Читать книгу The Fussy Baby Book: Parenting your high-need child from birth to five - Martha Sears - Страница 22

As difficult as it was to do when Hayden became irritable to irritating, we had to maintain a peaceful presence.

We learned that with Hayden there were certain places that were not suitable for confrontations. (The problem with this insight was that we were often not disciplined enough ourselves to wait for a better time and place.) One of these times, as every parent knows, was mealtime. One of these places was the car. If Hayden felt pushed into a corner, she would typically lash out physically and hit or kick something. One memorable occasion was when she was in the front passenger seat. She was reacting strongly to something I was telling her. Knowing she tended to get physical, I should have backed off until we were in a less confined space, but I didn’t. We still have the broken door on the glove compartment to remind us of that mistake.

Because Hayden was a challenge to our discipline skills, we were forced to get to know her in a way we had not experienced with our sons. The endless hours spent parenting Hayden produced a deep knowledge of who she was as a person, and this in turn helped her understand herself as a person. Rather than muzzling her, by responding to Hayden we rewarded her for being an expressive person. She became a master at expressing her needs and engaging the resources of adult caregivers at a very early age. She was a very resourceful three-year-old. The ability to express herself is an asset that will serve Hayden well as an adult.

As we watched Hayden dominate her peers in playgroups, we saw why she had earned the label “bossy”. Like a quarterback addressing a huddle, she commanded all the kids’ attention, and they lined up to listen as she told them how they were going to play the game. Now, we watch her dominate student council meetings in our living room, and we marvel at how she works on the members until they agree with her point of view.

Hayden early on caused us to re-evaluate the issue of control. We gradually figured out that the child shouldn’t control the parents, or the parents control the child. Yet parents must control situations; when there is no limit-setting, family life is a disaster. We needed to be in charge of Hayden, to give her “house rules” and then control her environment so that it was not difficult for her to comply with these rules.

We were unprepared for the strong-mindedness we encountered in Hayden as a toddler. The older children had responded well to verbal cues. Hayden seemed not to hear us. So, rather than be constantly yelling “no, don’t touch” (which was futile), we taught her that throughout the house there were “yes-touches” and “no-touches”. Our job included making the “yes-touches” more accessible to her than the forbidden things. Hayden could operate from her own inner controls in a setting that communicated order and structure of some sort. (Every family will do this differently.) When she had the opportunity to behave properly, independent of endless no’s from us, she would start to get a sense of her own inner controls. When she’s older and on her own, this set of inner rules will help her operate responsibly and confidently on her own. She’ll feel right when she follows the rules and won’t feel right when she doesn’t. And we learned that in order to set limits and model desirable behaviour, we ourselves had to be disciplined.