This is a new series that I’ll be featuring periodically, sharing my thoughts and research on educating a spirited child. Whether you are a home educating parent or your family is part of a school community, I hope you’ll find something useful and uplifting to take away.
The first thing I can tell you about parenting a spirited child is this: it’s not about you. You didn’t interrupt your child’s play too much, or give into their requests for attention too frequently. You didn’t talk too much or overstimulate them. You didn’t do anything to make your kid into a streak of lightening, beautiful and intense, chatting a mile a minute and dashing about the house. They came this way.
You will know if you have a spirited child. They are intense, energetic, perceptive, ‘more’. They run instead of walking, they shout instead of talking, and they are switched on to 110% from the moment (the very early moment) they wake up, until they fall asleep. People who don’t have a spirited child may think that your child is running rings around you - that something you’ve done or not done has caused your child to act this way.
Depending on how old your child is, you may have already spent months or years looking for guidance about helping your child to play alone - mostly written by people who have kids who naturally are good at playing alone. You’ve read books that recommend you reduce your child’s input, so you’ve turned off any distractions and monitored how many words you say. It hasn’t helped much - in fact, maybe your child is going at an even higher speed. You’ve typed “should I worry child doesn’t play with toys” and “should I worry non-stop talking” into your search engine more than once. At least once a week, you wonder if you are doing it all wrong.
The moment that I realised that A was definitely a spirited child was when he was about 18 months old. I’d met up with a group of friends, all who had toddlers of the same age. The kids were sitting on a picnic blanket eating strawberries. Most of them could say a few words: bus, car, ball. A was running in circles around the group, singing a song he’d made up about a frog and a dog on a log, and climbing a rock wall meant for much older children. I have a laser-clear memory of looking around and thinking, ‘These other kids are sitting here, eating fruit and saying ‘bus’, and my child is acting like he is in some kind of alternate reality.’ Giving myself the permission to see him differently - to admit that he was wired differently than other kids - has meant that I can see spiritedness as an asset and lean into what will work best for him. I’m not doing anything wrong, and he’s not doing anything wrong. We’re just doing us.
The main approach to spirited kids seems to involve ‘taming’ them in some way (without ‘breaking their spirits’, some books promise) so that they can fit in with society’s expectations of children: that they will have polite exchanges with adults, sit quietly in school, and use their exuberant energy at the ‘right place and time’ - recess and weekends. But spirited children are only ‘difficult’ because our society is set out to reward one very specific kind of behaviour: compliance with those in positions of power.
There is nothing we need to change about our spirited kids. Instead, we need to change how we think about our expectations of children’s behaviour and capacities for learning. If you haven’t yet read Carol Black’s essay A Thousand Rivers - please, give yourself the gift of reading it right now. In it, she writes about the way that our Western societies (which she calls WEIRD - “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic”) privilege one kind of learning and behaviour over others, and the effect this has on children. Whether your child is home educated or at school, shifting your perception about their behaviour and skills is powerful. Our children go from being kids who can’t sit still and follow directions, to being kids who have a boundless supply of new ideas and a thousand jokes up their sleeves. The characteristics that make kids ‘spirited’ or ‘difficult’ in our society would make them leaders in cultures that place more value on independent thinking, flexibility, and sociability. Their boldness, the fast pace of their ideas, their intensity are all useful and valuable skills in the real world. And when we shift our perspective, we start to see how we could stand to learn a lot about independence and strength of mind from our spirited kids.
In this series, I’ll explore different aspects of educating a spirited child, like learning linked to movement, setting daily rhythms that work for your family, and using stories and project-based methods to tap into the ways that spirited children tend to learn best. If there’s an aspect of educating a spirited child that you’d especially like to hear about, please let me know!