KIDS ARE WEAK, YOU GOTTA MAKE THEM TOUGH. IT'S WHAT BEING A MAN IS ABOUT. LET THEM FREEZE. LET THEM FEEL PAIN. LET THEM LEARN TO RESPECT MONEY BY GOING IN DEBT. LET THEM FEEL LIKE SHITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!
THAT'S HOW A MAN TEACHES A LESSON!
Funny you should mention "feeling like shit".
My daughter once complained to me that she felt like "a real piece of shit" because she'd recently done some cruel, antisocial, and self-absorbed things. I told her that the feeling she was having was the normal and predictable consequence of what she'd done. I said that if she liked that feeling and wanted more of it, then all she had to do is repeat those specific dishonest and irresponsible behaviors. But if she wanted the feeling to go away, she needed to stop giving herself permission to do the things that produced those feelings.
Apparently nobody had ever told her that before. She'd been raised in an environment where everyone told her she was a special little snowflake, that the rules didn't apply to her, that she was a Very Good Person because she believed in an imaginary sky daddy, and that because of her belief she was double-plus-special. Therefore it didn't matter what she did to other people: she could do as many bad things as she wanted and still be a Very Good Person, because her beliefs put her above things like laws, commandments, house rules, and any sort of moral standards. Furthermore, she'd learned that she could get what she wanted if she threw a big enough tantrum and was abusive enough toward enough people.
There were a few years of drama, and my daughter experienced lots of natural consequences from sources besides me, but I now have a young adult who consistently behaves in a reasonably considerate manner toward me. Over the years I did have to help her connect the things she was experiencing with the behavior she'd been dishing out, because she genuinely could not see the connection. Time after time, I asked: "what happened immediately before that?" A normal person does make that connection, just like a puppy does, however not everyone is wired that way. They are genuinely unable to learn by being told, or from other people's experience. They really do have to stick the fork in the light socket themselves.
I would never describe my daughter as weak, however her thinking and reasoning patterns were based on a very reactive world-view rooted in her reaction to trauma and instability. That world-view had to change before she was able to move forward.
I didn't get off on watching my daughter suffer. The destruction of one's world-view, maladaptive though it may be, is never fun or easy.
The "tough love" parenting concept was not my first choice. In fact it was my tenth, due in part to the fact that until my daughter had reached her legal majority I was legally required to continue providing for her and to continue allowing her access to my home. She knew that. Only once she reached her legal majority, when she was no longer entitled to financial support from me in any way, did she have an incentive to lay off the abuse. But it did eventually work. It was the only thing that did. Also, I was the only parent and authority figure to succeed in causing my daughter to act like a civilized person without being heavily medicated. About eleven other households, including professional treatment foster parents, had tried and failed. We're not in danger of becoming a Campbell's Soup happy family, but she truly has changed and my well-being is actually a small and intermittent blip on her radar screen.
The thing to remember about cause and effect parenting is that it's far more effective when the kid is young and can fail on a small scale. As they reach the teen years and beyond, they develop the ability to damage themselves, and others, on a more impressive scale. I got my daughter when she was fifteen and we didn't finalize the adoption and kick the social workers out until she was almost sixteen and a half. I didn't have a lot of time, and some of the legal and logistics aspects of being an adoptive family made it hard to create an environment where cause and effect could really roll.
I suppose that the upshot of all of this is that if you're dealing with a basically normal, well-adjusted young person who's on the right side of the bell curve in terms of opportunity and brain power, all you really have to do is place them in the right environment and they'll bloom where they're planted. It's also reasonable to expect them to understand things like compound interest and the impact of student loans. An individual like my daughter, however, has the same legal right to take out massive student loans at Bullshit U and is legally on the hook to pay them even if she washes out or is socially promoted to the point where she's issued a worthless degree and can't find a job. Because my daughter's difficulties aren't severe enough to put her two full sigmas to the left, she's not legally incompetent and she can and will be held legally accountable if she takes out a loan. Yet she's incredibly vulnerable to snake-oil salespeople, car salespeople, Bullshit U finance departments, and a bunch of other people who make a living selling overpriced and overrated merchandise.
People like my daughter live in the same world as Buff Elvis, who because of his hardcore badassity was able to raise himself out of poverty through a combination of education, hard work, student loans, and a pair of gigantic brass testicles. Now, Buff Elvis is kind of a Horatio Alger wet dream (except he's a fully grown adult and apparently straight). My daughter? Well, she's making outstanding progress but in some respects she's still catching up. Compared to most people her age, her concentration capability's not as intense, she isn't a good credit risk, her impulse control has room for improvement, and her work ethic isn't as well developed and it might not ever be. I won't even get started on the testicle issue. But the same laws and expectations apply to her as apply to Buff Elvis. What created an outstanding opportunity and success pathway for him could easily create a pitfall for her.