Читать книгу The Highly Sensitive Child: Helping our children thrive when the world overwhelms them - Elaine N. Aron, Elaine N. Aron Ph.D. - Страница 40

Mitchell’s mother did not realize that she and her son were both highly sensitive. Sharon had been raised in a pretty tough, not very sensitive family. She did not remember consciously adapting to them. She just did.

But she was very sensitive to her new baby, Mitchell. She loved to sing, and she could not miss the signs that her baby did not like to be sung to. When he was older, he did not like to sing either—at least not in the children’s choir in which she had planned to see him shine. Sharon was equally frustrated when he would not wear a costume at Halloween and still needed a pacifier at four. And she was sad that “he couldn’t initiate—I saw him as always the follower, the imitator, never the leader.”

Then a speaker came to Mitchell’s preschool and talked about sensitive children. “Suddenly,” Sharon said, “the light went on.” She went on to tell me how much she wishes she had understood sooner and “gotten out of my own way and stopped judging my parenting. Deep down I had known what to do. But I was not doing it and was blaming myself for the results, especially when the rest of the family thought there was something wrong with what I was doing. Now all that is over. I mold myself to fit his behavior. I let him tell me what he needs.

“And he has so many wonderful qualities, too—his sweetness and gentleness. So if he doesn’t want to run off and do a skit at our family reunion, now it’s not a big deal to me. It’s almost a pleasure to say, ‘No, he doesn’t want to do it.’ It feels good to understand so well when others don’t.”