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I want to manage and lead my strong-willed child properly, but Im afraid Ill break his spirit and damage him in some way. How can I deal with his misbehavior without hurting his self-concept?

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I want to manage and lead my strong-willed child properly, but Im afraid Ill break his spirit and damage him in some way. How can I deal with his misbehavior without hurting his self-concept?

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Answer I sense that you do not have a clear understanding of the difference between breaking the spirit and shaping the will of a child. The human spirit, as I have defined it, relates to the self-esteem or the personal worth that a child feels. As such, it is exceedingly fragile at all ages and must be handled with care. You as a parent correctly assume that you can damage your child’s spirit quite easily — by ridicule, disrespect, threats to withdraw love, and by verbal rejection. Anything that depreciates his self-worth can be costly to his spirit. However, while the spirit is brittle and must be treated gently, the will is made of steel. It is one of the few intellectual components that arrives full strength at the moment of birth. In a past issue of “Psychology Today,” this heading described the research findings from a study of infancy: “A baby knows who he is before he has language to tell us so. He reaches deliberately for control of his environment, especially his parents.”41

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