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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 affected, for better or for worse, by the need level of the child. Compliant babies who can be put down in a cot while awake and who fall asleep on their own will accept a less intensive style of nighttime parenting. Compliant children will often switch gears from their agenda to their parents’ at the slightest suggestion and come immediately when called to dinner from a distance. High-need children, on the other hand, need an eye-to-eye summons before switching from their agenda to yours.

      Parenting high-need children has matured us as individuals, too. High-need children push buttons that reveal pleasant and unpleasant scenes from our childhoods. Parenting Hayden led us to make personal discoveries about how we ourselves were parented, and how this was affecting us as adults. When these flashbacks surfaced, we soon learned which ones we could use to our parenting advantage and which ones to discard, for example, the impulse to smack. Some people would have considered Hayden’s behaviour cause for smacking, but we realized that she needed a different kind of “hands-on” discipline.

      Hayden also caused our marriage to mature. We became very different partners as a result of our experience with parenting a high-need child. We knew that the best parenting requires two parents in the home. As tempting as it was for Martha to throw herself totally into mothering, she wisely directed some energy toward me. We have become much more sensitive to each other’s temperaments and better at anticipating each other’s needs. We have continued to avail ourselves of marriage-enrichment opportunities and plain old “enjoying time” together often.

      Now that Hayden is about to leave the nest and enter college, we look back at our parenting with few regrets. We cannot take all the credit or blame for the person she becomes, yet it’s comforting to know we gave her a good start. The rest is up to Hayden.

      Hayden has gone from being a high-need child to a high-energy teen. Her life as a baby is chronicled in our earlier book The Fussy Baby. She sometimes opens that book and shows her friends, “That’s me.” One prom night, as she stood posed for her picture, she looked so grown up in her formal gown. I whispered to Martha, “Fussy baby fills out”, and this mature teen-woman gave her daddy a wink. As she was escorted out the door, our minds and hearts filled with flashbacks of those countless energy-draining scenes of babyhood, toddlerhood, and childhood. Martha and I looked at each other and thought, “It’s been a long and bumpy road, yet all that time in arms, at breast, and in our bed, the many discipline confrontations, and the years of high-touch parenting have produced a confident, compassionate, caring person. It has all been worthwhile.”

       chapter 2

       profile of a high-need baby

      “Why is my baby so different? She is not like any of my friends’ babies. They sleep through the night. They’re happy being held by anyone. My friends don’t seem as tired as I am. What am I doing wrong?” Sound familiar? Your baby acts the way she does because that’s the way she is. It’s her personality.

      

      In the first weeks after birth you get a glimpse of who this little person really is. Even while pregnant you may have had a hint of the challenge to come. High-need infants tend to be full-time tummy-thumpers and bladder-kickers, as if telling the world even before they’re born that they need more space.

      In some ways all babies СКАЧАТЬ