Was It "Overkill" Because Of Us?

Are we the reason a consequence was "overkill"?

Thinking of consequences that are imposed by parents, for example, is a given consequence moved from three days without the phone to a week without the phone because we say we could care less and will continue doing what we were doing before?

Younger Christians,

How many consequences do we call “overkill” that actually started out as lenient before our reaction pushed them to the next level and beyond?  Thinking of consequences that are imposed by parents, for example, is a given consequence moved from three days without the phone to a week without the phone because we say we could care less and will continue doing what we were doing before?  Then, do we later tell our friends we couldn’t understand how our parents could take away our phone for a whole week?

We want to try to be honest with ourselves when we've done something wrong instead of refusing to acknowledge it and trivializing the consequence until it becomes worse.  In a number of cases, we are the ones who make the consequence worse.  Then, we criticize the worsened consequence for being “overkill.”

We even make the mistake of criticizing the person imposing the consequence in front of our friends later. However, they were only trying to stop us from something like saying cruel things to someone in the first place.  It was actually our reaction to the consequence that was overkill.