parenting

Five Benefits of Having a Strong-Willed or Stubborn Kid

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

Finding living with a stubborn kid challenging? Here are five benefits of having a strong-willed kid to keep in mind at the toughest of times!

Five Benefits of Having a Strong-Willed or Stubborn Kid. Have a stubborn kid who won't do what you want? Here's some benefits you may not have considered! (Photo: Four-year-old white boy sitting on top of a rock structure.)

“Which set of pajamas do you want? The space ones or the biking alligators?” I asked my three-year-old.

“Nope,” he answered. Nope is the casual middle finger of answers. So much for offering choices.

“How about these?” I said, holding up a pair with bears on them.

“Nope,” he said, lounging with his hands behind his head on his bed like it was a pool floatie in Malibu.

After a few more choices, he finally acquiesced to wearing a pair. We don’t go through this particular back-and-forth every night, but it’s just one in his bag of tricks to delay bedtime.

My son – nicknamed Sprout – is one of those kids who doesn’t want to do anything that’s demanded of him. “Because I said so” is a foreign phase to him. He wants a good justification for every decision and preferably to feel like he came up with the idea himself.

Part of this is my fault, for better or worse. Our family practices positive parenting, which is largely focused on validating children’s feelings and perspectives while teaching them to do the same for others. And as a science writer and communicator, I love explaining our choices.

But some of it is just his personality. I’m pretty sure if we tried to be more authoritarian, he’d just dig his heels in harder. The times that I start to get bossy go downhill very quickly. Despite the fact that having a stubborn kid with a strong will is sometimes a pain in the butt, there are some definite advantages to it for our family.

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What Gardening Has Taught Me About Parenting

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What Gardening Has Taught Me About Parenting. Kids and seeds are more alike than you may realize! (Photo: Young boy playing in the dirt with tomato plants behind him.)

“Look, those tomatoes are red! Can I eat them?” Sprout asks me, hardly waiting to pop them in his mouth.

“Just wait to get inside for me to wash them,” I say, brushing aside the overgrown zucchini leaves as I walk towards the garden gate. He mock puts them in his mouth and I roll my eyes at him.

Getting inside, he hands me the tiny tomatoes for me to place in a small orange plastic bowl and rinse off. I hand it back and he sits down on the couch to chomp down. (Despite our “only eat at the table” rule.)

I reflect on how much he’s learned from spending time with me in the garden: knowing how to plant seeds, understanding the role of weeds, composting, and judging when vegetables are ripe.  But I also think about the life lessons the garden has taught me that apply to raising kids.

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A Season of Smothering

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A Season of Smothering. Some times of parenthood are harder than others - even if they're something you love too. (Photo: Monkey with baby climbing on its head.)

Lying on the couch, I have a one-year-old sitting on my lap and pinching my face while a four-year-old is almost sitting on my head as he tries to twist my hair in his hands. I look up to my husband and only half-jokingly cry out, “Help!”

Sometimes, I feel like Max in Where the Wild Things Are, when the Wild Things are yelling “We’ll eat you up, we love you so!” Except the Wild Things are my children whom I love very much. While they aren’t actually wild monsters, their love back to me can feel rather smothering at times.

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The 10 Things Parents Must Teach Gifted Children

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What do we need to teach gifted kids about life before they go out into the world? There’s a lot more they need to know than calculus and Shakespeare. 

The 10 Things Parents Must Teach Gifted Children (Photo: Kid with a backpack walking away)

Sitting in the private school’s admissions office, my mom faced a choice about my education. The admissions officer told her how much smaller the classes were than public school, how girls felt less pressure when they didn’t compete for boys’ attention, and how much more they could meet her gifted daugher’s needs.

But the tuition was as expensive as you would expect for a private school. We were a solidly upper-middle-class family, but a salesman’s and teacher’s salaries together meant we weren’t exactly rolling in the dough. Private school meant no new house. No vacations for years. Hardly any luxuries at all.

But wasn’t her daughter’s education worth it? Wasn’t public school going to hold her back? Would she be able to fulfill her potential?

As the daughter in question, I now know my mom made the right decision. With more hoopla these days than ever about the beauty and struggles of raising “gifted” kids, it feels odd to me. Wasn’t this stuff we should have figured out 20 years ago?

As a “gifted” kid who had lots of gifted friends growing up and is now an adult, I’ve thought a lot about what society does and doesn’t do well in terms of how we treat “smart” kids. From my experience and reading, here’s what parents must teach gifted children:

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The Bond Between Brothers

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The Bond Between Brothers. Watching my children together illustrates the sibling relationship for me in a way that I didn't have as an only child. (Photo: A one-year-old and four-year-old looking at a packed dirt road.)

“Siblings are who you share your childhood with,” my husband commented, as we talked about possibly having another kid.

“I never thought about it that way,” I responded. Tilting my head, you could practically see the classic cartoon lightbulb above it. As an only child, that aspect of having a sibling honestly never occurred to me. But now, years later, I see its truth reflected in the relationship between my two young children. Even at one and four-years-old, they have a bond different than I’ve ever experienced.

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How Parents Can Go Out and Not Hire a Babysitter

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How Parents Can Go Out and Avoid Hiring a Babysitter. (Photo of a doll babysitter who looks vaguely grumpy and has a small child clinging to her leg.)

Reading a party invitation, I look up at my husband and ask, “Whose turn is it this time?” We both struggle to remember who went out last. In the end, we just pick one of us, figuring that even if it’s wrong, it’ll work out in the end. And it always does. Paying a babysitter would be easier, but we’ve never gotten around to hiring one.

While we’re too busy to have extensively vetted a babysitter and too cheap to pay one anyway, we’ve remained committed to seeing our friends on a regular basis. Here’s some of the ways we’ve managed to maintain those relationships, our wallets and our sanity:

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Raising A Quiet Wild Child: How to Explore Nature with Introverted Kids

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

How to Explore Nature with Introverted or Quiet Kids. Do you want to spend a lot of time outside with your kid but they aren't the adventurous or "wild" type? Here's how to make the most of it for both of you! (Photo: Child in red jacket walking in a forest)

“Look, there’s a rabbit!” I exclaim to my four-year-old son, trying to keep my voice down.

“Where?” he asks, as I point to the animal.

“Do you see it? Let’s be quiet so we don’t scare it away.”

“Yeah,” he replies, as he watches the bunny twitch its tail. It looks at us, then goes back to munching on the clover. It doesn’t think we’re a threat.

While the rabbits in our neighborhood do tend to be bold, my son’s calm demeanor definitely allowed us to watch it longer than if he had a louder reaction.

While we may think of a “wild child” as boisterous, exploring nature isn’t limited to adventurous extroverts. In fact, more quiet or introverted children can get just as much, if not more, out of being outside. While he sprints and yell-sings inside, my son is naturally a bit cautious and calm outside.

Here’s what I’ve learned from exploring with him:

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Parenting through the Looking Glass

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Parenting through the Looking Glass. What an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland taught me about adulthood, childhood, and parenting. (Picture: Illustration from Alice in Wonderland of Alice, the White Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter at the tea party.)

The fairy-like White Queen gazed at me intently. Lying on a table, her look invited me into Wonderland, a place of childhood on the edge of adulthood. Then she shoved herself backwards, flew across the table, and jumped to her feet, towering over us.

This was all quite literal.

Last weekend, Chris and I took our first trip by ourselves since Sprout was born. The trip was nominally celebrating our eleventh wedding anniversary. So we were in New York City, watching a play put on in a former mental institution. The play – based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and the real-life relationship between Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell – sparked insight for me about childhood, parenting, and how both are more complex than they seem.

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