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What is an Intense Child?

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This is one of a series of articles from RaisingLifeLongLearners.com. If this article describes your child, please go to Coleen Kessler’s site to read the whole series or sign up for her weekly newsletter.

If you have an intense child, you probably know it. Call them spirited, emotionally intense, difficult, high needs, or challenging…it doesn’t matter.

You know them and you’re tired. And defeated. And sure you’re doing everything all wrong because those parenting books other parents swear by just don’t work for you.

The intense child is more – more emotional, more energetic, more sensitive, more empathetic, more focused, more distracted, more, more, more – than other children.

Characteristics of an Intense Child

If you’re still struggling to determine whether your child is intense or just ill-behaved like everyone seems to think, take a few minutes to look through these characteristics. Do you see your child described? You’re probably dealing with an emotionally intense kiddo that just needs a different parenting approach. Let’s problem solve together.

An intense child is:

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Positive Parent’s Creed

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With the beginning of Spring around the corner, I thought this was a good time to review some of our foundational principles and practices that will help us to be the best parents we can be to the children God has given us.

My husband wrote this Positive Parent’s Creed many years ago and we feel it has stood the test of time in our own parenting and now in your generation of parents. Please consider each one. If you have questions or comments you’d like to make about any of them, please feel free to email me. I’ll be happy to discuss them with you.

The Positive Parent’s Creed

We will let our children know we love them no matter what they do.

* Our children will learn that love is not earned, love is freely given.

We will be honest about our mistakes, remembering to ask our children to forgive us when we fail them or misunderstand them.

* Our children will learn the value of personal honesty instead of hypocrisy.

We will give each child some individual time and attention every day.

*Our children will learn that they are important to us, not a nuisance that we endure.

We will listen to our children as well as talk to them.

* Our children will learn that listening to one another is one of the most loving things we can do for each other.

We will help our children develop a genuine personal faith in God.

* Our children will learn, through our example, the value of a genuine faith.

We will correct our children with love.

*Our children will learn that discipline is an expression of love.

We will teach proper relationship to authority.

*Our children will learn that respect for authority is the key to a successful life.

We will encourage proper independence.

*Our children will develop a strong conscience. They will learn to withstand and overcome the negative pressures around them.

Loneliness

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Here we are at the beginning of another year. While some of you live in warm climates all year, others of you will be living through another cold and snowy winter. It seemed a good time to take a look at loneliness.

I’m no stranger to loneliness. I think it has been a thread that has run through most of my life. You see, I don’t fit in any clear cut box. I never have. There have been a number of different seasons of loneliness in my life. Maybe you can relate to one or another of these.

We can feel lonely because of our own personality and we just don’t make friends easily. We want friends but don’t know how others seem to make them so easily. Hanging around the fringes of others’ community just doesn’t fill our need for closeness.

We can feel lonely because we are the only one we know that is in our situation. That may be a place or a season of life or the age we are and the ages of those around us. We’re the only one nursing her baby or that speaks English or that is younger than 70 and older than 15. Or merely because it is too cold to get out with a baby.

We can feel lonely because we are just too busy to make friends. Friends take time to cultivate and we are out of time and energy to make that happen.

We can feel lonely because we are in a season of God’s silence to us. He may be building our faith that He is there even when we don’t ‘feel’ Him. Or He may be drawing us to a willingness to step out of our comfort zone and learn He can guide us without our sense of awareness of His directions.

A few lessons I’ve learned

This is a big topic with far too many causes and cures. But I want to share a few of the lessons I’ve learned about loneliness.

Loneliness is rarely terminal. Usually the loneliness I’ve experienced has been just for a season. But I believe we do experience a loneliness that won’t be satisfied until we are in our Heavenly Home. That longing draws us on when nothing else seems to help us get through tough times.

But most of our loneliness, no matter what the cause, will end. Sometimes we just have to live through it. When our children are little and it is impossible to have an uninterrupted adult conversation, we are lonely. But in a few years, those babies and toddlers are off to school and then there will be an opportunity to have the deeper friendships we were craving.

When I was in nursing school, there were rotations that I found particularly distasteful. I learned a mental trick that has helped me through other seasons of discomfort. “This will end. Can I do this for (name the period of time)?” My answer was always, “Yes,” because I knew it wasn’t forever. Maybe this will help you endure through your present lonely season.

Each friend can only partially ease my loneliness. One friend doesn’t have to meet all my needs. Each person in my life may supply part of the answer to my loneliness. I have had friends who were as much as 50 years different in age from me, from radically different cultures, different races, Christian or not yet Christian, with very different personalities and so on. I tend to have one or a few close friends at a time and I don’t need a crowd of friends. But at times there didn’t seem to be anyone I could relate to. I found when I made it a matter of prayer, God would open my eyes to someone who could meet at least part of my need.

It required me to step out of my shell and make time for them. I needed to find something we had in common to build the relationship around. It was hard for me when I had to be the one to take the first step, but I was usually met more than half way when I tried.

One caution with this is to not drown the budding friendship with too much time together or too many demands. Savor the time together and wait long enough between visits so that you are really welcome.

Paying too much attention to my feelings of loneliness only made it worse.

Like homesickness, looking at it too long, just makes it feel hopeless that there will ever be an end to the loneliness. Taking note of the good things in my life and purposefully writing them down helps. Getting physically busy, cleaning a closet or rearranging some furniture can help. Telling one prayer partner I need prayer today, even if I didn’t tell them what for, helps me know I’m not really alone.

Some things that can help us in our temporary loneliness:

  • Nothing will make companions magically appear, but we can lift our mood.
  • Remember why you are here! What is your God-given purpose for this season of your life?
  • Shower some extra special attention on your husband and/or child.
  • Cook something especially tasty.
  • Dance for a few minutes.
  • Take a bubble bath or manicure your nails while your baby takes a nap.
  • Keep a favorite magazine open to the next page you want to read the next time you have a minute of solitude.
  • Keep good music with uplifting words playing as much as possible.
  • Write a note to someone you know needs an encouraging word.

Why not send in your own treatments for loneliness? I’ll share them with the group.

The Parents Who Canceled Christmas

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Katia Hetter writes about travel, parenting and culture for CNN.com.

Why Cancel Christmas?

John and Lisa Henderson of Hurricane, Utah, had finally had enough of their little hurricanes. For months, the couple had been trying to teach their three boys, ages 11, 8 and 5, to stop being disrespectful and acting entitled.

“We gave them good warning, either it was time for their behavior to change or there would be consequences,” wrote Lisa Henderson, co-founder of the Over the Big Moon blog, in a recent post.

“We patiently worked with them for several months and guess what, very little changed. One day after a particularly bad display of entitlement John said, ‘We should just cancel Christmas.’ ”

And that’s what they did.

Santa isn’t coming to the Henderson house this year. The family is taking the money that would have been spent on gifts and using it for service projects and helping other people. It’s not like her children suffer from a lack of toys, Lisa Henderson wrote. The family will still decorate and celebrate Christmas as the birth of Christ, and the children will still get presents from other family.

Though they’re taking some heat from critics who call them Scrooges, the gifts these parents are giving their children are so much more important than the latest popular “Star Wars” figure or electronic gadget soon relegated to the dustbin. These gifts will last a lifetime.

The gift of consequences

How many times do parents threaten to take away the television/iPad/favorite toys unless their children start to behave?

If the threats continue but there’s never any follow-through, children come to believe that there aren’t any consequences. They also learn that their parents can’t be trusted to tell the truth. And they develop a nasty habit of manipulating to get what they want.

The Henderson children will probably never doubt their parents’ word again.

The gift of perspective

Henderson knew that her children had plenty to be grateful for, including good food, a nice home and too many toys to count. What they needed was a dose of perspective, which they got. They used the Santa money to start a clothing drive for victims of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and ship the goods overseas. They are also considering participating in an Adopt-a-Grandparent program.

The gift of imagination

The boys aren’t sitting around feeling sorry for themselves. Besides organizing as a family to do good works for others, the boys have responded by making gifts for each other and sneaking them into each child’s stocking.

“They are learning exactly what we wanted them to learn, because they are not moping around feeling sorry for themselves,” she wrote. “They are thinking of others.”

The gift of family

Christmas hasn’t been completely canceled in the Henderson household. What’s been canceled is an overwhelmingly commercial Christmas. Instead of a race to the tree to see what Santa brought, the focus on Christmas morning will be on spending time together with Lisa’s cinnamon rolls, their faith, family games and the opportunity to “truly enjoy the few presents they did get” from grandparents and others.

“While this may not be the best choice for everyone, it feels right for our family right now,” she wrote. “Our kids get to focus on that feeling. I am almost certain this will be the best Christmas they ever have!

Share /Role Play

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Last month I shared ways to help our children learn through play. This month I found this wonderful article by Tanya Marlow about sharing her faith with her son through role-play. What a wonderful time of year to begin using this type of play to teach the story of Jesus’ birth.
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Let Us Play
by Tanya Marlow at: Tanyamarlow.com

“You can be Jesus.” My little boy says this to me last Advent, when we are playing together in my day room on a particularly dark and rainy day.

I can “be Jesus” – he wants me to pretend to be the Son of God, made incarnate as a baby. I sit on the sofa, and in the few seconds I have before I respond to him, I try to sort through the complex emotions surrounding his request.

His favourite thing in the world is role-play, and every day he finds stories to enter into – Superman rescuing an orphan girl, or Cinderella going to the ball, or Aladdin on a magic carpet flying all over the world. The nativity story is just one more story to enter into, and it’s a good one, with secondary characters of angels and shepherds and the best, most holy kind of magic.

He is already talking, bustling around with cushions as props, arranging a stable as he prepares to be Joseph, and I try to catch my thoughts. I can be Jesus. Why am I struggling with the concept? It still feels slightly blasphemous – I think that is my problem. How can I pretend to be Jesus? Am I breaking one of the ten commandments, making a false image of God? What if I get it wrong…?

And there, right there, I realise what is at the heart of my hesitation. Play is dangerous, because I might get it wrong. We might stumble into blasphemy along the way. I am someone who needs to get it right. It feels written through my identity, like a stick of rock: I am someone who does the right thing, and gets it right. I am the good girl.

Playing is a kind of rebellion. To pretend to be God, even in play with my three-year-old, shakes and challenges my very core.

It was about two years ago that I first came across Alice Buckley’s blog, Play on the Word. A friend had recommended it to me as a good resource for parents who want to introduce Jesus to their children. When I read her site, it was utterly revolutionary: at once intuitive and counter-intuitive.

Her thesis is simply this: Children love to play. So the best way to introduce them to Jesus is not just through books or discussions but through play, either with art and craft, messy play (don’t get me started on my hang-ups with making a mess in play…) or role play.

I read her website again: yes, she really did mean role play. But that meant not just acting out lines and the ‘right things’, but improvisation. And that meant departure from the Bible, a filling in of gaps as we explored together how it might have been. Again, that question – what if I get it wrong?

But it felt peculiarly liberating, as I read her website, to realise she was giving me permission to share my faith with my son in his native language, the language of play. I took a deep breath and entered into the story with him.

First I played Mary, and he was the angel Gabriel. This Gabriel was so excited to share the news that his eyes grew wide and he bounced up and down at the annunciation. Then he switched to Joseph, and he was a very protective and organised Joseph.

I was now Mary in the stable, so I dared to play: I groaned, I rubbed my back in agony, I moaned at Joseph to make the pain stop. I said I was worried about giving birth in the dirt.

Joseph, to his credit, stroked my hair and told me he had found a broom, and started sweeping out the stable. Then he stopped, because there, on our blue and white carpet, was a one-penny piece.

“Mary!” my boy exclaimed. “Look! I’ve found some money. I’ll just go out to the shops and buy a present for baby Jesus so he has a toy to play with!”

It was entirely anachronistic, and entirely perfect.

I am exploring what it means to have a theology of play. Alice Buckley is helping me with that, as is my now four-year-old. I am more relaxed about it than I was last year, and I am catching some of that excitement of what it means to enter into the story. Play is a rebellion, but not against God, against my perfectionist and control-freak tendencies.

I still can’t articulate it properly – I feel like I’m on the cusp of discovering something more about myself, and creativity, and meditation, and God. I am the person who likes to be able to explain everything – but I can’t talk it, and I can’t fully write it, but I feel it, and I am experiencing it.

I am wondering if we are designed for play, even as adults. I am wondering if God likes to play, too.

“You can be Jesus now,” he says, and in a matter of seconds before we start the next part of our play, I consider how to be Jesus.

Through my head runs the mystery of God who created outer space contained in a dark womb for nine months, God who shaped the blue whale gripping onto Mary’s thumb, the Creator who spoke roaring waves into existence screaming with tiny lungs.
“Goo goo, ga ga,” I said, and as I look up at my son from the carpet, I gaze with fresh wonder.
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Thank you, Tanya, for sharing your experience and your thoughts on sharing your faith through role play.
Why not try some role play with your little one this Christmas season? If your baby is too young to role play, take the time to tell the wonderful Christmas story. Your child will absorb your enthusiasm and begin to love one of the greatest stories ever told!