My mom would have screamed and cussed me out. My dad would have laughed and told me to clean it up. The courts said I had to live with my mom until I was 15 and then I could make a choice. At 15 I chose my mom because I was so invested in the life I built (friends, school, sports) and my dad remarried and had 4 kids it just was a horrible version of cost analysis.
"You're going to be a human being for a long time.." I love that. My parents always overreacted when I spilled stuff or did anything wrong. Whenever my son spills something or makes a mistake I think of how my mom/dad would have reacted and do the exact opposite. Try to teach him the best thing to do in whatever scenario.
Can I chime in with my dad stuff here? If This happened to one of my kids I'd say let's clean it up and think of ways that we could prevent this from happening next time. But I see some kids say "oh no there was no way to prevent me from spilling this." It's got to be an argument about how yes there are indeed several things that could've been done to prevent spilling that slushy over the place. It's not about making a mistake, it's to see how you could have prevented it in the can prevent things from happening again in the future.
There are several ways you could have avoided the mistake, we don't pay 100% attention all the time so mistakes do happen. I don't argue with me that it was inevitable, and there's no way anybody on earth could have avoided doing that stupid thing. Sometimes we really do have to pay attention to what we're doing to the exclusion of typing on the phone looking at a car out in the parking lot or whatever
There are several ways you could have avoided the mistake, we don't pay 100% attention all the time so mistakes do happen. I don't argue with me that it was inevitable, and there's no way anybody on earth could have avoided doing that stupid thing. Sometimes we really do have to pay attention to what we're doing to the exclusion of typing on the phone looking at a car out in the parking lot or whatever