Beyond your friends and family (who all have lots of well-intended suggestions!), there are plenty of other parenting resources including books, blogs, classes, and even TV shows. I’ve dipped my toe in all of them, but one book stands out above and beyond all the rest.
Raising Your Spirited Child, a guide for parents whose child is more intense, sensitive, perceptive, persistent, energetic, by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, is that book. Whether it’s right for you depends on your child, but it changed the way I parented at a time when I desperately needed some help with my two-year-old. The book starts out with a discussion of negative vs. positive labels and their impact on kids. From her list of negative labels, the ones that rang true to me were demanding, picky, argumentative, and stubborn. Whether I was using these words out loud or just in my head, they weren’t helping.
The list of things my son couldn’t tolerate was long and varied, but included smelly body odor, loud noises, birthday cake, bright sunshine, crinkles in his socks, the feel of denim, an upside down binky in his baby brother’s mouth (he would wake him to turn it right-side-up) and people who took their shoes off at our house. All kids are picky, but I didn’t know what to do with a kid who would freak out if an electrical socket didn’t have a safety cover. I carried those damn safety covers with me everywhere, leaving them in every public restroom and friend’s house we visited, just to avoid epic temper tantrums.
This book taught me that rather than the negative labels, I could change my thinking and substitute the word “spirited.” It felt fake at first, but it actually worked. He wasn’t going out of my way to make my life insanely difficult. It was just that he perceived the world very differently than I did. It was frequently just too much for him. Knowing that helped me find ways to turn down the volume in his world. Some might think he had Sensory Integration Disorder (I did too), but now that we’re on the other side of this, I can say he’s outgrown the vast majority of his spirited ways.
If you’re still in the younger years with your kids and any of what I’ve written sounds familiar, you might want to check this book out. Or, if you’ve moved on to the older years, Kurcinka has another one called Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles that may be a better fit for you.
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