Paint and its Consequences

I had an interesting thing happen to me yesterday at nearly nap time. All the children were down and the light was about to be turned out when from a corner of the room we heard some whimpering. My lead teacher went over to investigate and then called me over. One of our four year olds had gotten into a little bottle of paint (purple--her favourite) from a nearby shelf and the paint was now all over her mat, her blanket, etc. She was obviously upset and had even hid her purple, wet hands underneath her. I coaxed her out of the mess and to the sink. And while we were washing up, my lead and another teacher from a different classroom told me that I shouldn't be nice to the girl because she had done something bad and she should experience the bad consequence of someone being upset with her.

My response was that regardless of how I acted with the child, she had already experienced the natural consequence. She messed with some paint at an inappropriate time and consequently the paint got all over. And then she spent the rest of the day cleaning up the paint from her mat. "What a bother! I'm not doing that again!"