Published on July 24, 2025
Richard Koestner, a Canadian researcher, teamed up with Richard Ryan to investigate
how control and autonomy affect children. The situation? An art class. In their study,
first and second graders were divided into groups and told they would be participating
in a painting project.
Rules were established for the children to follow while doing their art:
• Being neat and tidy mattered.
• Staying within the lines was important.
• Brushes were to be rinsed when swapping from one paint colour to another.
Other rules were put in place so the children knew the purpose of the activity and how
it was to be assessed. But it was the way these rules were established that set up this
experiment.
One group of children experienced limits being set in an autonomy-restrictive manner.
Here, the adults explained the rules to the children, lecture-style. The other group of
children established their rules with the adults in a collaborative way. Their set-up was
autonomy-supportive.
Here’s what they found.
Setting limits in a controlling and dictatorial way reduced the children’s intrinsic
motivation for the painting activity. It also resulted in less creative art being produced
by the kids.
Comparatively, an autonomy-supportive approach to setting limits (which got the same
results in terms of neatness and cleanliness) led to increased motivation and creativity
on the part of the children in that group.
The autonomy-supportive approach is about collaborative problem-solving within
reasonable limits with parental/adult guidance. Not only that, but it gets better
outcomes than controlling approaches.