All About High Demand Children

What are high demand children? How can you tell if your child is one of them? If your child needs a lot of care or has a lot of needs, leading to frustration and exhaustion, and also makes you doubt your abilities as a mother, they’re surely high demand.

High demand children are active and require a lot of care, as they’re more sensitive and demanding. If your child cries all the time, is always hungry, needs attention, wants to spend all day glued to you, and always requires something, which wears you down and makes you feel frustrated, you probably have a high demand child.

It’s completely normal for you to feel anxious, especially when you meet all your child’s needs and they still cry. This can be very confusing if you’re a first-time mother, because babies require a lot of attention. Thus, you may be wondering if your child is of high demand.

High demand is simply a trait of your child’s personality that makes them different from demanding babies or their common requests. You may think they’re a brat or that you’re doing something wrong but the truth is that they’re very sensitive and require a lot of love and patience.

The most important thing is to recognize their personality. Every baby is different and there’s no single parenting style, but there are certain common characteristics that you can easily recognize to know if your child falls into the category of high demand children.

Characteristics of high demand children

It’s very important to know the characteristics of high demand children to differentiate them from a demanding child.

1. They demand attention and constant physical contact. They need to be in their parents’ arms all the time, sleep with them, and receive affection. In addition, they need to constantly be near their parents.
2. Likewise, they’re hyperactive. They’re children who cry a lot and sleep little. They wake up when they hear noise, have trouble falling asleep, and are very restless.
3. Also, they’re exhausting. They have a lot of energy, always want more, and it’s hard for them to stop. They’re sponges, as they absorb other people’s energy.

   

4. These children are never satisfied. Nothing satisfies them, as they always demand more: more time, more love, more attention, or more explanations.
5. They’re unpredictable. What you did yesterday to calm them down during a tantrum wouldn’t work today if you tried it again.
6. They’re oversensitive. These children are overly aware of what’s happening in their environment. If there’s too much noise or stimuli, they can become irritated easily. However, this can provide them great empathy and sensitivity in the future.
7. These children can’t calm down on their own. They don’t know how to contain themselves and self-regulate, so they need their parents to calm down.
8. Likewise, they’re often hungry. When they’re still small and you feed them, what they really want is for you to attend to them and feel physical contact, as this gives them a sense of security.

How to deal with high demand children

The first thing to consider is that high demand babies become high demand children, adolescents, and adults as they grow.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t have to be considered negative. You just have to take this into account during child-rearing and properly handle those traits to make sure they evolve into others.

Their high degree of sensitivity and intensity can lead to them becoming easily frustrated, which is why it’s important for you to guide them so they can learn how to tolerate frustration. As they’re very aware of their actions, if they learn to better channel their frustration, they can do whatever they want in life.

Also, it’s important to change their caregiver so they can help you with their education. It’s very difficult to accept that, as a parent, you can’t deal with everything and that you also need moments of rest and disconnection, as they’ll allow you to recover your energy and clear your mind.

Since they’re highly sensitive beings that perceive everything, you should avoid using negative words, as they can attribute them to themselves. The best thing to do in these cases is to accompany them emotionally, be positive, and substitute punishments, labels, and negative words with affection.

Other recommendations

Also, you must persevere and be consistent with what you do and say. You should lead by example. Although you may feel tired of hearing them scream that you just give in to their demands sometimes, you must remember that you can’t give in to everything because, if you do, you’ll just end up worsening their insecurity and anxiety.

In addition, you should know that high demand children are normal, just more intense, curious, and a bit tiresome. However, don’t forget that they have wonderful qualities that make you love them with the same intensity with which they do everything.