Читать книгу The Fussy Baby Book: Parenting your high-need child from birth to five - Martha Sears - Страница 21

Our job was not to prevent frustrations in Hayden’s life, but rather to help her learn how to manage them.

Continuing to command Hayden’s respect was one of our most difficult challenges at every stage of her development, and especially important when it came to the issue of talking back. When she became disrespectful toward Martha, I would quickly intervene, “Hayden, I will not tolerate you talking like that, especially to someone I love.”

It’s easy for a child with a dominating personality to overpower the parents. Out of sheer exhaustion you give up, give in, and take the path of least resistance. Early on, we feared that because of her persistent personality Hayden would have difficulty accepting authority figures. (Our fears were later confirmed.) Dealing with Hayden was a constant contest of wits and wills. Sometimes we simply had to put on our parent-in-charge hat and say, “I’m the parent, you’re the child, that’s that!” Other times we had to walk with her for a while on her path before gradually rerouting her onto ours. This forced us to divide our conflicts into “biggies” (non-negotiable situations that required her compliance) and “smallies” (trivial, yet annoying, situations that threatened neither Hayden’s respect for us nor her emerging self-image).

Early on we realized that learning to live with Hayden meant channelling her unique personality traits to work not only to her advantage but also to our advantage. Her keen awareness made her more sensitive to our moods, so we learned that when Hayden was being childish we had to be “adultish”. Hayden taught us the concept of mirroring: children, especially hypersensitive ones, easily pick up their parents’ moods. If a tantrum was about to erupt and we reflected an “it’s okay, no problem” attitude, she would often mirror our peace and settle down. If we let ourselves get angry or worried about the tantrum, our anxiety just added fuel to her fire. When Hayden protested our instructions and flew into a rage, we needed to stay calm. When she lost her self-control, we had to hang on to ours. If we lost our composure – and many times we did – it took twice as long for her to settle down. Acting like the adult in charge set a calmer mood that helped put a crumbling child back together.