Parenting high-need children has matured us as individuals, too. High-need children push buttons that reveal pleasant and unpleasant scenes from our childhoods. Parenting Hayden led us to make personal discoveries about how we ourselves were parented, and how this was affecting us as adults. When these flashbacks surfaced, we soon learned which ones we could use to our parenting advantage and which ones to discard, for example, the impulse to smack. Some people would have considered Hayden’s behaviour cause for smacking, but we realized that she needed a different kind of “hands-on” discipline.
Hayden also caused our marriage to mature. We became very different partners as a result of our experience with parenting a high-need child. We knew that the best parenting requires two parents in the home. As tempting as it was for Martha to throw herself totally into mothering, she wisely directed some energy toward me. We have become much more sensitive to each other’s temperaments and better at anticipating each other’s needs. We have continued to avail ourselves of marriage-enrichment opportunities and plain old “enjoying time” together often.
Now that Hayden is about to leave the nest and enter college, we look back at our parenting with few regrets. We cannot take all the credit or blame for the person she becomes, yet it’s comforting to know we gave her a good start. The rest is up to Hayden.
Hayden has gone from being a high-need child to a high-energy teen. Her life as a baby is chronicled in our earlier book The Fussy Baby. She sometimes opens that book and shows her friends, “That’s me.” One prom night, as she stood posed for her picture, she looked so grown up in her formal gown. I whispered to Martha, “Fussy baby fills out”, and this mature teen-woman gave her daddy a wink. As she was escorted out the door, our minds and hearts filled with flashbacks of those countless energy-draining scenes of babyhood, toddlerhood, and childhood. Martha and I looked at each other and thought, “It’s been a long and bumpy road, yet all that time in arms, at breast, and in our bed, the many discipline confrontations, and the years of high-touch parenting have produced a confident, compassionate, caring person. It has all been worthwhile.”
“Why is my baby so different? She is not like any of my friends’ babies. They sleep through the night. They’re happy being held by anyone. My friends don’t seem as tired as I am. What am I doing wrong?” Sound familiar? Your baby acts the way she does because that’s the way she is. It’s her personality.
In the first weeks after birth you get a glimpse of who this little person really is. Even while pregnant you may have had a hint of the challenge to come. High-need infants tend to be full-time tummy-thumpers and bladder-kickers, as if telling the world even before they’re born that they need more space.
In some ways all babies are high-need babies, and most babies have high needs in at least one area of their life. Some have more high-need areas than others. All babies need attachment – high-need babies don’t give up expressing this need. The neediness of the baby is often in the mind of the parent. Some experienced parents of children have widened their expectations of what babies are “normally” like, and they adapt more easily to a baby with high needs; new parents often are not so realistic. After Hayden introduced us to high-need babies, we learned a whole new way to parent. The babies that followed her each had their own particular high needs. We were able to recognize and respond to them because of our experience with Hayden. None of them were as thoroughly “high need” as Hayden, but they came close. In retrospect, we realize that the babies who came before Hayden had high needs, too, in some areas. The difference between those babies and Hayden was not only a difference in need levels; Hayden also had the forceful personality to let us know just what she needed. (Factored into our whole spectrum of parenting is that we were young and full of energy with the first babies. Hayden was born eleven years after our first child, Jim. By then we had less energy, perhaps, but more experience.)
We have met many high-need babies over the years. Based on this “gallery” we have compiled the following profile of a high-need baby. All babies will show some of these features some of the time, and these features are descriptive only. As you will see, each of these personality traits has its blessings and its trials. These personality traits should not be judged as good or bad. They simply show differences among babies; but these differences do make high-need babies challenging to parent. Ultimately, what matters is how the child learns to use these special gifts. Our goal is to help parents identify these unique features in their infant and channel these traits to work to their child’s advantage.
“He’s going to be a handful”, one midwife said to another as they tried to console newborn baby George. You can often spot high-need babies in the hospital. Even at a few hours of age, George had an instinct about what he needed and the persistence required to get it. The cry of a high-need baby is not a mere request; it’s an urgent demand. These babies put more energy into everything they do. They cry loudly, feed voraciously, laugh with gusto, and protest more forcefully if their needs are not met. Because they feel everything so deeply, they react more powerfully if their feelings are disturbed. “If I don’t feed him as soon as he fusses, he falls apart” is a common statement from the mother of such a baby.
You can read the intensity of the baby’s feelings in her body language. The fists are clenched, back arched, muscles tensed, as if ready for action.
I set up a cradle in our room so we could hear Mara’s cries at night. It quickly became clear that not only would we be able to hear her, so would everyone on the block. Mara was LOUD! When she started crying, it would quickly escalate. The intensity and shrillness sounded as if something must be very wrong. We would feed her, burp her, change her, rock her, walk with her, but sometimes nothing seemed to help. After a while, I found myself going into overdrive instantly whenever she cried, because I knew if it got out of control she’d quickly disintegrate, and it would take her a long time to come back around. I became obsessive in trying to prevent her from getting upset in any way because there was hell to pay if she did. She was a type A personality right from birth.
Intense babies become intense toddlers, characterized by one word: “driven”. They seem in high gear all the time. Their drive to explore and experiment with everything within reach leaves no household item safe. Some high-need toddlers manoeuvre around the house carefully, but most do not. Most of these babies run headlong toward a desired object, seemingly oblivious of everything in their path. Soon it dawns on you that the same behavioural trait that can exhaust you will also delight you. The same drive that gets your toddler into trouble also leads him to a level of creativity that other children may not venture to reach. Your job is to help him drive carefully on roads that he can handle.
can you make a child high-need?
We believe that most high-need children are born with this trait. In fact, all babies have high needs for being held and comforted, but some babies are able to express their needs more strongly than others because they haven’t shut down (withdrawn) due to the trauma of separation. Some critics believe that parents make their child needy by how they parent. The great majority of parents we have counselled brought their high-need babies into the world and followed their own intuitive parenting to give