. In typical I’m-a-guy-and-can’t-help-myself fashion, I say it:

“This doesn’t strike me as a natural consequence.” 

Turns out the natural consequence of making a second bad joke after ruining dinner is not getting laid!

Thanks for reading! Hope you laughed. See you next time.

-Will

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider forwarding it to your parent friends. If this email was forwarded to you, consider subscribing to Parental Advisory here. Outside of this newsletter, I run a financial planning firm that pretty much exclusively serves millennial families with 1) variable incomes from sales or sales adjacent jobs and/or 2) concentrated wealth (usually from a lot of employer stock).