Jean Piaget was a psychologist in the early 20th century. He studied the moral development of children and how they come to moral decisions and knowledge. He noticed trends in reasoning and moral development and classified these as stages. According to Piaget's stages of moral development, children ages 10 or 11 are motivated to follow group-set standards to avoid the consequences of stepping outside of the norm.
Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist practicing in the mid-20th century, followed Piaget's model loosely to design his own stage-based model of moral development. Kohlberg suggests that at stage one of moral development, fear and awareness of the consequences of wrong-doing (punishment) keep children from deviating from accepted norms or rules.
As established by both Piaget and Kohlberg, children at an early stage of development respond to the presence of consequence. Children at these early stages perceive both punishment and natural negative outcomes of deviation to be a deterrent from breaking the rules. Therefore, consequences, at least at early ages, can be used to reinforce and develop in children an awareness of rules.
For consequences to fully be actualized as a tool for teaching morality and fostering development, a firm cause and effect relationship between rules and punishment for breaking those rules must be established. The presence of consequences, whether as a result of teacher-administered punishment or natural outcome, can condition children to follow rules only if the connection is made explicit. At the early stage of moral development, as stated by Piaget and Kohlberg, if children internalize that there is right and wrong, they can later move onto a more sophisticated and theoretical understanding of right and wrong.
The awareness of punishment for a wrong act is a great motivating factor for children at early developmental stages; however, care must taken to thoroughly connect the act and the punishment. In addition, the punishment must be fully understood by the child as a consequence of that wrong act. In later developmental stages (and in adult society) punishment is understood to be a consequence; however, the wrong act is understood as more than an antecedent and wrong is avoided for a reason other than solely consequence avoidance. According to Piaget and Kohlberg, consequence is a necessary component in early moral development.