Parenting with Temperament in Mind: Navigating the Challenges and Celebrating Your Child’s Strengths (APA LifeTools Series)

This book will help parents and caregivers understand and more effectively parent their children with the kids' individual temperaments in mind. Every child comes with an innate temperament, which includes a motivational style, emotional reactions, strengths, and areas that require extra support. In particular, children who are easily frustrated, impulsive, inflexible, or fearful have unique needs that can challenge any parent. This book explains how different temperament characteristics can lead to challenging emotional and behavioral responses from children, and it presents parenting strategies that are tailored to address these different temperament sources of problems. This unique approach to parenting is based on a model most frequently used in current research, with roots in neurobiological systems that underlie motivation, emotions, and regulation. Drawing from extensive research as well as their own clinical and personal parenting experiences, the authors lay out how each temperament profile leads parents to react in particular ways, and how parents can impact their children’s neurobiological arousal and self-regulation, nurture their children’s adaptive behaviors, and work effectively with their children to promote positive social and emotional development. The result is an accessible, engaging, and meaningful guide to parenting.