Many parents read parenting books to gain awareness and find advice on how to raise their toddlers. There are a wide variety of parenting books out there, and it is important to remember that not all of them will contain information that is helpful or a good fit for your family. Parenting is such a highly personal thing, in fact I would venture to say that how a family decides to raise their children is one of the most deeply personal choices that they will ever make. It’s not a one time thing, either. Parenting choices are made on a daily basis, and parents are constantly evaluating what works and what does not, what strategies are a good fit for their families and which are best left for others.
One of the books that I have found to be a good fit for my family is “Raising Your Spirited Child” by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. I first came upon the book about a year ago, as Dylan’s personality began to emerge and I was able to begin to see who he is. What led me to pick up the book and begin reading it is that I was previewing it online and I saw within the first few pages a description of who a spirited child is. That description, which says that spirited children are normal children who are “more” intense, perceptive, persistent, and uncomfortable with change than other children, fit right in with what I was experiencing.
The first spirited child trait that I noticed in Dylan, and the one that led me to seek information about children and their personalities, is intensity. Whether he is shouting loudly and riding his toy airplane across the floor at top speed or focusing single mindedly on twisting a lid on and off of a container, everything that he does is done with great intensity. Sometimes, his intensity would leave me feeling at a loss for what to do, and that is why I went looking for information about children who are temperamentally intense. I knew that there was not anything wrong with him, I just wanted to know how I could better appreciate his intensity and parent him in a way that acknowledges who he is. What I found is that there are some very helpful strategies for parenting children who experience both the good and the bad, the high and the low, with great intensity. Tomorrow I will share some of my experiences with these strategies and how they have worked for us.