LJ030: Punishments, Rewards, and Autonomy [Parenting]

We're back with a new episode in our Parenting series and we're talking about punishments, rewards, and autonomy. For most kids, life is a series of expectations: when and what to eat, when to sleep, what to learn, how to learn it. This loss of autonomy can cause disconnection with a child's inner knowing. Punishments and rewards, too, are designed to influence children's choices. How could things feel different if we didn't try to control our children? What we've found is that stepping away from that control leads to better understanding about the individuals in our families, and so much amazing learning.We hope today's episode sparks some fun insights for you and we invite you to dive deeper with our Episode Questions. Join us on Instagram or YouTube to continue the conversation and share your reflections.Let’s dig deep, challenge paradigms, choose connection, and live joyfully!You can follow us on Instagram or YouTube. Explore our courses and coaching at https://livingjoyfullyshop.com/.EPISODE QUESTIONS1. Think back to when you were a child. Did you get to make many choices about your days? If so, how did it feel? Did you feel empowered? Trusted? If not, how did it feel? Frustrating? Like you weren’t trusted to make good choices? And who got to define “good”?2. Were you punished as a child? If so, how did it feel? How did it play out for you? Did you spend your punishment time contemplating your “crime”? Or being angry with the person who set the punishment, feeling it was unfair? Over time, did you absorb the message that you were a bad person in general for getting in trouble? Were you more likely to continue the “crime” but hide it from your parents?3. Did your parents reward you pretty regularly growing up? If so, looking back, does it feel like they were trying to use rewards to control or behavior and/or choices? Did you find that the rewards influenced your behavior or choices at the time? What, if any, impact did that have as an adult?4. I find it so interesting to consider the relationship between a child’s autonomy and their learning about themselves as a human being. I encourage you to take a couple minutes to start brainstorming a list of the things you can imagine a child learning through making choices and seeing how things unfold. I think once you get the ball rolling it may well be hard to stop!TRANSCRIPTPAM: Hello! And welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast! Navigating relationships can sometimes be challenging, because people are so different. Thanks for joining us as we dive into tools, strategies, and paradigm shifts to help you decrease conflict and increase connection in your most important relationships.If you’re new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen from the beginning, particularly the episodes in our introductory Foundations series. If you want to dive deeper, we also have courses and coaching, which you can explore in our Living Joyfully Shop! Follow the link in the show notes or go to livingjoyfullyshop.com.And if you’ve been listening to and enjoying the podcast for a while, we’d love it if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review on your podcast player of choice. They can really help encourage people to take a chance and listen to the show.So, this episode is part of our Parenting series and we’re going to be diving into the ideas of punishments, rewards, and autonomy and how they weave together. And while we’re talking about this in the context of parenting, it’s equally valuable when it comes to any relationships.So, let’s start with the bigger picture of autonomy.And so that we’re starting on the same page, I see personal or individual autonomy just as the freedom to make choices and pursue a chosen course of action. Fundamentally, it’s how human beings learn: by making choices and seeing how they unfold. Sometimes things go smoothly, unfolding how we anticipated. And sometimes they go completely sideways. And most times, it’s somewhere in between the two.But each time, we learn something. Maybe it’s about the choice itself, maybe it’s about the execution, maybe it’s about the environment, maybe it’s about ourselves—the list is vast. Yet when we’ve made the choice, we’re learning something meaningful, or at least useful, to us. And that’s at all ages, kids included.So, when someone else makes the choices for us, which often happens for kids—choices like what they can do and what they eat and who they play with and what they wear and when they sleep—they learn different things. They learn less about themselves—their likes and dislikes, how their body likes to be fueled, how they like to express themselves, how they like to explore the world, how they prefer to engage with others—and more about their parents’ expectations.Maybe they feel the rub and bristle at the line or limit their parents hold for them, but, certainly when they’re younger, they aren’t able to explore ...