Episode 89: Rethinking Parenting: Moving Beyond Punishment and Reward

Are you tired of the endless cycle of punishment and reward in parenting? Join Pam as she unveils the pitfalls of this outdated strategy and offers a refreshing perspective on building strong parent-child bonds without fear tactics. Discover how shifting your approach can transform your family dynamic and empower your children to thrive.

Key Points:

• Roots of Punishment and Reward: Pam discusses the traditional parenting model inherited from previous generations, emphasizing its fear-based nature and its prevalence in society.
• Consequences of Fear-Based Parenting: Pam addresses common fears parents have about abandoning punishment, debunking myths about consequences and children's development.
• Impact on Child Behavior: Pam explains how fear-based tactics can lead to children outmaneuvering parents, eroding trust in the parent-child relationship, and negatively affecting brain development.
• Promoting Connection and Resilience: Pam advocates for prioritizing connection over control, highlighting the importance of fostering resilience and emotional regulation in children.

Join Pam on a journey to reimagine parenting beyond punishment and reward. Embrace the power of connection and watch as your family thrives with newfound harmony and understanding.

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Transcript

Pamela: 0:00

Hey there. And welcome back to the Peaceful Home Podcast. My name is Pam and I am your host. And today we're talking all about parenting strategies, specifically the strategy that our parents used, the punishment and reward system, and why that doesn't work so well with your kids today and why that's okay. So let's dive in. The strategy that most of us learned in parenting. When we were kids from our own parents was this concept of punishment and reward. You screw up, you get punished, you do something good, you get a reward, right? This is, and this goes back. Even when I was teaching parenting in the early days, like a reward system of like a sticker chart, some sort of Positive reward metric that you could achieve. And it's something that we even had in our classrooms growing up. So this is not just like, you know, your parents sucked or my parents sucked. This is what was going on at that time. But the problem is this parenting strategy of using punishment or reward is rooted in fear. It's a fear based strategy. And it's like ingrained in our DNA because it's something that we experienced and have been exposed to for so long. So fast forward, you become a parent and then you're like, what do I do? How do I get my kids to listen to me? Well, the things that I hear from parents when I say we're going to remove punishment because it's not effective is they say things like, yeah, but. Then my kid will never understand consequences. They won't be able to handle the real world, right? They won't be able to deal with disappointment or have someone be uh, mean to them or take something away. They won't be able to like deal with failure in the real world. They'll become a narcissist because this is language we use today, right? They're, they'll become self centered or egotistical. They won't have empathy. I had somebody say to me on Instagram at one point because I was talking about meeting my child's emotional needs, that my child was going to be a huge failure, was never going to be amount to anything. It was going to be a snowflake. Like this is the kind of stuff that is programmed into our head. It's programmed into our DNA, right? They'll become horrible human beings. They'll be entitled little brats. And how will they learn how to follow rules? They'll never know how to follow rules. I just want to say that I have a huge rule follower in my house. She's 15 years old. She's been a rule follower her entire life. And I do not use punishment and rewards. And when we talk about punishment, sometimes people think you have an idea of what punishment is. When I say punishment, I mean yelling. I mean threats. And I mean physical punishment as well. So anything that falls into if you screw up, there's going to be a hell to pay. Is a punishment that includes saying things like, wait till your father gets home, which I used to hear all the time growing up. And I get it. Like I get it can be really scary to move away from what you know and move into something that you don't know if it's going to work or if it's going to be effective. Like what, if I'm not yelling, what am I doing? If I'm not punishing or threatening or bribing them to behave, how are they ever going to behave? How is this ever going to work? What am I going to do? I'm going to have no control or power over them. Parents often think if we don't give our children consequences or punishments, they'll never learn, but this is just false. This is something that is not based in fact, it's not based in research. It is a belief system and belief systems are not Truths, they are beliefs, they are thoughts that we've thought over and over again. It's something that you've been told over and over and over through the early part of your life. So then you become a parent and you go into those reserves, into the filing cabinet in the brain. Like I, as I like to say. And you go, what's the strategy I need to use here? And then what comes up is if I don't punish my kid, if there's not a consequence, then all these terrible things are going to happen. They're going to be terrible human beings and I'm going to be totally screwed. I even have families that I work with or a mom's like, I don't want to yell at the kids, I don't want to punish the kids. And dad's like, well, that's the only thing that worked for me. And so there's, I get it. I get that this is deeply rooted. But my question to you is. Are you willing to look at something a little bit differently? Are you willing to explore why this might not be the best solution for you and your family? Because here's the thing, when you understand the negative consequences of these actions from us as parents, maybe just maybe the adult in the household that thinks that this is a load of crap. we'll start to see, Hmm, maybe there is something to this. And that's all I'm asking. Are you open to being curious? And you could ask this of your partner. If it's like, you're saying my partner doesn't believe these things, you can just say, are you willing to be curious with me and see what happens to experiment, right? This is big old experiment. Here's the really interesting thing about it. That was, it's not really that big of an experiment because it's not They're doing research on this. We have a, we have an understanding of what happens in your child's brain when you yell, when you threaten them, when you give them physical punishment or any other type of punishment or consequence that you can come up with that you've manufactured. Punishment is something that you manufacture to make them feel bad about their actions. Now there are natural consequences that occur. For instance, if I get mad and throw my train and it breaks, I have a broken train. trying to That's a natural consequence, right? A natural consequence is not, I get mad. I throw my train, my train breaks. You take away all my toys and tell me I'm bad because I broke a toy and now I don't get to have toys. That's not a natural consequence. That is a punishment. Right? So there's like a nuance here and sometimes it can be confusing if you're, if you're trying to avoid punishments and you're like, Oh no, now I can't give them any consequences. Natural consequences arise because. They just do. It's a result of the action. Punishment is something that you've manufactured usually from a place of being pissed off that they're not listening to you, that they're not doing what you're asking them to do. And this is why, and we'll talk about this And future episodes. But this is why one of the reasons we yell is because we're triggered, right? One of the reasons we punish is because we are emotionally triggered and we don't know how to handle it. And that's not our kid's problem. That's our problem. So that's I think the next episode we'll talk about that and what you can do about that. What I want to talk about today, what I want to share with you is three things that children learn or that are the consequences of them being punished. The first one is they learn how to outmaneuver you because let's be real, kids have way more time, effort and energy to put into winning the battle than you do because you're running a household. Maybe you're working, you're parenting, you're making sure there's food on the table, you're paying the bills, you're managing all the things you're already overwhelmed and overloaded. You cannot spend. From 3am to 5am coming up with a strategy so that you can outmaneuver your eight year old. Guess what they're doing. They're figuring out very quickly because their brains are very creative how to outmaneuver you. And this is what happens. They just get better at lying and hiding their behaviors. And if you ask any grown adult that grew up in like the seventies, eighties and nineties that was parented this way, What happened, especially those like my husband, and we joke about it all the time, like he was a bad kid. I love him dearly, but man, he got into trouble. And he just got into trouble all the time. And I was like, what did you learn when your parents punished you, took things away, grounded you, what did you learn? And he said, I learned how to get, how to be better at it. I learned how to be better than them. I learned what I needed to do to stay under the radar. I learned how to manipulate them. I learned how to lie better. These are all strategies that I learned. Guess what? Those are all the things that, that line up perfectly with addiction, which my husband is in recovery and has been for very long, a very long time. And he's like, those were the early symptoms. Those are the early things that I learned how to do that just supported my addictive behaviors later in life. Yeah. Because when your parents punish you or reward you, research tells us that children will choose the wrong choice if they think they can get away with it. They will choose the wrong choice, wrong air quotes, right? The thing that you don't want them to do. They'll choose that if they think they can get away with it. And like I said, they have way more time to put effort and energy into figuring out how to lie and manipulate the situation so that they can get what they want. Right. If they, if you're like, you can't know cookies after dinner or no cookies before dinner or whatever. Right. And they're like, I want a cookie. They're going to figure out how to get a cookie and not get blamed for taking a cookie. That's what they're going to do. If what you do is punish them because they're not developing a moral compass. They're not making decisions between what they. recognize as right and wrong. They're making decisions based on can I get away with this or not? So punishing them and our society does this too. And I don't agree with that either, but like punishing them starts to create this dynamic. Number two is that the biggest cost of punishing your child is the parent child relationship because when children fear you trust is eroded, and raising a confident empathetic child relies on a strong parent child bond. And this bond is rooted in years of work and effort and practices and connection. And every time you yell, every time you threaten, every time you punish them, you're eroding that connection a little bit more. And why is this important? Because we are nervous system beings, right? We've got nervous systems. We've got brains in our central nervous system and our peripheral nervous system and all the sciencey inside the body stuff. And when you are yelling, when you're threatening, when you're punishing, you are triggering the fight or flight response. And every time the fight or flight response gets triggered, Your child feels less and less safe and they feel less and less in control of who they are and how they show up in the world. If you are a parent that is thinking, man, I can barely maintain control of my six year old now. I don't want to know. We'll see what's going to happen in another, you know, five years. Chances are you're using a punishment reward system with them. Because that, that, like, as a therapist, people would come to me with their like seven or eight year olds and they're like, Oh, they used to be so easy when they were little and now they're just getting so much harder and parenting is getting so much harder and things are getting so much harder. And that is a really good indication that the priority is not connection. When the priority is connection in your relationship with your child, you're setting them up to be empathetic, to be well rounded, to be confident. And when that's the case. Then you have a kid that you can say, Hey, can you help me out with this thing? Hey, and you can screw up, you can make mistakes, you can raise your voice. And then you go and you make a repair and they go, I get it. Like it happens. Well, it happens to all of us. And if you are positioning yourself I guess for lack of better terms, right in the parenting journey, parenting and connection should get deeper and easier as they age. But most often I hear from people from moms and dads, from parents in general, that parenting gets harder after the age of 10. That's a belief system. That's a perspective. You can choose to believe it or not. But that, when we focus on connection, that shifts. And number three, right? Three things that children learn from punishment. Number three is their brain development is negatively impacted. So the, you have a developing brain that's learning how to navigate emotions and experiences and relationships. And when you punish, you trigger their fight or flight response, which is part of the brain. And that decreases their ability to manage stress, which creates an increase in angry outbursts, anxiety, and misbehavior. All of those things come as a result of actually changing the pathways in the brain. So if you think about the brain I live in the Northeast, it's, we're just moving into the springtime, even though we have a ton of snow. When all that snow melts, every dirt road around here, cause I live in the country will be filled with ruts, ruts from trucks, ruts from school buses, ruts from water running down. In every year, those ruts are a little bit different because it just depends on what's, how things are defrosting and what water is running where and who's driving on them to make ruts before it freezes again, right? But if you think about the brain as having these ruts in them, those ruts are our neural connections and we can, they can get deeper and deeper and deeper and we can get stuck in them more and more and more. So this is the kid that like is maybe getting punished more, is getting Treated ne. It has like a negative, uh, parental experience, and they're getting more and more angry. They're having more angry outbursts. That just becomes norm more and more the norm. So when they're two and having angry outbursts versus when they're six versus when they're 12 versus when they're 16, they get deeper and deeper and deeper. Part of the reason those get worse is not just because of physical size. It's become the systems become more entrenched, and our job as parents is to help them continue to rewire those so that just because you've had a negative experience doesn't mean. You can't still have positive experiences, but when the ruts stay the same, when the same people drive over the same, you know, the same heavy trucks drive over the same areas of muddy road over and over and over again. Those, and when everything finally dries out in the summer, those ruts are going to stay there and they're going to be there next fall and they're going to be there next winter and it's going to continue and continue and continue and get worse and worse and worse. Our job is to be like the grader that comes along and drops dirt and you know, uh, rakes it all up and levels everything out. Our job is to help them. That's called resiliency. Her job is to help them learn to regulate their emotions, to feel connected. And all of that is rooted in her ability. To connect with them. So if you're like, that's what I want that's what you focus on that punishment and reward needs to go away and If you're still having like these nagging thoughts like oh, but what will happen? I promise you In a very short period of time if you start working with your kids Start focusing on connection start working on your own triggers What will start to happen is you'll start to see a dramatic shift. I see this in the families that I work with all the time, all the time. Families that come to me and say, you don't understand. My kid's difficult. You don't understand. This is the way we've always been. You don't understand. It's never going to get better. My kid has this diagnosis or that diagnosis. I need you to hear this and hear it. Like, listen to it again. If you need to. Everything. is fixable. Everything can be changed. You have the ability to become the mom, to become the parent that you desire to be. And then when you do that, you can bring them along on the journey with you. But first you've got to believe it's possible. So that's it for today, guys. Thank you so much for being here. And I will see you again next week. Take care.