Your Child's Journey

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Intensity

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This month I am continuing with more from the book, Raising Your Spirited Child by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. The topic is Intensity. Some of you are blessed with a calm child who rarely or never shows great intensity in their reactions. Count your blessings! Others of you have a child or children who have very intense reactions. These are the children who often throw a fit when frustrated or scream with delight. Even if you don’t have an intense child, you may be able to help a mom who does to find the key to calming her child.

In this installment we’ll look at how you can identify an on-coming tornado of emotions and how to defuse it. Knowing your own child’s cues will help you learn how to calm them and then teach your child to recognize the signs and calm themselves. As in all our parenting, the goal is to help our child learn self control.
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Introvert or Extrovert

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This month I am continuing with more from the book, Raising Your Spirited Child by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. In this segment I’ll share another tool to help you better understand your child. Using your observations you can make adjustments to reduce the amount of friction in your family.

This month’s discussion is about Introvert and Extrovert. You may want to take a look at this survey. After you have used the tool for evaluating yourself and your spouse, come back to read some more so you may be better able to identify your child’s energy source.

“Traditionally the term introvert has been used to describe someone who is shy and socially unskilled. It’s important to remember that in psychological terms, introversion and extroversion do not describe social skills. They explain how we get our energy. Both introverts and extroverts can be very savvy interacting with people. Your child can be a very social extrovert, or a very social introvert. The key is what happens afterward. The introvert will be drained and ready for a nap or a quiet, solitary activity, whereas the extrovert will be wound up and ready for more action.”

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Temperament Survey

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This month I’ve been reading a very interesting book called Raising Your Spirited Child by  Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. My son sent me a copy of the book when we were trying to understand our grandson better. I have been most interested in the tools she provides for evaluating your child and yourself.

It is always good to be a student of your child. In this way you can help to mold his character and yet not break his will. Many of the problems we have with our child comes from misunderstanding needs and motivations. Knowing what the baseline is for both of you can help you to respond, instead of reacting, to your child. It can help you to plan ahead to avoid some explosions.

For the next few months, I will share some of the evaluating tools included in Raising Your Spirited Child. There is much more to the book. I would encourage you to get a copy if you find these tools interesting and helpful. The book is loaded with personal examples and ideas for dealing with problems arising from our basic makeups.

The first of the evaluators deals with temperament. This is even a bit more basic than personality which can be influenced by our experience, culture, education, and upbringing. These are in-born traits that can be identified at an early age and don’t change throughout life.

Why not take a look at these evaluation tools?  Child’s Temperament and Parent’s Temperament

I hope you find these as interesting as I did.

Raising Good Students

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This morning I read three different articles about the scholastic success of Asian students as opposed to the poor results of many American kids. The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, and Stanford boast about 1/4 of their top students are Asian. For the University of California at Berkley nearly 1/2 are Asian. 47% of Asians over 25 hold Bachelor’s degrees (compared to 27% overall), the median income for Asians is $10,000 higher than the median incomes of other ethnic groups, and 16% of Asians hold advanced degrees (compared to 9% overall).

At about the same time these statistics were published there were two books that hit the market about how Asian parents raise such high achieving children. The first one was Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, in which she audaciously claims that if American parents would follow her iron-fisted “Chinese mother” approach, their kids would be straight-A, concerto-playing, super-achievers like her two daughters. And the second was Bitter Melon, Cara Chow’s novel about a teenager girl coming-of-age under the thumb of a controlling, high-expectations immigrant mother. It explores the psychological dilemmas, and damage, that can result from extreme Chua-style parenting.

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MMR Study Fraud

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Just this month a report has been publicized that the original research that linked the MMR immunization to the development of autism was fraudulent. The conclusions of the 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was renounced by 10 of its 13 authors and later retracted by the medical journal Lancet, where it was published. Andrew Wakefield has had his medical license revoked.

This is all very disturbing. Why would reputable doctors condone a study based on fraudulent data? They take an oath to “do no harm,” yet have caused much damage to many children.

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