Recommended Reading: Personality Plus

I read this book Personality Plus for Parents by Florence Littauer in a confinement center after I delivered my first baby. I found it so interesting that I bought myself a copy and read it from time to time.

This book explains 4 major types of personality: Sunny Sanguine, Controlling Choleric, Meticulous Melancholy, and Pleasant Phlegmatic. Each personality represents a unique character, and each pair of personality (whether similar or different) when being put together creates a different type of relationship. The book touches on the possible scenarios and challenges, focusing specifically on parenting (right from the infancy stage) and cites many good examples.

As the name suggests, Sunny Sanguine is popular; s/he is the extrovert, the talker, the optimist. People who belong to this group long for attention and approvals, look for fun, excitement and hate dull tasks and routines. They are good in charming their parents and negotiating.

Controlling Choleric is the "commander" who is always strong-willed and wants his/her way followed. Decisive and stubborn, they tend to focus on getting things done, and may offend others. They are self-confident, aggressive and responsible.

Meticulous Melancholy is the perfectionist with high standards. They are generally the deep thinkers and good students. Dutiful and responsible, they are sensitive to others and may get depressed more easily.

Pleasant Phlegmatic is the least demanding of all. They are very compromising and mediate problems to avoid trouble. They have a casual attitude and tend to procrastinate.

By reading this book, I was able to identify the personality of my family members and understand better why they act in a certain way in some situations. As parents, it is good to
- understand our children's weaknesses and help them manage those weaknesses,
- know what to watch out as the children grow up,
- master the skills to effectively communicate with them,
- learn how to "tick" with them, and
- find out how to manage the similarity and differences between us.
As a result, we can better guide our children to the "correct" path.

We should accept our children as who they are and not forcing them to become like us. I believe that a healthy relationship between a parent and a child is a loving one with mutual understanding, trust and respect. I hope my children will always share with me their thoughts and problems they face. I am not trying to help them solve all their problems (sometimes they need to learn by themselves) but in the least I can be their listener and share their joy and pain together. I would want to be a friend my children can always turn to.

I highly recommend this book to parents who want to understand their children more and maintain a close relationship with them.

Love and respect are the most important prospects in any relationships (Jodie Foster).

My Toddler's Crying Problem

My 2-year-old little girl had been a little difficult to handle lately. She cried easily, day and night. It was disturbing especially during midnight, whereby she just burst into loud cries shouting "papa" or "mama" once she realized that neither of us were sleeping beside her, and it was difficult to calm her down and put her back into sleep without one of us being fully awake. Certainly, this had disturbed our sleep. Our tiredness due to lack of sleep had led to some other problems like lower tolerance level of her wrong actions - when she did something wrong and we punished her she started crying again... The cycle repeated and we could not break it...

I have been wondering if this can be due to the fact that I have recently returned to work after being a homemaker for 1 year plus. At first we did not think it was a big change to her because she has been attending a full day childcare for 9 months and all along she has been doing well. However, after the 3-day long weekend (with a public holiday), I noticed that she has been behaving well and I realized that what she wanted was more attention from the parents! She probably has felt the changes after I started working. Naturally, I feel tired at night after returning from work and have less energy and time to spend with her. Furthermore, I still need to do a little housework, and give some attention to the elder brother who is entering primary school next year, monitoring his progress in school related work. Sometimes I also need a break to watch TV / surf Internet, which doesn't make her feel very happy. Another big change for her is probably that I no longer take her to school every morning. Usually I leave home before she even got up. Although she is very attached to the father, she probably needs me around as well.

My girl had actually been very well behaved since birth, especially compared to the brother, who was a very difficult infant. (Nevertheless he has turned out to be one of the best behaved kids among his friends and makes us really proud of him.) She made little noises when she was hungry, seldom gave problems at night, slept early at night and slept through the nights from an early age. Sometimes when she woke up at 7am, she did not even cry to wake us up; she just stayed quiet by herself unless she was very hungry. As she grew into a toddler, her words always made us laugh, and she knows what to say at the right timing to melt our heart. :) So there must be a reason for her to cry - which I thought could be feeling insecure. Her cries during midnight may be due to nightmares as we punish or spank her during the day. (Well, some older people believe that this phenomena is caused by the disturb of some ghosts/spirits, but I prefer to look at it logically.)

Now the challenge is how I can keep up her good behavior during weekdays. I may need to boost my physical stamina by exercising more and taking supplements, or get someone to help with housework so that I can give her more attention at nights. Although sometimes I feel so sleepy and can't attend to her, I believe that my love to her will give me power to stay stronger... and help her go through this stage of hurdle. Pray for us!