Can we talk about "spirited child" books?

[Juvysen]

Ok... so I'm looking for books on spirited children (or explosive children? is that the same thing?)... there's Raising Your Spirited Child by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka and then there's
Taming the Spirited Child: Strategies for Parenting Challenging Children Without Breaking Their Spirits by by Michael Popkin so.. (ugh, sorry, I'm not sure what's going on with the fonts) which one is good? What about the explosive child book? Other recommendations?

[Juvysen]

no one's read them?

[2boyzmama]

I've read Raising Your Spirited Child, and LOVED it!!! It helped me identify my son's personality type (and in the process, my own, and my husbands!) and then learn how to set him up for success vs failure.

For example...my son is an extreme extrovert, gross-motor oriented, and a deep pressure sensory seeker. SO...when he's overwhelmed, tantruming, etc, the best thing to do is take him to a large open public place (the mall was our favorite!) and let him run off energy and get that sensory input he needed. In order to PREVENT the tantrums, I had to make sure to give him lots of exposure to different people, sounds, touches, smells, etc.

My husband, on the other hand, is extroverted, and sensory avoiding. When he's overwhelmed, he needs quiet, solitude, calmness. That's why those two were butting heads so much, my husband wanted to stay home and my son wanted to be out and about.

Asking my oldest son to have quiet time with a movie is NOT restful to him and will cause a cascade leading to an hour-long tantrum in the evening. Asking my husband to do back to back errands out of the house that last all day will cause HIM to breakdown in the evening.

It's challenging having such different personality types in the same family! (and interestingly, our second son is very moderate, not as extroverted as his brother, not as introverted as his daddy. I'm waiting to see what this third baby is going to be!)

[staceychev]

I, too, loved Raising Your Spirited Child. It gave me a lot of insight, not only into DD1's personality, but into mine and DH's as well (thinking that we're both, in our own ways, spirited, and that DD got a combination of both).

[MissMaegie'sMama]

[ssh]

Raising Your Spirited Child by Mary Kurcinka is really good, so is her Kids Parents and Power Struggles Winning For a Lifetime.

[Peppermint Poppies]

I'm reading Raising Your Spirited Child at the moment, and finding it really good. It's helped me accept that my son has a certain temperament, and I have a certain temperament, and that neither of those is a bad thing. They just are. And the book gives a lot of strategies for coping with the mismatch between those temperaments. I really like their analogy of trying to keep things 'in the green zone' and intervening when things are 'approaching the red zone' (i.e meltdown time). It really resonated with me, because I can absolutely sense when things are about to enter the red zone, and my usual response is to get frustrated and short-tempered before it even happens, because I *know* that it's coming. So I'm looking forwards to trying some new strategies from the book.

Just a caveat though - I was given this book for Christmas, and read parts of it at the time. I remember thinking it wouldn't be very useful for the stage my son was at then, and maybe 6 months of maturity has made a difference because now it all seems really useful all of a sudden.