The book If It’s Difficult with a Child by Lyudmila Petranovskaya is part of the “Close People” series. I decided to read it almost immediately after finishing the first book in the series, The Secret Support: Attachment in a Child’s Life. The first book focused on the various stages of a child’s development and how their behavior changes significantly during each stage. In this new book, the focus shifts to something else—how to deal with challenging situations when “it’s difficult with a child.” Both I and Lyudmila Petranovskaya are careful not to say “a difficult child” because it’s usually the situations that are difficult, while the child often becomes difficult due to the circumstances.
In this book, the author also addresses various situations, but one of the main messages is to try to see things from the child’s perspective and to understand why they act the way they do. Often, once you do, their behavior seems much more logical and even obvious.
This applies to many situations where something is forbidden for the child but allowed for adults. There are countless examples, starting with “you have to go to bed at 9 PM” or “you can only play on the computer for half an hour.” The child sees that their parents don’t go to bed that early, so why should they? Or if their father spends most of his time in front of a monitor (regardless of what he’s doing), why should the child be limited to just half an hour? Simple prohibitions no longer work in such cases, as the child doesn’t see any logic behind them.
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