This is a continuation of a review of Mary Sheedy Kurcinka’s book, Raising Your Spirited Child. This book would have been such a boon to me in raising my two sons. They were good boys, but both were spirited in different ways. I felt like I was banging my head against a wall many days, especially before they could talk well and again when they were teenagers.
The section on persistence is a long section and much of it deals with children who can talk well enough to negotiate. Though this site is primarily for moms with younger children, there is no way to understand the principles without discussing the goal and general methods of dealing with persistence in older children first. Please bear with me, it is worth the journey.
“The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will and the other from a strong won’t.”—Howard Ward Beecher