Coping With a Strong-Willed Child

One of the unfore­seen advant­ages of hav­ing an Amazon affil­i­ate account is the pos­it­ive loop it intro­duces. In this par­tic­u­lar case, I reviewed books about rais­ing chil­dren, people clicked on the links, they bought oth­er books from Amazon that showed up in my reports, I looked at those books, etc. I call it a multi-level recom­mend­a­tion ser­vice; I’m sure there are more “offi­cial” names for it.

Any­way, in this par­tic­u­lar case someone bought Par­ent­ing the Strong-Willed Child: The Clin­ic­ally Proven Five-Week Pro­gram for Par­ents of Two- to Six-Year-Olds, and since my daugh­ter is strong-willed (much more so than her broth­er at that age), I thought I’d take a look. I also ordered When Your Child Has a Strong-Willed Per­son­al­ity from the lib­rary and read both the books at more or less the same time. 

Par­en­thet­ic­al note: are there ever a lot of books out there on how to cope with strong-willed children! 

Both the books have anecdotal/illustrative examples, which mostly served to make me grate­ful for my child. After that, the books have the same basic ideas at the core, but go about the mes­sage in dif­fer­ent ways.

The “clin­ic­al pro­gram” book has an actu­al pro­gram in it that you’re meant to fol­low, which con­sists of spend­ing 10 minutes each day doing the pro­gram for that week, before start­ing the next week on the next phase. This would prob­ably be use­ful if there is a ser­i­ous prob­lem; con­dens­ing the pro­gram and com­bin­ing steps worked out fine for us. The first step is simply pay­ing atten­tion to what the child is doing for those 10 minutes: no ques­tions, no orders, just say­ing “now you’re stack­ing the red blocks” “now you’re col­our­ing with blue cray­on”. The “do you want to try…” etc comes later, after you and the child have got used to the idea of your pay­ing atten­tion to what the child is actu­ally doing rather than what you think they should be doing, for that small amount of time. Per­son­ally I think this is the most import­ant step — it’s so easy as a par­ent to get into the “now we have to do this”, even if it’s under the guise of encour­aging the child to do things “prop­erly”, and fail to take the time to pay atten­tion to what’s really hap­pen­ing. The oth­er steps in the pro­gram are also reas­on­able, noth­ing stu­pendously dif­fer­ent to what oth­er books say.

The “strong-willed per­son­al­ity” book is more gen­er­al and does not come with a 5‑week pro­gram, so is likely less reas­sur­ing if you have a ser­i­ous prob­lem. It points out strongly that the worst prob­lems come with a strong-willed child and a strong-willed par­ent bat­tling and advoc­ates the par­ent to not quibble over small issues, but to seek ways to defuse poten­tial situ­ations, and let every­one save face. 

Both books coun­sel kind­ness and respect for the child’s point of view as ways to defuse con­flict, and give meth­ods or tips to help. Vari­ations on some of the tech­niques would prob­ably also help with deal­ing with co-workers.