Grandparents as Parents : A Survival Guide for Raising a Second Family Book

This book definitely made me grateful for my child's temperament, as I compared it with other temperament styles profiled in the book! My child is mainly like what's described in an early chapter: a generally "easy" child with one or two higher-need traits. For this reason, much of the book was not super applicable to us, since it focused on profiling particularly challenging combinations of traits (e.g. "The Active, Intense, Slow-Adapting Child" - yikes), and offering ideas for how to support kids of these temperaments.

The temperament descriptions are great. I liked the chapter about how parent and child's temperament go together, and it gave me some helpful insights. I thought a lot of the suggestions for how to work with kids of challenging temperaments seemed generally good; they were very specific and explained clearly why your child needs things done a certain way, without being overly moralizing most of the time. (The message was more like "Things will be a lot easier for you if you try this" rather than "You must do this to be a good parent".) Also, I liked that the book is not jargony.

I wished this book had more for parents whose children don't happen to fit the specific combinations they profile. Only the first three chapters were universally relevant. A chapter for each trait would have been helpful (and this is not a super-long book, so it could have easily had a chapter about each trait in addition to the profiles of trait combinations).

As a side note, this book is about ages 0-5. That was fine for me, having a toddler, but it would be nice if there were a companion volume for older kids - it would be interesting to know more about how these traits play out at older ages.