“This is a marvelous, inspiring, usable gem of a guide for parents of these challenging and rewarding children”

Marjorie Hogan, M. D. pediatrician, Minneapolis Children’s Medical Center
The spirited child-often called “difficult”-can easily overwhelm parents, leaving them feeling frustrated and inadequate. Spirited kids are, in fact simply more intense, sensitive, perceptive, persistent, and uncomfortable with change than the average child. Through vivid examples and a refreshingly positive viewpoint, Mary Sheedy Kurcinka offers parents emotional support and proven strategies for handling their spirited child. She will help you:

- Understand your child’s - and your own - temperamental traits
- Discover the power of positive - rather than negative - labels
- Cope with tantrums and blowups when they do occur Develop strategies for handling mealtimes, bedtimes, holidays, school, and many other situations.

Filled with personal insight and authoritative advice, Raising Your Spirited Child can help make parenting the joy it should be, rather than the trial it con be.

Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, M. A., has more than twenty years experience as a pioneer and award-winning educator in Minnesota’s Early Childhood Family Education Program, and is the founder of the Spirited Child workshops. A licensed teacher and parent educator, she lives with her family in Eagan, Minnesota.

Recently, temperament traits have come to the forefront of child development theory. In Raising Your Spirited Child, Mary Sheedy Kurcinka’s first contribution is to redefine the “difficult child” as the “spirited” child, a child that is, as she says, MORE. Many people are leery about books that are too quick to “type” kids, but Kurcinka, a parent of a spirited child herself and a parent educator for 20 years, doesn’t fall into that trap. Instead, she provides tools to understanding your own temperament as well as your child’s. When you understand your temperamental matches–and your mismatches–you can better understand, work, live, socialize, and enjoy spirit in your child. By reframing challenging temperamental qualities in a positive way, and by giving readers specific tools to work with these qualities, Kurcinka has provided a book that will help all parents, especially the parents of spirited children, understand and better parent their children.

Kurcinka’s now-classic guide to raising children who are “more”-more intense, more sensitive, more persistent, etc.-gets a greatest-hits treatment in this brief audio version read by the author, a teacher and parent educator. The abridgement can be abrupt at times; in the effort to condense a 300-page book to a three hours, many memorable and useful examples, illustrations and anecdotes have been excised in favor of general principles and descriptions of the basic traits common to spirited children. Helpfully, though, each CD is imprinted with track titles and time signatures, a great boon to parents who want to retrieve specific information quickly. Kurcinka’s voice can sometimes be a problem; it tends to trail off to such a low end-of-sentence volume that listeners may have to strain to catch what she is saying. Kurcinka never really achieves a deep or comfortable vocal resonance even at the best of times, though she does exhibit a quiet dramatic intensity despite the brittle, high tones. In all, it’s difficult to justify the additional $10 this audio costs over the far meatier trade paperback version, which offers considerably more bang for the buck.

How many times had I heard, “yup, he’s all boy” or “he sure is active”, or “he just needs a good spanking”…but I always felt that no one truly understood what I was going through with my “spirited” child. I read “The Strong Willed Child” by Dobson, I read “The Dicipline Book” by Dr. Sears, still nothing seemed to explain the problems I was having with my child. I had just about decided that I must have done something wrong to make him behave the way he does, when I found this book. What a relief! It isn’t anything I have done to make my son the way he is. But the book gave me such practical and effective advice on how to work with his personality instead of against it.

Any parent of a spirited child will tell you that traditional discipline techniques don’t work. Time outs? Are you kidding? I’dd have to tie my kid into a chair or lock him in his room! Now I realize what sets him off and I can often avoid the “naughty” behavior. No more quick trips to the bank or grocery store after preschool. He is totally tapped out by the time he gets home, and it is time for quiet/alone time in his room so he can recharge and be sociable again.

My parents kept telling me he should be sleeping through the night, when at age 2 he still was waking up during the night. In their eyes, he was just spoiled. “Let him cry” they would say. What they didn’t understand, was that a spirited child does not cry themselves to sleep like other children, they cry themselves awake! Sometimes to the point of vomiting because they get so worked up!

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is, this book truly saved my sanity. I feel like a better parent as a result of it and I know my relationship with my son has improved dramatically.

Tags: child development, discipline, Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, parenting