How to Parent a Strong Willed Child

Parenting & You With Dr. Shefali

In this episode of 'Parenting & You With Dr. Shefali,' host Dr. Shefali sits down with parenting coach Mary Van Geffen, who specializes in supporting mothers of

Key takeaways

• Strong-willed children are not broken—they are often highly sensitive, justice-minded, and emotionally intense, requiring a different parenting approach.
• Parents often project their own childhood wounds onto their children, especially when they see traits in their kids that mirror their past struggles.

Main topics

• Parenting strong-willed or 'spicy' children
• Healing childhood trauma to improve parenting

Notable quotes

"They are your curriculum. They are not your problem."

"I was beginning to say these same things about my daughter that my mother had said to me."

Conclusion

Raising a strong-willed child is not about control or correction—it's an invitation to

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Support your homeschool routine. Getting into the school year rhythm can take a little time, and iXL makes it easier. It fits right into your routine, helping reinforce lessons, practice important skills, and give your child that extra boost to keep learning on track. iXL is an award-winning online learning platform that supports students wherever learning happens. It offers interactive practice across math, language arts, science, and social studies from pre-K through 12th grade. Homeschool families can use IXL as part of their everyday routine, while students in traditional schools can use it to reinforce classroom learning. IXL personalizes learning for each child and gives parents clear insight into progress. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now. And parenting and you listeners can get an exclusive 20 % off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash parenting. Visit ixl.com slash parenting to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. Hello, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of Parenting and You with me, Dr. Shefali. This episode really hit close to home for me. Our guest today is Mary Van Geffen. She's an international parenting coach for mothers of spicy ones, and she describes herself as a spicy one. She's a mother who has walked this path personally, raising a strong-willed child, and she's learned firsthand how triggering and humbling parenting can be. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Support your homeschool routine. Getting into the school year rhythm can take a little time, and iXL makes it easier. It fits right into your routine, helping reinforce lessons, practice important skills, and give your child that extra boost to keep learning on track. iXL is an award-winning online learning platform that supports students wherever learning happens. It offers interactive practice across math, language arts, science, and social studies from pre-K through 12th grade. Homeschool families can use IXL as part of their everyday routine, while students in traditional schools can use it to reinforce classroom learning. IXL personalizes learning for each child and gives parents clear insight into progress. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now. And parenting and you listeners can get an exclusive 20 % off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash parenting. Visit ixl.com. to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. Joining me today is Mary Van Geffen. She's a parenting coach for mothers of spicy ones, helping mothers stay calm, kind, and firm with their strong-willed children. Welcome to my podcast, Mary. Speaker 2 (2:57) What an honor. This is a full circle moment and I'm fangirling hard. So I'm glad to be here. We're Speaker 1 (3:03) very happy to have you here. So what do you mean by moms of spicy ones? And why did you choose that group to center your work around? Speaker 2 (3:14) There's Speaker 1 (3:15) a Speaker 2 (3:15) few ways to define this. One is this global feeling that a lot of moms have of this kid needs something from me that I actually don't have within me to give. They need more than I have, or they need a certain kind of skilled parenting, or I'm making things worse. I would call that a spicy one. And maybe if I... babysat your spicy one, they'd be kind of a breeze. That's one sort of way of doing it. There's also the more general like temperamental, like this is a strong-willed child. This is an intense child. This is sometimes inflexible, very persistent when they have something that they want to make happen. They negotiate wildly with adults right up into that point where they realize there's actually a wall there. The emotions are so big and so contagious. I mean, they're the ones who can ruin the road trip. And if we haven't done our work, they really take us off course. And I like to think they just come out of the womb with more loyalty to their own soul than to what your adult agenda is. And that can be really discombobulating. It can feel like when you believe that a good mom has a well-behaved child. then you just feel like a failure. And when you feel like a failure and have a like sort of a lack of compassion for yourself, you come at your child in a way that, I mean, research shows that challenging children or explosive children do not do well with punishment. And what they perceive is injustice. They're very justice minded and they want to have an impact. You could frame that as they always need to have power and everything's a conflict. Or you can do that deep work that you started me on 15 years ago to look at them with just the eyes of compassion and to know that they are your curriculum. They are not your problem. Speaker 1 (5:06) Yeah, I like that. So did you have a spicy child yourself or were you one when you were younger? Speaker 2 (5:14) Yes, to both of those. Right around when your book came out, I think that was. 2010. Yes. I had a four and a six year old. And that was probably the worst part of my parenting. Because now I had two children, and I could see that their differences, I don't know, it was amplified. And I still felt it was my fault, so to speak. And so yes, I had a very spicy one, and a mild child who was kind of a typical kid. And so I went on a whole journey to get her diagnosed. There must be a problem with her because I couldn't tolerate that there, and I couldn't see that there was a problem maybe with me. And so I really needed to have some kind of label for her. Wow. Yeah. Speaker 1 (6:00) It's so hard to believe that children can be so different and we've been so indoctrinated to expect. a quiet, servile, docile, you know, temperamentally very easygoing child that we can boss around and influence and control. And so it's so hard to believe that this child came out of the womb like that, right? And so because it's so hard to believe, we spend the first few years trying to put this kid back in a box and we make things worse. Did you find yourself doing that? Speaker 2 (6:37) Oh, yeah. I added combustion to every situation. I had an inner victim that was like, I do everything. And I had an inner monster that would really clinch. I would clinch my teeth and thoughts would flit across my mind like, oh, now you deserve it. Now, now any rules of decorum, I get to do whatever I want because. there's some line that you have crossed. And so it was just bringing up a lot of parts of me that I could not tolerate. And so I ended up trying to find like a play therapist that would come watch her in preschool because I'm like, if someone could see, she would use very like emotionally manipulative ways of. interacting with other toddlers. Like if somebody else wanted to get in and play with the dress up area, she'd say, oh, you can't come. I don't like your breath smells bad. And I would think, oh my gosh, I'm, I'm raising this bad seed. Really. I was just raising someone who was gifted intellectually, had a higher vocabulary than her peers and was really declined in other areas as we all are. We're going to be gifted in something and, and deficient in another. And so I began to tell myself this story, like there's something really wrong with her. Speaker 1 (7:51) And what I wasn't aware of is that there were echoes of Speaker 2 (7:54) my own story happening here. My own mother, if she was going to describe me as a young person, would say bossy, overly emotional, too sensitive, all these things that I was beginning to say about this child. And it was just as it does being recreated. And I would complain about her to friends and say, you know, I'm always going to love her, but I don't have to like her. The very things my mother had said to me. And my mother loved to say, there's only going to be one queen and I got to knock you down a few pegs. And it was sort of that internalized misogyny, I think, of I need to make you smaller so you're safe. I like to believe that that's the unconscious programming that was going on. But we had constant battles and it got really bad up in the teenage years. And now we've found our truce. I'm headed to see her next week. But I was beginning to say these same things about my daughter. And then I. finally found Speaker 1 (8:49) a therapist that was a play therapist. Speaker 2 (8:52) And I took her to the play therapist and sat outside and was like, here we go. I don't know what they're going to say. Like, and then she went twice and the lady came out and said, could you come by yourself next week? And I was like, Speaker 1 (9:03) oh, Speaker 2 (9:04) finally, let's get a treatment plan. And you can finally lay it on me when I'm dealing with, you know, I was waiting for the drama. And so I went back that next week and then I went back the next week and I went back the next week and the next week and the