Читать книгу The Fussy Baby Book: Parenting your high-need child from birth to five - Martha Sears - Страница 26

As Hayden grew, her neediness remained but her personality blossomed. One of the earliest qualities we noticed was her sensitivity, her ability to care and comfort when playmates were hurt or upset. As a preschooler, she had already developed a keen sense of justice and social values. Often she would say, “That’s not right” or “How sad.” Her love of people and her ability to connect with them was another payoff we witnessed. She would be aware of other children who needed mothering, and she would do what she could to help. Her sense of intimacy was appropriate, giving eye contact or a touch on the arm during a conversation. She had a confident way of being in the presence of adults. A child psychiatrist who was at our home one evening remarked, “Hayden knows where her body is in space.” We knew what that meant. Because she had been held and nursed and responded to appropriately, Hayden already had a good sense of herself as a unique physical presence and she responded to others in their uniqueness. She was able even then to affirm each person she met. Since Hayden was used to being understood and responded to, she could express herself comfortably. This ability, combined with her high energy, caused us to joke about our “Sarah Bernhardt”. It’s no wonder that through her grade school and high school years, she enjoyed and excelled at being onstage. Her chosen course of study in college, if you haven’t already guessed, is psychology and drama.

As Hayden matured as a person, we were maturing as parents. Gradually and subtly our parenting style, besides being nurturing to Hayden, became a source of growth for us. Hayden’s high needs caused us to stretch ourselves to higher levels of giving with the ever-present challenge of balancing Hayden’s needs with the rest of the family’s. Hayden opened us up to be more flexible, more patient, and more disciplined. We came to realize that, although there are a few basic principles of good parenting that apply to every child and every temperament, how parents apply these principles is affected, for better or for worse, by the need level of the child. Compliant babies who can be put down in a cot while awake and who fall asleep on their own will accept a less intensive style of nighttime parenting. Compliant children will often switch gears from their agenda to their parents’ at the slightest suggestion and come immediately when called to dinner from a distance. High-need children, on the other hand, need an eye-to-eye summons before switching from their agenda to yours.

Parenting high-need children has matured us as individuals, too. High-need children push buttons that reveal pleasant and unpleasant scenes from our childhoods. Parenting Hayden led us to make personal discoveries about how we ourselves were parented, and how this was affecting us as adults. When these flashbacks surfaced, we soon learned which ones we could use to our parenting advantage and which ones to discard, for example, the impulse to smack. Some people would have considered Hayden’s behaviour cause for smacking, but we realized that she needed a different kind of “hands-on” discipline.

Hayden also caused our marriage to mature. We became very different partners as a result of our experience with parenting a high-need child. We knew that the best parenting requires two parents in the home. As tempting as it was for Martha to throw herself totally into mothering, she wisely directed some energy toward me. We have become much more sensitive to each other’s temperaments and better at anticipating each other’s needs. We have continued to avail ourselves of marriage-enrichment opportunities and plain old “enjoying time” together often.

Now that Hayden is about to leave the nest and enter college, we look back at our parenting with few regrets. We cannot take all the credit or blame for the person she becomes, yet it’s comforting to know we gave her a good start. The rest is up to Hayden.

Hayden has gone from being a high-need child to a high-energy teen. Her life as a baby is chronicled in our earlier book The Fussy Baby. She sometimes opens that book and shows her friends, “That’s me.” One prom night, as she stood posed for her picture, she looked so grown up in her formal gown. I whispered to Martha, “Fussy baby fills out”, and this mature teen-woman gave her daddy a wink. As she was escorted out the door, our minds and hearts filled with flashbacks of those countless energy-draining scenes of babyhood, toddlerhood, and childhood. Martha and I looked at each other and thought, “It’s been a long and bumpy road, yet all that time in arms, at breast, and in our bed, the many discipline confrontations, and the years of high-touch parenting have produced a confident, compassionate, caring person. It has all been worthwhile.”