My daughter always insists she is right even when she is wrong. One day when she was between two and  three years old, we were driving to her preschool and we pulled up beside a bearded young man in a Jeep Cherokee.  He had his music up loud and he was singing along at the top of his baritone  lungs.  My daughter asked, “Daddy, what’s that lady doing?”  I looked at him, then I looked at her through the rear-view mirror and said, “Well first of all that’s not a lady, that’s a man!”  The light turned green and he sped off.  For the remainder of our ten minute drive to her preschool, my daughter kept arguing that the bearded baritone was a woman.  She even argued with me when I used the Love and Logic one-liner, “I love you too much to argue with you!”  She emphatically said, “No you don’t!”

Needless to say, my wife and I are saving money to send our daughter to law school someday (Besides, someone has to take care of us in our old age!)  She loves to argue!  She needs to learn how to argue from the other person’s perspective and she gets better at this all the time.  With a little modeling and guidance, her “determination” is becoming a strength that makes her a leader in school and life.

The moral of this story?  Sometimes, we have to get creative and recognize the strengths behind our child’s apparent weaknesses.  For example, the “flip-side” of your teen’s distractibility is creativity, the strength associated with your child’s impulsivity is curiosity, and your tween’s stubbornness can easily be reframed as determination.   The exciting news is that these strengths can help address your child’s needs as outlined in the blog post Flexibly Structured Discipline. 

If you struggle to recognize your child’s hidden strengths, consider reading the book Super-Parenting for ADD by Edward Hallowell, M.D. and Peter Jensen, M.D.

Need help addressing your child/teen’s needs?  Call 817.421.8780 to learn about our research-proven counseling techniques.

(c) 2009- 2012, Monte W. Davenport, Ph.D.