Temperaments

Post Reply New Topic

This isn't directly relevant to parenting children on the autism spectrum, but I have found the concept of temperaments very useful.

Temperaments

This is taken from a great book by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. If you want to explore the idea further, she has another one that comes with a workbook: Raising Your Spirited Child. One of the best qualities of her approach is that it helps you to see your children's personality traits in a more positive way, and to adapt the things you say to those traits.

I am pretty sure some of you have "highly sensitive," "highly persistent," and/or "highly regular" children.

J.

Coolness! Thanks. My son scores high in almost all the categories. I like that they list the different examples, because you can see how the categories sometimes fight each other (frustration vs persistence) and helps explain the occasional odd exception in a category.

Can this be applied to adults as well?

I have one criticism of the Spirited Child book -- it doesn't have any info on what is just "spirited" and what indicates you are dealing with a more significant problem like AS, where you may need more help than the book can provide. Otherwise it has some interesting points. Mostly I felt like it boiled down to different ways to accommodate, not much in how to identify and teach missing skills.

CubeDemon: yes, it applies to adults as well. They suggest parents do it along with their children, because often parents have different results and can't understand their children instinctively. However, the strategies they suggest may not be quite as useful for adults. It would be good to have a book that helped adults who were highly sensitive deal with trigger situations in everyday life. I did find it somewhat helpful in understanding myself, but other tests such as the Myers Briggs are probably more useful. (If you want to try MBTI, you can go to www.humanmetrics.com.
I have some experience in applying the MBTI results, although I'm not a trained psychologist.)

Zette: agreed. When one of my children was young, I found that he was highly perceptive. There was a comparison chart of highly perceptive vs. ADD, and it convinced me not to have him tested. I'm still not sure whether that was the right thing to do. He is 19 now, in university, and some days he would like to have a better understanding of himself and other times he thinks his struggles have helped him adapt to challenges. On the other hand, knowing that my ASD daughter is highly intense but not highly sensitive helps me choose the strategies to focus on, as long as I recognize that her high intensity might reflect depression or anxiety and require extra help. I think I use this as a "try this first, maybe it will be enough." The other thing is that it is compatible with my attachment parenting approach, and a lot of discipline methods aren't.

J.