Fresh Reads: Parenting a Spicy One: A Compassionate Guide for Raising a Deep-Feeling and Wonderfully Strong-Willed Kid by Mary Van Geffen
There is a moment—one most parents have had but few will ever admit out loud—where you look at your child and feel something uncomfortably close to dislike. Not a fleeting frustration, but a deep, bewildering wall between you and the small person you love more than life. If you have ever stood there, in that shame-soaked silence, wondering what is wrong with you—or them—then Mary Van Geffen wrote this book for you.
Mary is an international parenting coach who works with what she lovingly calls "the spicy ones"—the intense, strong-willed, deep-feeling children who seem engineered to challenge every expectation you had about who you would be as a parent. She knows this child intimately because she was one herself, raised without the tools or understanding she desperately needed. And then, in one of life's most poetic ironies, she gave birth to one. Her journey from bewildered, burned-out mother to coach and author is at the heart of her book, Parenting a Spicy One: A Compassionate Guide for Raising a Deep-Feeling and Wonderfully Strong-Willed Kid—a memoir-meets-manual that weaves her own raw, unguarded story together with the voices of over 1,700 women who have moved through her program and come out the other side transformed.
What makes this book unlike any other parenting book on the shelf is its radical insistence that the child is not the problem—and neither, ultimately, are you. Mary guides parents through the work of examining their own unhealed wounds, their need for control, their inherited smallness, and their people-pleasing patterns, because this kid—your spicy one—will not let you bypass any of it. The book moves through the pillars of being calm, kind, and firm, and it ends in the places other books are afraid to go: what to do when your child gets violent, how to navigate co-parenting after divorce, how to survive the judgment of everyone who has an opinion about your family. It is, as Olivia put it in this conversation, a Bible. A lifesaver. And an invitation to finally stop parenting out of fear and start leading from a place of self-knowledge, humor, and radical self-compassion.