Welcome to Raising Your Spirited Child. I’m Mary, your guide, licensed teacher of parents and children, fellow parent of spirited children, now all grown up.
Yes, there is hope! Today I am in the position of enjoying the companionship of wonderful “spirited” adults, having survived adolescence—which really wasn’t bad at all—and have even had the pleasure of watching my son choose a delightfully spirited young woman to be his wife.
I’m pleased to testify that the information and strategies presented in Raising Your Spirited Child have soundly stood the test of time.
When I first sat down to write the original version of Raising Your Spirited Child, I was a mother of little ones, teaching classes for parents through the Minnesota Early Childhood Family Edu- cation Program.
At the time, I was frustrated by the existing curriculums and secretly needed to talk with other parents who understood what it was like to live with a child who could scream for forty-five minutes because his toast had been cut in triangles when he was expecting rectangles.
The kind of kid who would rather die than take no for an answer and knew the perfect trigger to “push my buttons.
” The kind of kid the existing parenting books either failed to address or did so in terribly negative terms—terms I wasn’t willing to accept.
I brought into those first spirited child classes the latest re- reports and studies of child development, communication,
2 GREETINGS!
personality, temperament, and type. We hashed them over, tore them apart, and figured out ways to use them to help us get resistant little bodies dressed, fed, into bed, or through the grocery store with a little less hassle.
By sharing our stories we allowed each other to peek into our homes, schools, and neighborhoods.
We discovered similarities in the things we worried about and screamed about. We shared the rules that prevailed in our families, the discipline techniques that worked and those that didn’t.
We learned what each of us was doing to build a healthy relationship with our spirited child. Today I can report that what we knew then, through observation, experience, and a bit of intuition is now being confirmed by the neurobiology research.
I’ve included that research in this updated version, along with brand-new stories from the families I work with today. Like their predecessors, they were willing to share with you their questions, fears, favorite strategies, and horror stories.
All the anecdotes are true, the ages accurate, but all the names, places, and descriptive details are those of a storyteller. People, I have found, don’t mind us looking in their window as long as we don’t share their address.
