LJ016: You Don't Need to Bring School Home [Parenting]

This week, we're sharing the first episode in our Parenting series, in which we'll explore our relationships with our children. We are excited to bring this new lens into our conversation! We decided to start this series with school, because it's a significant part of many children's lives. Yet, we don't need to bring school home. When it comes to our relationships with our children, life can be so much bigger than school. We can choose to put it in perspective as just one aspect of their lives.

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!

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EPISODE QUESTIONS

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1. How does it feel to contemplate prioritizing your child, and your relationship with your child, over their school grades?

2. What was your school experience growing up? Considering what we talked about in episode 3 about how people are different—and children are people too—how is your child different from you as a child? How is their school experience different from yours?

3. What are some aspects of school that you might consider not enforcing at home? Where might you consider your child’s needs more important than the school’s expectations? What might that look like?

4. Does your story of your child change when you don’t include how they perform at school? If so, how? Which feels better? Which feels more true to the person your child is?

TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We're happy you're here exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world.

If you're new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some foundational relationship ideas in the first 14 episodes and have really enjoyed how they're building on one another.

If you've already been enjoying the podcast, we would love it if you could share it with someone in your life that you think might benefit from contemplating these ideas. It's super easy to share. Just send them to podcast.show/living joyfully. They can listen and read the show notes right there, or they can pick their favorite podcast player and it'll take them to the show. So, thank you so much for helping us spread the word.

And this is our first episode in our parenting series in which we'll explore our relationships with our children. And I am really excited to bring this lens into our conversation. Now, we decided to start the conversation in this series with school because it's a significant part of most children's lives. Yet, spoiler alert, we don't need to bring school home.

When it comes to our relationships with our children, life is so much bigger than school. That said, it can be hard to remember that in the thick of things while you're figuring out the day-to-day logistics of getting kids to and from school, of packing lunches, of finishing homework, of getting paperwork signed. But it's true.

When we can take a moment to release the artificial urgency that's often generated by those schedules (and check out episode eight, There's Plenty of Time, if that is feeling hard) it can be invigorating to remember that life is so much more than that. Our relati