I noticed this post on another blog (Susan Heim on Parenting) and thought it was great and wanted to share it with my readers. I personally have a strong-willed child and it is a struggle sometimes.
While there’s no doubt that it’s a challenge having a child who seems to
challenge everything, there are ways to work with them rather than
against them to preserve and nurture their unique gifts. Maintaining a
healthy parent/child relationship is vital as you work to find a balance
between setting limits with your richly spirited child while not
limiting their freedom to stretch and grow and develop into the person
they were created to be.
The key to preserving your trust relationship with your child is
remaining calm and present and supportive, even while setting and
maintaining reasonable boundaries. It is helpful to remember that the
most strong-willed children tend to be the ones who identify the most
strongly with their parents. So instead of viewing their seemingly
constant challenges as defiance or attempts to thwart authority, work to
parent from a place of understanding that your strong-willed child is
actually on a discovery mission and is doing endless 'research' on you
by testing and retesting and digging and chiseling to discover all of
your quirks and foibles and ups and downs and strengths and weaknesses.
This kind of testing isn’t negative unless you make it into a battle of
wills instead of responding with gentle, respectful guidance. Taking
this stance will help you to keep from seeing the challenges as personal
insults and, instead, see the challenges as attempts to learn and grow
and understand.
There is no doubt, though, that parenting a child with the gift of a
strong will is a constant exercise in patience and self-regulation. The
personal growth you will experience is invaluable as you seek to parent
with empathy and wisdom and compassion, but it can be draining and will
often stretch you far, far out of your comfort zone. Knowing that and
being prepared for it will help you cope with the inevitable stresses,
and being ready ahead of time with some specific strategies for handling
the challenges will help you to respond calmly and effectively.
This is a good place to revisit the Three C’s of gentle discipline -- Connection, Communication, and Cooperation.
Connection ~ Maintaining a secure connection with your
spirited child is vital. It is the springboard from which all of your
interactions with your child will originate, and it is the touchstone to
which you will both return, again and again and again, when your
relationship gets strained and stained and stretched.
• Play word games, board games, rough-and-tumble outdoor games,
silly face in the mirror games. Play is the language of childhood, so
make sure to speak your child’s language every day.
• Laugh together. Humor is an undervalued parenting tool. But it
lowers defenses, inspires smiles, brings people together, and reconnects
hearts.
• Read storybooks, chapter books, travel brochures, encyclopedias,
anything that will inspire you to dream together, talk, plan, get
excited, share interests.
• Focus more on who your child is than on what your child does.
Remember, you’re growing a person, not fixing a problem. So make sure to
spend time getting to know the person, not just the child. It doesn’t
have to cost anything. Just walk together, talk together, share ice
cream cones, spot shapes in the clouds, and enjoy each other.
Communication ~ Children have their own ‘inner world’ of thoughts
and plans and problems and worries and hopes and dreams that are
occupying their time and attention, so a lack of cooperation is often
simply the result of having a different agenda than we do. Getting some
insight into that ‘inner world’ is key in guiding and growing them
respectfully.
• Listen with your heart. Listen ‘between the lines’ to what your
child is communicating through their behavior. Listen and listen and
listen some more. That is always, always the first step in communicating
with your child.
• Reflect, connect, and redirect. Reflect what you hear, whether
it’s communicated by your child’s behavior or their words. This not only
validates their emotions and lets them know that you hear and
understand them, but it also helps them to understand their own
emotions. For instance, if your child is upset that he can’t have a
cookie after brushing his teeth for bedtime, try saying, “I hear you.
You’re upset because you want a cookie.” Then reestablish your
connection, “I like cookies, too!” and offer a solution, “How about we
go pick out the two best cookies and put them in a special container
that we can take to the park in the morning?”
• Don’t take non-compliance as a personal insult. A strong-willed
child is very much their own person with their own agenda. Focus on
inviting cooperation instead of demanding obedience. Whether it’s
staying in bed or cleaning up or whatever the issue, make it a team
effort and come up with a game plan ahead of time. For example, you
could say, “You seem to be having trouble staying in bed at night. What
do you think would help you to be more ready to go to sleep when it’s
time for bed?” or “It’s important to pick up our things so they don’t
get broken, let’s put on the timer and work together for ten minutes and
see who gets the most picked up.”
• Make a firm commitment not to resort to punishments to control
behavior. The resentment that comes from being punished absolves
children in their own minds of responsibility. It doesn’t teach them
responsibility, and resentment can actually cause a lot of the behaviors
you are trying to avoid.
• Communicate daily, outwardly to your child and inwardly to
yourself, the positive aspects of your child’s personality. When the
focus is on ‘fixing’ a child, they get the message that they are somehow
broken, and that is not a healthy self-image to take into adulthood.
• ‘No’ is not a complete thought. It is an imperative, a command. It
doesn’t teach. It tells. If you want your child to learn to think like
an adult, take the time to explain your adult thinking.
• Remember that children, especially when they are upset, open
‘conversations’ through their behavior, and it’s up to us, the only
adults in the relationship, to gently guide them toward continuing those
conversations verbally as well as equipping them with the resources to
be able to do so.
• Also keep in mind that the social mores of rudeness simply aren't
inborn and don't apply to early interactions with our children. They are
learned by imitating how we as parents behave. Politeness is a heart
issue that cannot be imposed by the will of another unless we want it to
only be an external façade instead of a heartfelt courtesy. Helping
your strong-willed child learn to speak kindly means speaking kindly to
your child as well as offering guidance when they’ve been rude such as
saying, "That is not a nice tone of voice" or "That isn't a kind thing
to say" and then offering a do-over "Can you try saying that to me again
more nicely? I'll always try my best to be nice to you, and I would
like you to try to do the same for me." (see Appendix B for more ideas)
Cooperation ~ Always keep at the forefront of your parenting
goals that you are seeking thoughtful cooperation, not mindless
compliance. That way you will remember to treat your child as a
thoughtful individual with ideas and needs and feelings of their own
instead of a mindless drone there to do your bidding.
• Set clear limits and explain them in age-appropriate terms.
Remember, if you want to invite cooperation, you have to actually issue
the invitation to cooperate!
• Limit the number of limits. Spirited children are often stressed
children simply because of their own intense emotions and reactions to
things, so set them up for success by keeping your limits few and clear
and by maintaining them consistently.
• Make sure to let your child have a voice in determining the limits
so they feel like they have some control over their lives and so they
feel some ownership over the limits.
• Brainstorm together ways of helping everyone to work together.
Some ideas are to come up with hand signals or words that remain your
little secret codes to indicate when it’s time to leave the park or to
do homework or to dial the activity level or noise volume down a few
notches.
• Invite cooperation by creating daily routines together. Don’t be
surprised if your child ends up being the one who is a stickler for
following the routine, even to the point of nagging you to follow it. These gifted children tend to be all-in, fully focused and committed, and they’ll expect you to be the same!
• Cooperate with your child’s needs and personality by working with
them rather than against them. For instance, if you know that your child
has a hard time leaving a project, give them plenty of time to find a
good stopping point when you need them to leave it for a while. Or if
you know that your child has a hard time following directions at
bedtime, try writing or drawing the tasks that need to be done (i.e.
toothbrushing, pajamas, etc.) on ping-pong balls and put them in a small
‘bedtime jar’ so your child can feel some control over their routine as
they independently pick out the balls one by one for a ‘surprise’
nighttime order of tasks or take them all out and decide what order to
do them in themselves.
• If you are already locked in a head-to-head power struggle, put
away your boxing gloves so your child will (eventually!) feel safe
putting away theirs. When you battle with your child, you may win a
skirmish or two, but you will lose the treasure … your trust
relationship. Putting away the gloves means slowing down, breathing
through your own emotions, and finding a way to work through the issue
together. Remember, you’re the adult in the relationship, but that
doesn’t give you the right to overpower your child; it gives you the
responsibility to empower your child. That involves modeling the tools
of diplomacy -- communication, cooperation, compromise -- that you want
your child to stock in their own emotional toolkit.
Remember, the children who come into the world with their 'boxing
gloves on' so to speak are often the ones who become the biggest world
changers. It's not easy raising these little world-changers, I know (Believe me, I know. Two of my six are world-changers-in-the-making!)
, but the rewards are phenomenal!
About the Author:
Best-selling parenting and children’s book author and mother of six,
L.R. Knost, is an independent child development researcher and founder
and director of the advocacy and consulting group, Little Hearts/Gentle
Parenting Resources. Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages and Whispers Through Time: Communication Through the Ages and Stages of Childhood are the first in her Little Hearts Handbooks series of parenting guides. The newest book in the series, The Gentle Parent: Positive, Practical, Effective Discipline was just released on November 1, 2013. Other works by this award-winning author include the children's picture books Petey’s Listening Ears, and the soon-to-be-released Grumpykins
series for ages 2 to 6, which are humorous and engaging tools for
parents, teachers, and caregivers to use in implementing gentle
parenting techniques in their homes and schools.
