The Fussy Baby Book: Parenting your high-need child from birth to five. Martha Sears

a rage, we needed to stay calm. When she lost her self-control, we had to hang on to ours. If we lost our composure – and many times we did – it took twice as long for her to settle down. Acting like the adult in charge set a calmer mood that helped put a crumbling child back together.

      lesson

       As difficult as it was to do when Hayden became irritable to irritating, we had to maintain a peaceful presence.

      We learned that with Hayden there were certain places that were not suitable for confrontations. (The problem with this insight was that we were often not disciplined enough ourselves to wait for a better time and place.) One of these times, as every parent knows, was mealtime. One of these places was the car. If Hayden felt pushed into a corner, she would typically lash out physically and hit or kick something. One memorable occasion was when she was in the front passenger seat. She was reacting strongly to something I was telling her. Knowing she tended to get physical, I should have backed off until we were in a less confined space, but I didn’t. We still have the broken door on the glove compartment to remind us of that mistake.

      Because Hayden was a challenge to our discipline skills, we were forced to get to know her in a way we had not experienced with our sons. The endless hours spent parenting Hayden produced a deep knowledge of who she was as a person, and this in turn helped her understand herself as a person. Rather than muzzling her, by responding to Hayden we rewarded her for being an expressive person. She became a master at expressing her needs and engaging the resources of adult caregivers at a very early age. She was a very resourceful three-year-old. The ability to express herself is an asset that will serve Hayden well as an adult.

      As we watched Hayden dominate her peers in playgroups, we saw why she had earned the label “bossy”. Like a quarterback addressing a huddle, she commanded all the kids’ attention, and they lined up to listen as she told them how they were going to play the game. Now, we watch her dominate student council meetings in our living room, and we marvel at how she works on the members until they agree with her point of view.

      Hayden early on caused us to re-evaluate the issue of control. We gradually figured out that the child shouldn’t control the parents, or the parents control the child. Yet parents must control situations; when there is no limit-setting, family life is a disaster. We needed to be in charge of Hayden, to give her “house rules” and then control her environment so that it was not difficult for her to comply with these rules.

      We were unprepared for the strong-mindedness we encountered in Hayden as a toddler. The older children had responded well to verbal cues. Hayden seemed not to hear us. So, rather than be constantly yelling “no, don’t touch” (which was futile), we taught her that throughout the house there were “yes-touches” and “no-touches”. Our job included making the “yes-touches” more accessible to her than the forbidden things. Hayden could operate from her own inner controls in a setting that communicated order and structure of some sort. (Every family will do this differently.) When she had the opportunity to behave properly, independent of endless no’s from us, she would start to get a sense of her own inner controls. When she’s older and on her own, this set of inner rules will help her operate responsibly and confidently on her own. She’ll feel right when she follows the rules and won’t feel right when she doesn’t. And we learned that in order to set limits and model desirable behaviour, we ourselves had to be disciplined.

      lesson

       Everything we did with and for Hayden from day one was discipline. We were teaching her the tools to succeed in life.

our needs versus her needs

      Toward the middle of Hayden’s first year, we realized that parenting a high-need child could have a better or worse effect on our relationship as husband and wife. Such a child can easily dominate the home. There were times when Martha risked burning out from over-giving. A warning sign of impending burnout was Martha saying: “I don’t even have time to take a shower, Hayden needs me so much.” For Martha’s sake, and ultimately for the sanity of the whole family, I had to remind her, “What Hayden needs most is a happy, rested mother.” It wasn’t enough just to preach. Besides pitching in more around the house and with the older children, I took over with Hayden whenever I could. I would take her for a walk or car ride so that she would be out of Martha’s sight and earshot.

      lesson

       As a mother, I realized I had to take good care of myself so I could take better care of my baby.

      Having a high-need child helped us communicate more maturely with each other. There was always the “our needs versus her needs” dilemma. We had to steal time for ourselves, realizing that even the best parenting can be undermined if the marriage falls apart. I saw how important it was to Martha for me to validate her mothering. I frequently offered not only a reassuring “you know best”, but when I saw that her drive to give was outpacing her energy reserves, I realized I needed to intervene and help. I sometimes wondered when I would ever have my wife back, but then realized we couldn’t rewind this parenting tape. I was an adult, and Hayden would go through this stage only once.

      From Martha’s perspective, this balancing act was more easily said than done. There were plenty of times when I managed to let my own neediness send Martha double messages (“I’ve got needs, too, you know”). She would feel this pressure even when I thought I was doing a good job putting Martha’s and Hayden’s needs ahead of my own. And we both quickly found out that it is difficult for some women to accept help with the responsibility of baby care even when they need it a lot. They often can’t see that they need nurturing for themselves. Nor do they know how to make their own needs a high priority. We discovered that Martha was very good at taking care of everyone else but really did not know how to take care of herself. (We are still working on this seventeen years later.)

how we grew – the payoff

      As Hayden grew, her neediness remained but her personality blossomed. One of the earliest qualities we noticed was her sensitivity, her ability to care and comfort when playmates were hurt or upset. As a preschooler, she had already developed a keen sense of justice and social values. Often she would say, “That’s not right” or “How sad.” Her love of people and her ability to connect with them was another payoff we witnessed. She would be aware of other children who needed mothering, and she would do what she could to help. Her sense of intimacy was appropriate, giving eye contact or a touch on the arm during a conversation. She had a confident way of being in the presence of adults. A child psychiatrist who was at our home one evening remarked, “Hayden knows where her body is in space.” We knew what that meant. Because she had been held and nursed and responded to appropriately, Hayden already had a good sense of herself as a unique physical presence and she responded to others in their uniqueness. She was able even then to affirm each person she met. Since Hayden was used to being understood and responded to, she could express herself comfortably. This ability, combined with her high energy, caused us to joke about our “Sarah Bernhardt”. It’s no wonder that through her grade school and high school years, she enjoyed and excelled at being onstage. Her chosen course of study in college, if you haven’t already guessed, is psychology and drama.

      As Hayden matured as a person, we were maturing as parents. Gradually and subtly our parenting style, besides being nurturing to Hayden, became a source of growth for us. Hayden’s high needs caused us to stretch ourselves to higher levels of giving with the ever-present challenge of balancing Hayden’s needs with the rest of the family’s. Hayden opened us up to be more flexible, more patient, and more disciplined. We came to realize that, although there are a few basic principles of good parenting that apply to every child and every temperament, how parents apply these principles is