The Sunday Times magazine ran a piece about early childhood development and the importance of executive functioning, that is, the ability to predict what factors will help a child to "succeed." I read it with interest, trying to strike the usual balanced dose of skepticism and deference to the people who have spent many years observing children in a more scientific way than I have.

(I am likely too busy reacting to everything I encounter that concerns my daughter to really have an objective view. And isn't that our job as parents, to be triggered by everything, every injustice, every experience that we'd like to think is about their well-being, but is really about us and our less than ideal childhoods? Wait, no. I didn't mean to say that. OK, well, maybe I did.)

In the case of executive functioning, something I am quite sure I runshort on, it turns out that play is the most important factor, the kind of play that leads kids to problem solve and figure things out on their own without the interference of adults. (It can also lead to something called self-control, but I have to admit, I don't know what that is. My plan is to Google it as soon as I finish writing this.) This is great news to me. It came at the perfect time, when I didn't need another thing to feel bad about in my life as the parent of an extremely playful child who sometimes raises eyebrows.

One of the things I like to tell myself, as the parent of a five-year-old “spirited child” is that one day my high-energy daughter is going to be the most amazing woman. This is not to say that I don’t appreciate her now. She’s smart, funny, insightful, intuitive—and, did I mention, high-energy? Oh right, I already said that. But it’s not something you could ever overlook. It’s not something that any other parent I spend time with overlooks either.

My daughter, who likes to break into song and dance in the middle of a crowded room, finishing up with a kind of Mary Tyler Moore, throw your hat off at the end routine—yes, there is usually a hat involved in case you were wondering—is a bonafide performer, a real outgoing child.

When it comes to other parents and non-parents (does that cover everyone?), I usually get the full range of reactions: surprise, concern, sympathy, horror, or, often, just undisguised disbelief that my child could exude so much energy. Couldn't I just demand that she stop moving around and be quiet? She’s not officially (pathologically) hyper-active, or ADD, or ADHD or anything like that. I haven’t joined a support group. Well, I did once take a class about raising “spirited children” which turned out to be kind of a support group. It helped. A lot, actually. If only to know that I wasn’t alone in having the child who never stopped moving, or as one woman in the class remarked about her own daughter, “who is twirling around on her head up until she falls asleep at night.”

Spirited children don't have trouble focusing. They can focus quite well. But they can be higly emotional, highly sensitive, highly perceptive, and profoundly difficult to manage.

The experience is a challenge, and one which I don’t take lightly. I can’t. It affects every day of my life, every day as drop her off at school, hope for the best, and trod off to my job, second cup of coffee in hand, and try to regain some of the school busloads of energy I expend parenting a non-stopper. I’m not trying to play the victim here, but I have noticed, through many painful incidents that I won’t entertain right now, that parents of the say, the more demure children, the ones who are likely to sit still, are quick to think less favorable thoughts about her. And then of course there’s that other idea—that it is my lack of effective parenting skills that has produced this "unruly" child.

Believe me, pretty much every mother already thinks that most things are her fault anyway, so you don’t even have to insinuate this idea. It’s already there just waiting to be picked from the parenting tree of knowledge.

What I found most helpful about the spirited child class was having an instructor who made one thing very clear: don't expect empathy from parents of kids who are less demanding, less intense, less emotional and sensitive. In her words, "they just don’t get it. " They will always think it is something YOU are doing wrong as a parent—not reigning them in enough, not disciplining them enough, perhaps even not giving them a good whack (and yes, I did once have a man come up to me at Target, my child mid-tantrum, and tell me that I needed to “set her straight”).

Your job, this teacher said, is to not care about what other people think.

This is great advice. And, in my opinion, fit both for parents and non-parents. It's great advice, but difficult to follow. As a parent, you are forever on the receiving end of scrutiny, well-intentioned people telling you how it is, diagnosing your child with the latest findings. (Because I read too much, I probably already know about them before you tell me.)

“She’s one of those indigo children,” a woman once said to me with a great deal of authority after briefly meeting my daughter. “They’re very smart, and they’re born with a sense of entitlement.” Great, I thought. Is that her way of telling me she’s going to be a pain in the ass? I thought a sense of entitlement was more of an American trait than a new generation of children. So I did a little research about this Indigo thing. Turns out I was wrong. “Indigo Children” are the new crop of kids who appear, on the surface, to be high-intensity kids. And, if you keep reading the fine print, they also tend to be diagnosed with ADD and ADHD.

“There is an epidemic of bratty kids in this country,” another all-too-confident parent acquaintance said to me recently. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this kind of statement. You hear the criticism all the time: Parents are too soft, too tolerant, too afraid of coming down hard on their children, too lenient, less willing to squelch their budding flower's personality.

I can’t say whether or not I agree with this brat epedemic. Before I became a parent I remember using the words " little narcissist" and "self-indlugent" to describe kids i'd encourntered. I may have even blamed their parents for appearing to be teaching them that the world revovled around them. I can now look back on that and see that I was just not a parent yet. I was guilty of not having a clue about the ride of anxiety that parenting has become and I have since been relieved of that cluelessness.

It’s true that my generation has reacted to the more totalitarian parenting style. We do more of a modified democracy. Perhaps the anarchists in the bunch give all of us a bad name. I haven't personally met any of them and my hunch has alwasys been that there is a revisionist tendency when it comes to the "good old days" when kids were "better behaved." Fear of being slapped across the face can produce a quieter child, but is that something we should strive for?

I can really only speak from my experience. And though I try my best not step into the landmine that is the discussion of parenting style differences, what I do know is that I am not one of those anything-goes parents. I don’t let my daughter off the hook. I am not of the "my child can do no wrong" school of thought. But I won’t hit her and I won’t spend a lot of time wishing she was an easier, quieter, or less animated child. The bottom line, if there is one, is that a one-size-fits-all approach to parenting doesn't work for anyone.

What worked for you may not work for me. My child is not your child. And as jealous as I tend to be watching your quiet and seemingly obedient little bundle of joy, I have quite a different little person with a very different temperment on my already full hands. She may end up a lobbyist, or a litigator, or having a long run dancing on Broadway. She may end up struggling with all the energy she produces until she finds a productive way in which to channel it. I see it as my personal responsibility to help her do this. After all, as her parents, we’re the ones who passed on the genes. We’re the sensitive creative types who gave birth to another sensitive intuitive type. At the very least we owe it to her to give her some guidance.

Oh right, I was going to look up self-control. To be continued.