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Baker Publishing Group - Florence Littauer

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84 pages

English

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How can you improve your relationship with your children and more effectively parent them? Florence Littauer helps you identify, understand, and meet each child's unique needs.

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 septembre 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781585581313
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0960€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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© 2000 by Florence Littauer
Published by Revell a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-5855-8131-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version ®. NIV ®. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.© Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction: “I Don’t Know What’s Wrong with My Child!”
Part 1 Overview of the Personalities
1 What Are the Personalities?
2 Profiling Parent and Child Personalities
Part 2 Living with the Personalities
3 Signs of a Sunny Sanguine
4 Parenting Your Sanguine Child
5 Characteristics of a Controlling Choleric
6 Parenting Your Choleric Child
7 Marks of a Meticulous Melancholy
8 Parenting Your Melancholy Child
9 Practices of a Pleasant Phlegmatic
10 Parenting Your Phlegmatic Child
11 Enjoying Your Family’s Personality Portrait

Conclusion: “Now I Understand!”
Appendix A: An Overview of the Personalities
Notes
About the Author
Other Books by Author
INTRODUCTION
“I Don’t Know What’s Wrong with My Child!”
Fred and I were enjoying a quiet Sunday brunch at the restaurant in our hotel when the hostess seated a family parents, grandparents, and ten-month-old child at a nearby table. As they settled into their seats, we couldn’t help but watch the commotion.
The child clearly didn’t want to sit in the high chair that was pulled up to the table. Her screams of protest made that evident! But all her squirming and squealing didn’t stop her determined mother from firmly placing her in the chair anyway.
Meanwhile the father quietly slid into his seat and began to browse the menu, while the grandparents exchanged a wary glance before taking their seats. Soon the whole family was seated and the adults were ready to enjoy a nice meal. The child, however, had a different idea.
Every few minutes she would point upward and let out a bone-chilling shriek that caught the attention of every person in the restaurant. The flustered mother quickly scrambled to placate the little one with a few crackers. Immediately the child crushed each cracker into pieces, gathered them into a pile, then picked them up and tossed them into the air. She screamed in delight as the flakes fell on her and the table.
At this point the mother slumped in her chair and sighed. “I don’t know what to do with her anymore,” she admitted to her parents.
The grandmother shook her head. “I don’t know either, dear. You were never like that,” she said.
“Your mother’s right. You were always quiet and well behaved,” the grandfather added. “We could take you anywhere and you never made a scene.”
With a glance at her husband, who was hunched over in his chair still studying the menu, the mother raised her hands in an apologetic gesture and said, “I just don’t know what’s wrong with her!”
Does this story sound familiar to you? Have you ever wondered why your child doesn’t act as you expect him to act? why one child is loud, boisterous, and full of fun while another is quiet, obedient, analytical, and perfectionistic from the beginning? why one is strong, active, and controlling of the entire family and another is compliant, friendly, peaceful, and no trouble at all?
This book will help you answer those questions and bring harmony to your home.
Like the cast for a Broadway show, the members of your family play various roles and must work together to produce a successful blend. Unlike the Broadway cast, however, your family members don’t audition for their roles. Couples meet and marry without evaluation by an experienced casting director, and we don’t choose some children and send others packing based on how well they fit a role. Instead, we must learn to understand the cast we have and work with it.
In this book I will show you and your cast how to use the concept of the four basic personalities to understand yourself and to learn how to get along with each person in your family. You’ll “I Don’t Know What’s Wrong with My Child!” begin to see why your child acts the way he does and how you as a parent should respond. Rather than worrying about why Suzy Sanguine talks all the time and forgets her chores, why Charlie Choleric bosses his friends around and seems to control even you, why Martin Melancholy is so neat and organized but easily hurt, or why Phyllis Phlegmatic is so relaxed and doesn’t seem to care about any of your exciting plans, you can train your child according to the pattern God has established in his personality. The resulting production is sure to be a smashing success!

WHAT ARE THE PERSONALITIES?
It doesn’t take long for a parent to realize that not all children act alike, but we seldom know what to do about it. One child may be bubbly and outgoing while another is reserved and withdrawn. One may demand constant attention while another is content to be left on her own.
When her triplets were four years old, Cheryl gathered them around the table to decorate gingerbread men. After dividing the cookies evenly and placing bowls of frosting, gumdrops, candy sprinkles, and M&M’s on the table, she watched as the three little ones began to create their masterpieces.
Bryce dove right in, slathering frosting with wild abandon and cramming as many pieces of candy as possible onto each cookie. He also couldn’t help but sneak a cookie or two into his mouth. His uncontrolled behavior disturbed his sister Sarah Jean, who pleaded, “Mommy, make him stop! He’s using all the candy! I get the pink and purple gumdrops ’cause I’m the girl!” At Sarah Jean’s protest, Cheryl stepped in to divide all the candies equally before Bryce had indeed used all of the colorful pieces.
Meanwhile, despite the commotion created by his siblings, Blake was carefully studying his cookies and the various decorations available to him. He hadn’t even started to decorate. When asked if he needed help, he explained, “I need help making the face right.” Despite his mother’s encouragement to just decorate the cookies any way he wanted, Blake refused to begin until she agreed to help him form eyes, nose, mouth, and hair for the first gingerbread man. Blake then completed the decoration, adding just a single, perfectly centered M&M button to the body. With that perfect cookie completed, Blake saw no reason to continue decorating others. So he asked his mother to wipe his hands so he could go do something else. As he scampered off to play with his Legos, Bryce volunteered, “I’ll take his candy!” to which Sarah Jean squawked, “No! Mommy! Divide them!” [1]
Despite the common bond these three children share as triplets—same parents, same home environment, same food, same stories—their approaches to this project differed drastically. Impetuous Bryce was interested in having as much fun as possible with his colorfully decorated cookies. Orderly Sarah Jean demanded that everything be done fairly and on her terms. And cautious Blake was determined to produce the perfect specimen on his first try.
So what makes each child so different?
Born to Be Unique
Studies have confirmed that children are born with prepackaged personalities that largely determine how they will interact with the world around them. Environment does play a role in the expression of a person’s inborn personality, but the existence of a personality that is present from birth is undeniable.
In 1979 the University of Minnesota began a study called “Twins Reared Apart.” The study revealed convincing evidence that personality is inherited. By bringing together and testing twins who had been separated at birth, adopted into different families, and brought up with no contact, the university team concluded that we inherit more of our adult behavior than was previously imagined. Twins in the study were dumbfounded to meet exact replicas of themselves in looks, mannerisms, attitudes, sociability, and personality.
A similar study at Indiana University generated the same results. Individuals whose only link during childhood had been their genetic makeup grew up to be remarkably similar in every way.
I’ve personally met a number of twins at my seminars who have related stories confirming their inborn similarities. Janette and Annette, for example, were born seven minutes apart. Both married evangelists and twice gave birth to babies at the same time. Though they live eight hundred miles apart, they frequently do the same things on the same day, only later discovering their identical actions.
Lana and Lorna, separated at birth and later reunited, found when they visited each other that they had chosen the same wallpaper for their master bedrooms and had many of the same outfits in their closets. Another pair told me that after being apart for thirty years they came together to discover that both of them were writing and illustrating children’s books.
As these stories indicate, humans inherit far more than just physical characteristics such as eye and hair color. Rather, we come preprogrammed with a direction of response to life that causes shyness, aggressive action, happiness, depression, talkativeness, desire to control, and many other traits.
The biological makeup of individuals is complex, but genes clearly influence our responses. Individuals react to similar experiences in surprisingly similar or different ways, depending on their inborn personality traits. Author Dean Hamer concludes, “You have about as much