Do You Really Know Your Child? And Do You Really Know Yourself?
Knowing your child and knowing yourself go together, and you need both to raise a kid well. The framework that helped me most is Carol Tuttle's book The Child Whisperer. I came to it in a roundabout way. I had already found her other system, the one about choosing clothes based on your energy type, and the book grew out of my curiosity about that.
Dressing Your Truth took me a while to get. My first guess about my own type was wrong. I settled on Type 1, then after reading The Child Whisperer I grew surer of a different answer, Type 3. Type 1, it turned out, was my secondary type rather than my primary one. What convinced me were small things: strangers started paying me unexpected compliments when I wore Type 3 clothes and accessories. And when I looked back at a photo of myself in a Type 1 top (bought from the Dressing Your Truth store that was open back then, precisely because it was labeled Type 1), I could see it was not me. For anyone wondering, there is now material covering all four types for men too.
The book lays out all four types of children and all four types of parents. It spells out how the different child types interact with their parents and how easy it is for two people to misread each other, since what a child of a given type needs at a given stage can fit one kind of parent well and another kind poorly. So you have four possible child types and four possible parent types. Then remember there are usually two parents, who may be different types from each other. Once they figure out how their two parenting styles land with one child, along comes another child who may be a completely different type.
The Child Whisperer walks through those combinations and describes what each type of child looks like at various ages, how to spot them, and how the parenting styles play out with each energy type. My suggestion, though, is to get familiar with the energy types yourself before diving in. That has been easier for women, since Dressing Your Truth began as a system aimed at women, but the materials for men exist now. Once you pin down your own type, whether you are a man or a woman, you tend to feel easier in your clothes and more settled about how you look.
The Dressing Your Truth system is online. You will find tools there to work out your type and descriptions of what each one is like. There is an older book and a newer one, both explaining how to identify the types and what defines them. I am Fire, for example, though at first I assumed I was Air. My nicknames over the years fit, oddly enough. People have called me Wildcat and Wildfire, and as a kid I was Pumpkin, which happens to be one of the colors recommended for Type 3.
Here is something odd about the colors. Three of them belong to a single type each: pure white, gray, and black. Those are the shades most of us treat as wardrobe basics. I have a family photo from a wedding where I wore a black top and black skirt, and I looked awful, the only word for it is huge, even though you would expect black to slim you down. Black (and pure white, for that matter) really works only on Type 4s, and gray belongs to Type 2s. I expect the same holds for men, though I have not read up on that side yet.
Interested? I am posting this without filling in all the details, partly to pull you in, and I will come back with the rest in about a week.