Читать книгу The Fussy Baby Book: Parenting your high-need child from birth to five - Martha Sears - Страница 41

“Temperament” describes the basic emotional wiring of your baby. How your baby expresses her unique wiring is through her personality. What kind of person your child becomes depends on her inborn temperament (nature) and your responses to it (nurture). Temperament is not “good” or “bad”; it is simply the way your baby is. A vital part of living with your baby’s temperament is to know how to respond to it. There will be times you need to mellow a fussy baby or perk up a laid-back one.

It’s important to know not only the temperament of your baby but yours too. Parent and baby need to find a way to fit. This little word so economically describes the relationship between parent and baby. Some pairs fit together more easily, while some mothers and fathers and their babies have to make a few adjustments along the way to improve the fit. If your baby has high needs and a persistent personality that demands that those needs be met, and you are a person who loves to be in control and to have your life run in a smooth, predictable routine, you and your baby will both have to do some adjusting. It may be easier for a laid-back mother who by nature “goes with the flow” to cope with the unpredictable demands of a high-need baby.

The goal of parenting a high-need baby is to allow baby and parent to shape each other’s behaviour so that personalities mesh rather than clash, and eventually you will bring out the best in each other.

A responsive, flexible, nurturing mother is a good match for a high-need baby. This baby challenges the mother’s abilities and keeps her interested in her job, while the mother mellows the baby’s temperament by helping her feel right most of the time. The attachment style of parenting really pays off in developing a good fit. The hours you spend each day in high-touch, responsive parenting will naturally help you and your baby fit. Initially, you may have to work at it, but you will be surprised how the fit develops naturally – as long as you practise a responsive style of parenting that lets it happen. When mother and infant fit, they will roll smoothly along the road of life together; if they fit poorly, the road is likely to be bumpy.

Along with their unpredictability, these children show extremes of mood swings. When happy, they are a joy to be around; they are master charmers and people pleasers. When angry, they let everyone around them feel the heat.

The child’s unpredictability makes your day unpredictable. Do you take him shopping and risk a mega-tantrum when his first grocery grabs are thwarted, or will this be a day when he is the model shopping-trolley baby, charming everyone at the checkout counter?

When he is happy, he is the happiest baby around, but when he is angry he is the worst baby around. He is still that way, sunshine and smiles, anger and daggers. He has no middle emotion.

We have a theory that certain types of children show up in families that have certain areas in which they need to grow. When Hayden came along, our life had settled into a level of predictability that was quite comfortable, possibly heading for the “stale” category. We had three sons, easygoing types who liked sports and eagerly marched to the beat of the drummer in our family (Bill). We had similar interests professionally – we worked in paediatric settings, pursued writing together, and Martha’s interest in childbirth education and breast-feeding counselling fitted right into our paediatric setting. If Hayden hadn’t come along to introduce us to unpredictability, our work as authors would probably have begun and ended with one book (and even that one book might have turned out to be “plain vanilla”). Meeting the challenge of this “different” baby forced us to discover our creative selves. Hayden taught us that life with a high-need child is never boring.