Do you wish your child wasn’t a Spicy One™️?
Did you take my temperament quiz last week? If so, how did it affect your perceptions of your child?
Something magical happens when we can see our child’s temperament as morally neutral instead of wrong or less-than.
Being a deeply passionate child isn’t something that needs correction.
Feeling every nuance of clothing, crowds and temperature change is not a discipline issue. These are simply different ways of being, not inadequacies that we need to parent out of our kids.
Three traits of the Spicy One™️ that are often mislabeled as character flaws are: Rigidity, Intensity, and Sensory Awareness.
Rigidity falls on a spectrum of adaptable-to-rigid. Essentially, how are you able to adjust when plans change? A child high in rigidity is deeply bothered if a playdate gets canceled last minute. Or if grandma was supposed to come for dinner and she has to postpone, you can expect a meltdown. They have a strong sense of expectation. Everything in their brains and bodies has been organized to be ready for this next step, and shifting away from that is a challenge, making transitions very stressful.
You can normalize their feelings by saying, “You’re uncomfortable when plans change,” or “It’s hard for you when you have an expectation that one thing is going to happen but then something else happens instead.” Your job is to help them grow and expand their capacity to handle changes in plans and ideas. Let’s honor that this is part of who they are at their core! The plus side of rigidity is that they hold fast to their visions and can create structure and predictability for others.
Intensity is a hallmark of the spirited, dragon children. Every reaction is deep and powerful, their emotions are contagious to those around them. They do not suffer quietly through discomfort or disappointment and have an incredible ability to feel intense highs and lows. Our spiciest children are often marked by this intensity.
Real Moms of Spicy Ones™ have described their children in these ways:
“Fiery and Fiesty”
“Once they lose it, there’s no coming back”
“Zero-to-none in no time”
“If they aren’t happy, nobody’s happy.”
“This kid burns with the fire of a thousand suns.”
Sensory Awareness is how much and how deeply we metabolize all of the sensory information coming toward us. Children with high sensory awareness are the super-tasters, the super-smellers, and the super-feelers. They are the ‘canary in the coal mine’, which means they feel and notice things before the rest of the family. As a parent, we want to avoid making them feel wrong for that.
To these children, it can feel like their body is being bombarded by high-volume sensory input all day long. They will need your help in creating some sensory deprivation times and reducing what’s coming at them before they get exhausted by it.
Our job in caring for them is to minimize their stimulation and to help give them words for this experience with a vocabulary rich in sensing words like tight, scratchy, and noisy for our little ones and overstimulated, buzzing, and overwhelmed for our bigger kids.
We want our children to know that how they were wired is a gift, not a shortcoming!
Your homework this week is to complete the temperament quiz if you haven’t had the chance to do so yet.
Then, notice your child’s unique ways of being with neutrality and give them positive language to describe their experiences.
I'm proud of you!
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In Case You Missed It
This past week on Instagram, we talked about the Spice Ones™ who are reluctant to try new things and shared tips on how we expose them to the goodness they refuse:
