Wild Child

Some kids really are harder to handle than others. If you've got one of them, find out how a few simple changes can bring peace to your house.

by Faith Tibetts McDonald

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There was a little girl who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
And when she was good
She was very, very good
And when she was bad, she was horrid.

I know how the parents of this little girl must have felt. My 11-year-son is that girl's temperamental clone. I remember one particularly difficult day: our son had defied me at church in front of my friends, refused to clean his room then lied and told me he had, and gone behind my back to secure a privilege from his dad when I'd already said no. The discipline we meted out seemed to leave absolutely no impression on our son. When the kids were finally in bed, my husband Steve and I straggled into the kitchen, beat. "I feel like we're failing him," Steve said wearily.

My thoughts precisely. How do two adults wind up feeling incapable of parenting a child half their size and who has a tenth of their combined life experience?

Not so long ago, child development experts believed that environment was the primary factor in shaping a child's personality. These experts would have concluded, as we did, that we were the real reason our son was acting differently from our other children. They would have agreed that we were indeed failing as parents.

But in the 1950s, psychologists began to study the temperaments of children and the impact different temperaments have on family life. They found that every kid comes individually wired. And some truly are more difficult to parent than others.

Interestingly enough, that's how God planned it. Each child, each person, is created in God's image, but as a unique individual with special gifts, abilities and quirks. While the differences among our children make family life lots of fun, these same differences also make it extremely challenging at times.

If you're dealing with a difficult child of your own and searching for answers, here are some ideas that worked for us:

Get inside his head. What makes some kids harder to manage than others? Studies have identified distinct temperament characteristics that distinguish a child's personality. They include: intensity, persistence, sensitivity, perceptiveness, adaptability, regularity, energy, mood and first reactions. When a child leans too far to the extreme in oneor moreof these areas, he may become more difficult to parent.

For a practical discussion of these traits and parenting, I found Raising Your Spirited Child (Harper-Perennial), by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, to be extremely helpful. Kurcinka recommends studying your child's behavior and asking the following questions to help understand the specifics of your child's extremes:

Is she loud and demanding? (intensity)
Is she easily distracted, always on the go? (energy level)
Is she overly sensitive? Does she hate tags in clothes or strange smells? (sensitivity)
How does she react to surprises? (adaptability)

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Originally published in: Christian Parenting Today, Page 32

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