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Parenting With Temperament in Mind: Navigating the Challenges and Celebrating Your Child’s Strengths
This book will help parents understand their child’s temperament and more effectively respond to challenges in raising their kids.
Effective parenting isn’t one-size-fits-all. Every child comes with an innate temperament, which includes emotional reactions, a motivational style, personal strengths, and needs that demand extra attention. And every family has its own values and culture. In this book, psychologists Liliana Lengua and Maria Gartstein teach you how to parent based on the unique temperament of your child and the specific needs of your family.
To help readers understand the innate nature of temperaments, the book provides a brief, accessible overview of the neurobiological systems that underlie a person’s temperament. While we cannot change our child’s natural temperament (nor would we want to!), we can impact their neurobiological arousal and self-regulation systems, nurture their positive behaviors, and promote healthy social and emotional development.
Based on this scientific understanding of temperaments, as well as the latest psychological theories and research on parenting and the authors’ own experience as clinicians and mothers, the authors present four broad parenting principles and then show how to apply these principles with children of different temperaments. In particular, they focus on a handful of temperament characteristics that, when very strong, can present challenges related to children’s social, emotional, and behavioral development and well-being. These include being very fearful, impulsive, inflexible, and easily frustrated.
With its simple practical advice, relatable examples, and two questionnaires to help you assess your child’s temperament and your own parenting practices, this book gives you the tools you need to parent more effectively and strengthen your relationship with your child.
Effective parenting isn’t one-size-fits-all. Every child comes with an innate temperament, which includes emotional reactions, a motivational style, personal strengths, and needs that demand extra attention. And every family has its own values and culture. In this book, psychologists Liliana Lengua and Maria Gartstein teach you how to parent based on the unique temperament of your child and the specific needs of your family.
To help readers understand the innate nature of temperaments, the book provides a brief, accessible overview of the neurobiological systems that underlie a person’s temperament. While we cannot change our child’s natural temperament (nor would we want to!), we can impact their neurobiological arousal and self-regulation systems, nurture their positive behaviors, and promote healthy social and emotional development.
Based on this scientific understanding of temperaments, as well as the latest psychological theories and research on parenting and the authors’ own experience as clinicians and mothers, the authors present four broad parenting principles and then show how to apply these principles with children of different temperaments. In particular, they focus on a handful of temperament characteristics that, when very strong, can present challenges related to children’s social, emotional, and behavioral development and well-being. These include being very fearful, impulsive, inflexible, and easily frustrated.
With its simple practical advice, relatable examples, and two questionnaires to help you assess your child’s temperament and your own parenting practices, this book gives you the tools you need to parent more effectively and strengthen your relationship with your child.
- GenresParentingNonfiction
286 pages, Paperback
Published August 20, 2024
9 people are currently reading
5835 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 27, 2024
The American Psychological Association has such an array of helpful books for kids and adults. This is one of my favorites, teaching parenting based on a child's unique temperament. I wish it would have been available for my parents, who would have learned valuable strategies for dealing with an introvert. Highly recommended!
October 23, 2024
I recently read "Parenting with Temperament in Mind" by Liliana J. Lengua and Maria Amy Gartstein, and I was pleasantly surprised by how practical it is! As someone without children of my own but with experience in childcare and assisting in raising & even fostering a few amazing kids, I found the book incredibly applicable. Unlike many parenting books that can be overly conceptual, this one offers real strategies based on a child's temperament, which made it easy to relate to my own experiences. I highlighted several key takeaways and felt validated in many of the approaches I currently use. I especially appreciated the science-backed insights, particularly about sleep; I was fascinated to learn how independent sleep varies across cultures. Kudos to the authors for such an informative and accessible guide! I give it a solid five stars!
***I would like to thank the publisher, authors, and NetGalley for gifting this ARC in exchange for my honest review.
***I would like to thank the publisher, authors, and NetGalley for gifting this ARC in exchange for my honest review.
August 6, 2024
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC! All opinions are my own.
I was pleasantly surprised at how practical the content of this book was! Usually parenting books are very difficult to apply in real life because so much of the content is conceptual or black and white.
This book provided a lot of very real ways to parent, based on multiple different factors that may be present in a child’s temperament. I highlighted many things to remember to start doing but also felt good about a lot of things that we currently do.
I appreciated all the science backed data points, particularly around sleep. I was very surprised to see the mention of how most infants in other countries do not sleep independently. Kudos to these authors for mentioning the origins of independent sleep!
I was pleasantly surprised at how practical the content of this book was! Usually parenting books are very difficult to apply in real life because so much of the content is conceptual or black and white.
This book provided a lot of very real ways to parent, based on multiple different factors that may be present in a child’s temperament. I highlighted many things to remember to start doing but also felt good about a lot of things that we currently do.
I appreciated all the science backed data points, particularly around sleep. I was very surprised to see the mention of how most infants in other countries do not sleep independently. Kudos to these authors for mentioning the origins of independent sleep!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews