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Summary: Excellent! It was as if someone wrote a book about my child.
Review: The book was written in a way that I could relate to each of the subjects. The real life examples of the parents in the book gave me hope that I could channel the intense energy of my child. I would highly recommend this to anyone who has said "enough", and meant it about their child.
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Summary: Raising Your Spirited Child - our family's "bible"!!
Review: Sorry - no time for a proper review as I too have a spirited child! I would just like to share the following thought with Amazon customers who are obviously looking for help with a child. This book may save you, your child and everyone around your child LOTS of wear and tear! After reading every parenting book that I could (at least 100) trying to figure out what I was doing wrong with my son and what in the world was wrong with him, I found this book. What a relief! It was the first parenting book that I had read that sounded like it was written about MY son, instead of some other child. How wonderful for someone to describe my son as "normal" and "wonderful" and help me to see all his good qualities! I now know other parents even in our small town who use the same book as their family "bible" for the same reasons. I've loaned this book out to many parents and it is always returned with obviously heartfelt gratitude and relief, and usually with the comment that the borrowers are going to buy a copy for their homes. My copy is currently loaned out to my son's preschool director and his teacher is next in line to borrow it! If I ever had an opportunity to speak to Mary Kurcinka (author) I would never be able to tell her enough about the positive impact her work has had on our family! Big hugs from us to her!!! I wonder if she is aware of how many families she has helped in such a positive way? If each reader's spirited child is helped by the ideas in this fabulous work, it will actually have an impact on our society for many generations to come. So much for a brief comment about this book! I doubt that most readers could comment on this book in only a few sentences. It really does have this much impact on the families who live with a spirited child and who seek help in parenting these children. Mary Kurcinka, thank you and bless you!
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Summary: A guide to understanding behavior instead of modifying it.
Review: I was fortunate enough to have my youngest daughter enrolled in a Early Childhood Family Education class in the school district which Mary Sheedy Kurcinka is the director. There were three children who wouldn't separate from their fathers and Mary was called in to evaluate. She immediately determined that my daughter was "spirited." Of course, I was suspicious. This sure looked like a sales pitch for her book and the "Spririted Child" class offered in the district. I took the class under protest and even bought the book. What an unbelievable difference it made! By the end of the class, my daughter was separating well and the constant daily battles had become few and far between. This book gives life examples, several ways to deal with certain behaviors and most importantly, it helped me to realize I wasn't alone. At times the book seemed as if it were written with my daughter in mind! Raising Your Spirited Child is an excellent resource for families who have Spirited Children and for those who don't as well.
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Summary: this "owner's manual" rewired my neural net
Review: I wish Mary Sheedy Kurcinka's _Raising Your Spirited Child_ had been around when I was growing up. In just 300 pages, this "owner's manual" for dealing with intense, sensitive children completely rewired my neural net.A parent comes to most books expecting to learn how to influence and control their child - their health, their relationships, their behavior. Kurcinka turns this formula on its ear: instead of "how-to", the parent gets "how-they" and "who-are" and "what-if?". In place of generalizations about children's motivations, Kurcinka presents a glittering array of nuanced traits which converge like colored lights to form the white light of an individual character. The book is filled with the unexpected: the words of other parents driving this highway, a wide-ranging sampling of current theories of child development culled for relevance to the spirited child, parables, poetry, and most of all - humor. She doesn't claim to have all the answers and suggests that you as a parent forgive yourself for not having them either. This book was published the year my "spirited child" was born. I wish I'd gotten a copy on its publication date; instead, I endured two-and-a-half years of frustration and guilt. I'm lucky. It wasn't even written when my mother had her "spirited" child, me
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Summary: this "owner's manual" rewired my neural net
Review: I wish Mary Sheedy Kurcinka's _Raising Your Spirited Child_ had been around when I was growing up. In just 300 pages, this "owner's manual" for dealing with intense, sensitive children completely rewired my neural net. A parent comes to most books expecting to learn how to influence and control their child - their health, their relationships, their behavior. Kurcinka turns this formula on its ear: instead of "how-to", the parent gets "how-they" and "who-are" and "what-if?". In place of generalizations about children's motivations, Kurcinka presents a glittering array of nuanced traits which converge like colored lights to form the white light of an individual character. The book is filled with the unexpected: the words of other parents driving this highway, a wide-ranging sampling of current theories of child development culled for relevance to the spirited child, parables, poetry, and most of all - humor. She doesn't claim to have all the answers and suggests that you as a parent forgive yourself for not having them either. This book was published the year my "spirited child" was born. I wish I'd gotten a copy on its publication date; instead, I endured two-and-a-half years of frustration and guilt. I'm lucky. It wasn't even written when my mother had her "spirited" child, me
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Summary: The best child care book I've read
Review: I'm the mother of 3 girls, and this is the most useful book I've read. While some reviewers take issue with the methods Kurcinka advocates in dealing with the spirited child, I found it incredibly valuable just for the better attitude it gave me towards my daughter. Just to realize she wasn't the only child who threw fits about her socks was so helpful! I went from honestly not being able to enjoy much time with my daughter because of the constant screaming and drama, to being able to respond in a constructive way and eliminate many of the battles before they began. It got me looking at my daughter's behavior in a different, more positive way, and realizing that the point of being a parent isn't just to get your child to obey you, but to know how to avoid the conflict in the first place when you can!
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Summary: No longer "BBBB Bad to the Bone"
Review: I recently purchased and just started reading books recommended to me by a close friend who has done early childhood development for over 20 years. She is also a mom to a child who fits the "Spirited Child" description. In beginning the reading of "Raising Your Spirited Child . . ." I have learned that this description also fits my very energetic, persistent, assertive, agile, intense 3.5 year old. (It seems like my 19 month old may be borderline "spirited" - I think I need to wait and see.)
The author of "Raising Your Spirited Child . . ." talks about traits in children that we might associate with the George Thorogood song "Bad to the Bone" and how many of these actually have positive manifestations that can make for successful adults. According to the author (and mom to a spirited child), as parents (possibly "spirited" parents) can learn to channel this intense spiritedness into very positive directions so we can have more of the intense joy and less of the intense exhaustion that comes from parenting a spirited child.
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Summary: definitely worth reading
Review: This book really helped me understand my child, and helped me stop feeling like a bad parent. I love that Kurcinka advocates for redefining "negative" attributes as something that can be positive, because it helps parents and others view their child more positively and work with them. The most valuable thing I took from this book was in learning about personality differences between parent and child, and how that can effect your relationship. I also like that each chapter "characteristic" has a summary which gives the reader specific tips working with a child with that characteristic, so the book is easy to reference later on.
If I had any complaint about this book, it would be that it encouraged me to think my daughter's "issues" were simply personality differences rather than something more, when she actually has mild autism. Parents should take this book to heart, but still seek additional information and help if they are concerned about their child.
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Summary: Indispensable Book: NOT a Hall Pass for Bad Behavior!!!!
Review: I read this book a year and a half ago when I had sought professional counseling in dealing with me very strong-willed two-year-old. This book was recommended as well as 1-2-3 Magic. This book did WONDERS for me as a mother and my mother-child relationship. Why? It helped me understand my own and my daughter's temperament. It gave me straightforward, practical advice in working WITH and not AGAINST her temperament. IN NO WAY did it advocate allowing my child to misbehave or or let her think she was the center of the universe. She is now 4 and in her first year of preschool. She's doing beautifully interacting with others, knows and usually follows house rules, and understands her parents are the authority. She is blossoming into the wonderful person I knew she could be and I feel more calm and confident being her parent. I wanted to write this review because of the others here that say this book is about letting the child rule the roost. This book is about understanding who your child is as a person so you can help them meet their needs and gain cooperation in the process...all the while respecting your own needs and the needs of other family members. I think the bad reviews are a matter of misinterpretation on the part of those readers. I would have for others to be discouraged from reading this book when it is such a worthwhile resource for anyone dealing with a determined, persistent, and intense child.
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Summary: Life (and sanity) saving strategies for intense kids!
Review: A lifesaver
Certainly this shouldn't be the first or only parenting book you read and you will have to pick and choose those suggestions that seem suited to the challenges your child's temperament poses. But if many of the approaches suggested in conventional parenting books seem ineffective because they don't account for the temperament of your spirited child, you should definitely read this book, as well as "The Difficult Child" by Stanley Turecki.
After I'd read about a dozen parenting books, I was still tearing out my hair with my first. I knew from when he was in utero, as he tried to kick his way out forcefully, that my first child was a force to be reckoned with. He was the loudest baby in the hospital and continued in this vein--emotionally intense, loud, physically active. He was always in motion, in a hurry to get to the "next" thing rather than being a happy, content baby and toddler, a perfectionist, mad as hell if anything or anyone got in his way or if he didn't perform some skill perfectly the first time. He walked at nine months and immediately became an indefatigable explorer: he figured how out to undo the first type of locks we installed on the toilets and systematically identified any drawer or cabinet that was not equipped with the most stringent child safety protection. At 18 months, he scrambled up our 8 foot stone retaining wall, clinging to the top and proudly proclaiming "mommy, I climb" before I could snatch him. At about age two he tried to climb over the second floor balcony railing, so we extended all of the railings vertically with 3 feet of lucite. We had people come over and laugh at the extent to which we'd been forced to 'babyproof' our house and he still ended up at the ER 3 times before his third birthday. I only half-jokingly referred to him as Evil Kneivel. And, when his blood sugar was low, he hadn't slept well, it was 4-6PM (the "witching hour" of the day), or given any other small trigger, his meltdowns could astonish other parents, who'd never seen anything like it from their own children. They were louder, longer, more intense, often impossible to predict or to manage once they'd started. Learning to manage a kid with this temperament (even to keep him safe) and, more importantly, teaching him to eventually manage his own spirited temperament has been keenly frustrating at times. One has to always see ahead to what is going to trigger the next meltdown and help an often defiant kid to recognize that they are tired, hungry, should go on to a new activity instead of blowing up over not being able to immediately do something perfectly, etc.
However, two years after having begun to use (in an integrated way) the information in this book, the other book mentioned above and conventional parenting books, I have a wonderful, interesting, basically socially well-adjusted kid. He's gone from where I worried that he'd be labeled the problem child in any classroom to where he's learned enough self-management that his intensity can finally shine through as determination, curiosity, energy--his friends and teachers can finally see the wonderful, spirited kid that was buried all along under all of that oppositional behavior. He will never have a laid-back, easy going personality, but I now can actively hope to see his intensity take him as far as he wants to go.
This book truly helped me to get beyond the non-productive feelings of "why is my kid so much tougher than other people's, how on earth do I handle this, why do many problem-solving approaches in typical parenting books seem inadequate or just plain wrong for dealing with my child. There are lots of suggestions for how to productively handle particular aspects of your "spirited" child's personality that makes him or her tough to manage. And perhaps more importantly, this book helps one to remain positive through the challenges that such kids pose, to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Although it took a lot more consistency and patience to curb my son's impulsive behavior, to teach him to treat his friends and parents with respect, and to teach him how to manage his own spirit, it is a lifetime investment.
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