Parents often do not become believers in temperament until after the birth of their second child. Before this time, their child’s behavior may be seen as a simple and direct outcome of their upbringing, “a tribute to” or “the fault of” the parents. With the second child, management strategies that worked well with the first child may no longer be effective. Problems experienced with the first child (in feeding, sleeping, coping with strangers) may not exist with the second, but new problems may arise. Such experiences suggest strongly that “nature” as well as “nurture” influences child development, that children differ from each other from very early in life, and that these differences have important implications for parent-child interaction.
A number of these individual differences fall under the rubric of child temperament, which we define as individual differences in emotional, motor and attentional reactivity to stimulation, and in patterns of behavioral and attentional self-regulation.
The modern understanding that children make important contributions to their social interactions has two roots. The first is temperament research initiated by Thomas, Chess and colleagues in their pioneering New York Longitudinal Study (NYLS; Thomas, Chess, Birch, Hertzig, & Korn, 1963). The second is Bell’s (1968) reconceptualization of socialization as a mutually interactive process, with both child and caregiver seeking to redirect, reduce, or augment the behavior of the other. These insights led to the recognition that children differ in such qualities as responsiveness to parental socialization strategies, capacity to control their emotional reactivity, and capacity to bring pleasure or distress to their parents.
A child’s temperament is apparent from early infancy and is an important influence on development. Variations in temperamental reactivity and self-regulation can be assessed in terms of characteristic patterns of positive and negative emotionality, sociability, and attentional persistence for each child. These patterns are moderately stable over time but are by no means immutable. Temperament contributes to a wide range of child outcomes in behavioral, cognitive and social domains. The task for parents in thinking about temperament is to take their child’s particular characteristics into account when choosing strategies to soothe, control, stimulate and guide their child, and in arranging the overall childrearing environment.
We have suggested that some of the consequences of taking temperament into account might be to adapt parenting behavior and the child’s environment to provide as good a “fit” to the child’s temperament as possible, while at the same time encouraging the child’s adaptations to situations; to recognize that, while a child’s temperament is not immutable, changes over time are unlikely to be dramatic; and to avoid value judgments about these individual differences. Even though it may be recognized that in a given social and cultural context, some children take more effort to parent, there is nothing inherently inferior about these children, nor are temperament characteristics the result of “naughtiness.”
In sum, the concept of temperament directs our attention to important aspects of child individuality that must be considered in parenting. It has long been recognized that appropriate parenting depends on the age of the child; temperament characteristics also determine what is appropriate. The task then for the parent or caregiver is to foster “respect” for the individuality and integrity of each child, and flexibility in creating environments that may lead to positive outcomes for them and for us.
References
Bell, R. Q. (1968). A reinterpretation of the direction of effects in studies of socialization. Psychological Review, 75, 81-95.
Chess, S., & Thomas, A. (1989). Issues in the clinical application of temperament. In G. A. Kohnstamm, J. E. Bates, & M. K. Rothbart (Eds.), Temperament in childhood (pp. 378-386). Chichester: Wiley.