The meaning perspectives our parents and/or caretakers enact and teach us imposes a form on the world and our relationship with it. They call it "consequences." When we accept "consequences" as a meaning perspective, it establishes a definitional power to that perspective and its demands. That power can dominate our becoming self and our relationship to the world to one degree or another.
The idea of consequences served as a usual and prevailing meaning perspective for what my students also called "discipline." It means that when we do something our parental figure doesn't like, when we violate something that the parental figure feels we should not violate, that figure imposes a negative response to that action. If we don’t clean our room to the satisfaction of this figure, the figure denies us something we want. No clean room, no desert for dinner, and it's our favorite, too. That parental response serves as a meaning perspective about conduct and responses to conduct, but it doesn't necessarily make for a consequence as the word defines itself.
The word "consequence" defines itself quite well as language goes. Language can be very slippery stuff, but not quite so here. The prefix "con" generally works the same way as the word "with." The second part of the part of the word, "sequence" generally means things that happen or follow in order, one thing after another. When I say the word "consequence," I imply a natural order of things that follow one after another automatically and inevitably. If that's the case, no one need supply another person with a consequence because the consequence will come of its own accord, naturally as the way we see the sun appearing at the horizon at dawn as a consequence of the Earth's rotation.
As a very young child, we might experiment with stacking drinking glasses one on another to see if we can make a tower out of them as we can out of blocks. The experiment seems successful for a while until we stack one too high and the entire construction comes tumbling, crashing, and loudly breaking down. All that noise and broken glass come as a consequence of our adding one too many or misjudging the glass tower's stability, using glasses in the first place, and the splintered result serves as a consequence of our actions. The dread we feel when we see this consequence, our sense of responsibility and shear shock might also come as a consequence. Our parental figure appears, sees the mess, and begins to do whatever that figure sees as appropriate. The figure may shout. The figure may hit. The figure can demand we clean it up. The figure can forbid us the kitchen for a week. The figure can send us to our room. The figure can do anything the figure wishes, and it will mean the same thing, a denial of what we want most: unconditional positive regard.
The stacked, fallen, and broken glasses serve as a consequence. One thing follows the other as results that come from the natural forces at work. What the parental figure does is not a natural force. It's a choice. It's a decision the figure makes in order to prove a point to us about our actions. Our parental figure could choose understanding our need to experiment as a response. A child in such a position might even need comfort and an explanation of what happened.
One student began to cry as we discussed this. Bessie reported that her young son had broken his favorite toy, a fire truck, by standing on it. He wanted to ride it. Instead of a ride as a consequence of the standing, he wound up with a broken truck as the consequence. She said that she got furious. It was a very expensive toy. She shouted and told him to get to bed and stay there until she told him otherwise. She realized that she did not have to do that. Her action was no consequence. It was her choice. Consequences are not choices; they happen all by themselves. Her son had experienced the actual consequence, and he felt terrible already. His truck was broken and he broke it. She just made it worse. Through her actions, she told him that she didn't like him, as a result withdrew her unconditional positive regard, and that made things worse and more confused for him. She realized that she could have comforted him and explained to him the nature of what had happened, so he might make a different choice about how he treats some objects in the future. The point comes not in punishing over a past mistake but turning that mistake into a learning opportunity, so that he and we can make a new choice the next time around.[11] We get told we are supposed to learn from our mistakes. That's what we say. What do we do?