I'm posting about what I am reading in this book for several reasons. 1. to help me understand and remember what I"m reading better 2. to possibly help other people who deal with my children to understand them better 3. as a reminder to myself of this information everytime I re-read this.
It's nice to hear that you're not alone. As she says, "Being the parent of a spirited child can be lonely. Because they are "more" much of the advice that works for parenting other children is ineffective with spirited kids.......As a result you can feel crazy, wondering what you did wrong and thinking that you are the only parent in the world with a kid who act this way."
This passage really resonates for me:
Your "awakening" might have come with the birth of a second child-one who slept through the family gatherings instead of screaming and let you dress her in a frilly dress instead of ripping at the lace. Or it could have been the birth of your sister-in-law's child, the one who could be laid down anywhere and promptly went to sleep. Your sister-in-law proudly beamed as though she had done something right, while your child continued to fume and fuss, causing all the eyes in the room to turn to you, silently accusing, "What's wrong with yours?" Your intuition has fought the stares and the indictments brought against you, knowing, believing that this child was tougher to parent, but not quite sure if you were right, and if you were, you didn't know why."
Basically the book explains that nature gives your child their temperment, nurture can't change that. Nurture can only teach your child ways to deal with that temperment-both to use it's advantages and to control the disadvantages. Very comforting to someone who has intuitively felt that she didn't cause her children's temperment! And comforting because it gives me hope that I can still do something to help. A valuable lesson even if you don't have a "spirited child."
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2 comments:
Well, Steph! I had a spirited child and that was Tom. Bill was a very less spirited child. He was the child in the book that would fall asleep in a moving car and stay asleep. He would stop at what he was doing if you told him to stop and then start crying cuz he thought he did something wrong. Now the opposite was in Tom, the more you told him to stop the more he would do it, whatever he was doing. So, I guess you would say he was a spirited child. I see a lot of spirited children from crossing for so many years. Yes, it is amazing you aren't alone when it comes to active kids. When my son was young his doctor told me that he would out-grow the spirited stage and he did. So he said to be patient and take one day at a time. He didn't believe in giving medicine to kids to calm them down. The only thing he advise me on was to watch the sugar intake on his food that he ate. Tom didn't need sugar to make him have energy, all it took for him was a 5 minute nap, LOL.
Yes, I can see Tom being a spirited child, especially from the stories I heard. And I have a sneaking suspicion that you were too Sue.
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