As a parent, what would you do if your child did something bad or wrong by accident? Obviously, there are different types of accidents, so I’ll give a few examples for you to work with (feel free to deviate from these and interpret the question in your own way, of course. I actually don’t really want you to use these examples).
What sort of repercussions would arise from the child:
[ul]
[li]Spilling a glass of milk?[/li][li]Dropping and breaking that glass of milk?[/li][li]Dropping and breaking that glass of milk on the carpet?[/li][/ul]
How about something more dangerous such as accidentally running a red light while driving, or cutting themselves while peeling food? Maybe even something more serious such as getting or getting someone pregnant even when utilizing birth control?
In any of these scenarios, the child will know what they did was wrong, but was out of their control due to inattentiveness, brief loss of muscle control, whatever. Answers may also vary depending on their age, but again, interpret the question in your own way.
We have had that argument with the kids many times. Some accidents are flukes, while others are, as you note, caused by inattentiveness/carelessness. It’s those latter ones that we think are preventable and, thus, something to be discussed with the kids. It’s also fine, of course, to ensure that true flukes are treated as just that.
Giving a free pass for anything that could be considered accidental doesn’t teach responsibility; I’d hate to be driving near that kid someday.
I would think that a lot would depend on the reaction of the child to the situation. I was just thinking this morning about an incident in my childhood when I did something accidently, and how kind and gentle my father was with me, making me realize that accidents happen and that I was not to blame. Of course, I was the kind of child who was mortified by any mistake I made, and had a lot of anxiety and fear. My reaction to breaking a glass would have been to burst into tears and beg for forgiveness. For a child like that, comfort rather than punishment is necessary. That would also apply to the child who was devastated and fearful if he ran a red light, cut himself, or got someone pregnant.
OTOH, for a child who doesn’t care, or doesn’t recognize the consequences of his actions, more severe repercussions are required. A child who routinely spills milk and says, “What difference does it make?” or tries to avoid blame, needs to learn that those reactions are unacceptable. That child should also be praised for efforts to avoid accidents, and trained in being attentive and careful.
I think teaching that saying “It was an accident!” will not give you a free pass in life is important. You are still accountable for stuff you didn’t mean to do. So if they knock over a glass of milk, they should clean up the mess. They should only be punished if they were being reckless and not using common sense.
Seems to me most punishable offenses in childhood result from reckless boneheaded behavior rather than outright defiance of a rule, though. So I don’t know.
I would only think discipline would be helpful or appropriate if itsa case of being reckless, such as driving too fast, obviously drinking plus anything, playing ball in the house, etc. But for true accidents or mishaps, disciipline woldnt teach anything positive, except for making one feel they must be perfect. Afterall everyone has spills, mishaps, car accidents even…which is why theyre called accidents
If you have an accident, a true accident, you clean the spill, apologize, and its over.
If you have an accident because you weren’t paying attention, were sitting improperly, or trying to multitask, you are in trouble, have to clean it up, and articulate why you are in trouble and apologize for both that and spilling.
If you spill the milk while breaking a rule, like having milk in the bedroom, you have to clean the spill and articulate why you are int trouble. Then you also get the standard punishment for breaking that rule. (Ie if you are caught with food in your bedroom you get no snacks that day and you have to clean and vacuum your room.) Punishment fits the crime.
I might conceivably make him pay for carpet cleaning out of his allowance if it was staining and stinky.
I vividly remember breaking an overhead light fixture in the master bedroom while playing “backwards catch” with my brother. The ball hit the light and sent the whole thing crashing to the hardwood floor, where it shattered everywhere. We were supposed to move out the following morning, and, horrified by the thought that we’d just ruined the light for the new owners and would be in big trouble, we ran and hid.
Mom and Dad found us a few minutes later after hearing the horrible noise and obviously going to see what had happened. It turned out that they were so concerned that one of us had been hit by the falling light or cut ourselves on the massive amounts of broken glass all over the floor that the only reaction was relief when we told them we were okay.
I don’t recall ever getting more than a “That’s why I told you not to do that” or “Stop that and go do something else” for a dumb accident. Spilled drinks didn’t rate anything beyond cleaning it up. There weren’t any rules about where we could eat, so that wasn’t an issue. We were both pretty low-key kids with a natural sense of embarrassment and desire to avoid rampant stupidity. A different technique might have been needed if we had different personalities, but most of the time the result was a clean-up, a check to make sure everybody was okay, and perhaps mild admonishment.
My brother has since turned into a reckless moron who usually needs 2-3 ER trips per year, but I’m super cautious to the point of being majorly lame, so I can’t say it was the parenting that had any kind of impact.
I do think people have very different attitudes about whether or not something was “clumsiness”–a sort of inherent, immutable quality–and whether or not something was carelessness. I think everyone would agree your shouldn’t punish clumsiness and you should punish carelessness, but I think you get a lot of disagreement about which is which.
Some people put a lot of value into being aware of one’s environment/body, others do not. I think there is a bit of a gender divide here: boys are more likely to be expected to be coordinated whereas a girl can be “off in her own little world”. It’s cute in a girl: it’s sloppy in a boy. On the other hand, a girl is more likely to be expected to be aware of other’s emotional states: a boy who doesn’t share his toys and didn’t notice that his friend really wanted to play is excused as “missing social cues” or “thoughtless” ; a girl who doesn’t offer is “mean” or “selfish”. It’s not just gender, though: athletic people are quicker to feel like a person can control their own body, can be aware of where the glass of milk is; non-athletic people are more likely to believe that spills just happen.
This is really about self-efficacy. What is under our control and what isn’t? It’s a really complicated thing to teach a child, because too far in either direction-too fatalistic, or too much faith in your ability to control–is really unhealthy.
Along those lines, if the Firebug drops a glass of milk on the carpet…well, he’s not supposed to have a glass of milk outside the kitchen anyway, precisely because cleaning milk out of the carpet is significantly more work than mopping it off the kitchen floor.
So he’s going to get an earful and a time-out for spilling milk on the carpet, because his real offense was having put himself in a position where he could do that to begin with.
When he’s older, he’ll get to do the cleanup. But he’s just 5 now, so that’s still in the future.
Both my kids tend to be the “shrink and hate themselves” type when accidents happen. Obviously, not something I want to see continue, but I’m not sure what to do about it. If anything, I think that consoling them has exacerbated the problem. Much like whining dogs during a thunderstorm, the action of consolation has given them the idea that this is a Really Big Deal that *requires *consolation. But it could also just be that they’re sweet, gentle kids with better than average empathy - it really does seem like their main worry isn’t getting in trouble, but making more work for me.
My standard action is to have them clean it up, with assistance as required for the age and level of disaster. And that’s basically it. If I see an “accident” looming, I’ll ask the kid what their plan is if they lose control of the ball and break something. Generally, that’s enough to get the point across and they’ll relocate - either the ball or the glass of milk - and that’s cool with me.
If they break something belonging to someone else, like the classic baseball through a neighbor’s window (hasn’t happened yet, but if), then they’d be ringing the bell and apologizing to the neighbor, with an offer to clean it up and pay for replacement. I’ll loan them the money if they need it, but they’ll pay me back, either in cash or in labor.
I’m a “natural consequences” parent. I don’t really do punishments. I do try to help them learn to predict the natural consequences of their actions (which may include making people angry), but for me, the “punishment” for spilling milk is that you clean it up. No further punishment is really needed.
(The exception to this was when my daughter was very young - like under 2 - and wanted to play with the broom and mops and such. She began making messes, and I mean BIG messes, in order to have an excuse to clean. I had to kibosh that by making her stand there and watch me clean without helping at all. She was so angry with me!)
Pure accident = clean it up, no big deal. At this point we don’t even have to say anything: she spills something, she runs off and grabs a cloth and starts doing the cleanup.
Accident from carelessness = clean it up and have a quick talk about why it happened and how you can prevent it next time. (‘You know why that happened? Because you tried to get off the chair while you were holding the full cup. Next time, put the cup down, then get off the chair, then pick up the cup again.’)
And I agree that 5 is well old enough - Widget is three and a half and has been doing her own cleanup for ages, as long as there aren’t any sharp edges. Sometimes we have to give it a second going-over afterwards, but she does the initial one.
I’m pretty sure it actually helps her not to get upset about accidents: she knows what to do about them, so she feels like she’s back in control of the situation rather than just being in the middle of something that’s gone all wrong.
When I was four I knocked over a glass of orange juice at the breakfast table and it splashed all over the wallpaper and dripped on the carpet. My dad yelled at me and sent me to my room, where I lay on my bed and sobbed. I still remember the incident and don’t think his reaction was the right one.
This is where I get confused about "natural consequences: take three situations, with, say, a 13 year old boy:
[ol]
[li]Is reaching for the butter, misjudges where the milk is, and knocks it over. Genuine accident that comes from mild carelessness.[/li][li]Throws a beachball at his brother’s head, misses, and knocks over a glass of milk. Fully foreseeable accident.[/li][li]Is angry about 300 things, most of which his parents don’t even know about, and when mom hands him a glass of milk and makes a comment that’s supposed to be funny, he throws the glass on the floor, breaking it. A fully intentional act.[/li][/ol]
To me, these events aren’t remotely comparable. “Clean it up, no big deal” would be appropriate for the first one. Though even then I would probably want to encourage the child to look before he reaches; in the same way you can learn to think before you speak, you can learn to look before you leap, and I do think people do kids a disservice when they lead them to believe clumsiness is immutable.
It might be okay for the second one, too, though it would depend–if tomorrow he does the same thing, only on purpose, because it’s worth having to clean up milk to see the look on brother’s face, I think that’s a problem. Being willing to bear the consequences doesn’t make an activity all right, and the next time the consequences might be something you can’t take on–like if you break the glass he’s holding and cut his hand. That kind of thinking is the sort of advanced frontal lobe stuff that kids are bad at, and I think they need to be guided towards. That doesn’t mean thirty lashes and bread and water, but it may mean a really long boring lecture, not just a sunny “here’s a rag, clean it up, you have to wash your brother’s shirt and explain to grandma why we are late”.
And for the third, I don’t see any way to replicate “natural consequences”: the natural consequence would be that I, as mom, was terrified and angry and wary. But I don’t really want to teach my kid that you can make women leave you alone if you do something violent to scare them–even though, to some degree, that’s the truth. It is a way to shape relationships. It’s a way many people do shape relationships. But it’s not a good way. The “natural consequence” way I would deal with anyone that wasn’t my son who threw a glass in anger is to leave, permanently. But that’s not really an option (and, of course, a 13 year old in a hormonal stew throwing a glass means something really different than a 20 year old doing the same thing: a 13 year old is much more capable of improving). Anything “natural” I did in this situation would be faked.
I am a huge fan of not replacing natural consequences with artificial ones when and if it’s possible. But I don’t think it’s something that can be extended to all circumstances.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with my then 2yo son:
My son has grabbed a soda bottle off my night stand to steal a drink. While holding it, he accidentally spills a little on to the floor:
Son: “BAD lil’ Shakes”
Me: “It’s alright buddy, It was an accident.”
Son: [Deliberately pour more on to the carpet]
Me: “lil’ Shakes!”
Son: “It’s OK, it was an accident.”
Me: :smack:
As to the OP context is everything. The only time I’d ever scold my children was when they would set their open containers on the carpet next to their game console.
Spilling something that was setting on a table is a non issue for me.
Spilling Milk: Clean it up
Breaking glass: clean it up
Breaking glass on carpet: clean it up
That all seems pretty self explanatory and obvious to me.
I don’t know how I would know about the red light thing unless they told me, and I would just tell them to be more observant and careful next time because 1. you could have gotten seriously injured or killed and 2. you could have gotten pulled over by the police and suffered the legal repercussions
Cutting themselves would result in me ruishing to their aid to make sure I could bandage the wond and help them clean it up, then when things had calmed down I would exlaing to them how to be more careful when prepping food in the future.
As for the pregnant thing, that is more complicated. We teach our children that sex before marriage is not ideal, and comes with a ton of risks. Pregnancy is only one of them. Pregnancy would result in them having to be responsible for a child, and I think after hearing the disappointment from their father and me, they would have decades of payment for their mistake. So who am I to make it even worse for them? Depending on their age, I would help them take care of the child, or tell them to go get a decent job and raise their own baby.
