What is temperament in children

The term "difficult" has a negative connotation as it overlooks what are often valuable behavioural traits: assertiveness, persistence and decisiveness. Other words such as "spirited" or "feisty" have been suggested because they sound more positive; however, the word "difficult" is used here because it is the established term in the scientific literature.

Slow-to-warm-up babies do not like to be pushed into things. They are frequently thought of as shy or sensitive. Because many babies and children do not fit into a particular category, it is sometimes helpful to consider how the characteristics and types of temperament relate to each other. A baby may have some "difficult" characteristics and other characteristics that are "easy.

The relationship between the characteristics and types of temperament are summarized in the table below:. The Origin of Personality. Scientific American ; A slow-to-warm-up child is a cautious child.

However, if pressured to do so, these children may fall back to their natural tendency to withdraw. When a baby cries incessantly, you may have the urge to shout at them to stop.

And when your difficult child yells at you, it is natural that you want to yell back. Tough love parenting is therefore sometimes used by parents whose children have a difficult temperament. However, according to research, low emotional support, e. This difference in resilience can be explained by the Diathesis Stress Model.

According to the Diathesis-Stress Model , people who have a predisposition or vulnerabilities to suffer from a psychological disorder require a lower threshold to trigger the disorder. So tough love is simply not the answer to raising children with a difficult temperament. It can make things worse. By remaining calm, responsive and sensitive, it may take a long time to get through to your child and the process may be painstaking.

But at the end of the day, the reward of being a good parent will be tremendous. If you have an easy baby, congratulations! You probably have more sleep than many other parents. We envy you! Caring for a difficult baby is exhausting and worrisome. However, do not despair if you have a difficult baby. There is actually good news for you. Differential susceptibility means young children with a difficult temperament are disproportionately affected by parenting. They react more more susceptible or more sensitive to the quality of parenting than easy children, for better and for worse.

When raised with good parenting , a kid with difficult child temperament tends to do better in cognitive, academic and social adjustment than their easy counterparts. For example, if you notice situations where your child could be more assertive, you could get your child to practise handling those situations differently. Are you happy with that choice of movie? Children who are less reactive might also be less physically active.

Your less active child will be happiest with plenty of opportunities to use their fine motor skills, like doing craft or drawing. But you might need to encourage physical activity.

Try a trip to the park to collect leaves for a collage, for example. Or make sure you both walk to the library if you can, instead of driving. More self-regulated Children who find it easier to self-regulate are good at staying calm when they feel emotions like frustration or excitement. Also, children who are not well regulated are likely to elicit negative reactions from both peers and adults.

These factors have been linked to emotional and attentional brain systems in humans and in non-humans. Temperament develops over time. During the first few months of life, individual differences can be observed in attentional orienting, distress proneness, positive affect and approach, and frustration. Late in the first year and beyond, there may be individual differences in behavioural inhibition to novel or intense stimuli.

It is also late in the first year of life that children begin to develop effortful control. This ability develops rapidly in the first four years of life, with marked improvements occurring in the third year. However, temperament does not appear to become more stable during the elementary-school years and adolescence. For example, it is clear that effortful control is linked to positive development, even in the first five years of life, since it has been associated with lower levels of problem behaviours and has been found to correlate with and predict low levels of negative emotion, highly committed compliance, high levels of social competence, and conscience.

Links have also been identified between temperament and the development of psychopathology. Relationships have been found between temperamental fearful inhibition and later anxiety, negative affectivity and depression.

Negative emotional reactivity has been found to predict both internalizing problems e. Yet it is important to remember that temperament is not destiny. Even if they have a basis in genetic and other biological processes, temperamental traits are shaped by a combination of genetic and environmental factors both early in development and across the childhood years. For example, four-month-olds who show high levels of motor activity and distress, called high-reactive, are likely to become inhibited to the unfamiliar at years old and report more unrealistic worries and more frequent bouts of depression at age 18, whereas low-reactive infants are likely to become uninhibited to the unfamiliar in the second year and are at a slightly higher risk for asocial behaviour at age However, most of the children in both groups will not develop any mental symptoms or psychiatric condition.

Seriously negative outcomes require very specific rearing conditions. For example, child positive emotional reactivity, fearfulness, and self-regulation elicit warmth from parents, whereas child negative emotional reactivity results in more negative parental control.

For example, children who have high levels of fearfulness are less likely to have internalizing and externalizing problems if their parents are high in warmth and in gentle discipline strategies.

Genetically informed studies also help understanding these interactions.