Every child has unique needs that parents must meet to promote healthy development. One child may be more sensitive and require more attention and affection to thrive, while another may feel comfortable and content with less interaction.
However, certain temperament characteristics are associated with the likelihood of later behavior problems. Research indicates that problem behaviors tend to fall into one of two categories: externalizing aggressive, disruptive, or disobedient or internalizing anxious, depressed, or withdrawn.
Early child development experts have found that attentive parenting can help to mitigate these risks. As a parent, you cannot control who your child is at his core. But your actions can help to determine how well rounded and adjusted your child will become as he matures into childhood, adolescence and adulthood.
Social and emotional skills begin developing during early childhood. Parents can set the stage for these skills to be learned effectively. References Rothbart MK. Becoming who we are: Temperament and personality in development. In: Damon W, Eisenberg N, eds.
Social, emotional, and personality development. Handbook of child psychology. Kochanska G. Toward a synthesis of parental socialization and child temperament in early development of conscience. Temperament and development. Questionnaire approaches to the study of infant temperament. Individual differences in infancy: Reliability, stability, and prediction. Presley R, Martin RP. Toward a structure of preschool temperament: Factor structure of the Temperament Assessment Battery for Children.
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Gerardi-Caulton G. Sensitivity to spatial conflict and the development of self-regulation in children months of age. Developmental Science ;3 4 One of the most extensive research studies with this goodness of fit orientation is that of Lerner and colleagues:. Lerner, et al. Of course a wide variety of social and economic pressures will be influencing the decision to work outside the home.
The first could be that mothers find the problems of rearing the child with difficult temperament too aversive and therefore opt to go out to work to avoid the hassles of daily child care.
The second route could be that the difficult child is so unpredictable in its eating and sleeping habits and protests intensely when left with unfamiliar people that the mother feels constrained not to go out to work because the child cannot fit in with the externally required constraints of the mother attending the work place at fixed times for fixed periods. Lerner and Galambos found that mothers of children with difficult temperament tended to have more restricted work histories than other children.
Hyde et al. This study also found evidence that a mediating factor between infant temperament and maternal work outcome is maternal mood: difficult infants are likely to make mothers more depressed and diminish their sense of competence, thus affecting their work performance. The Lerner and Galambos study also found that it seemed to be harder for parents to make satisfactory day-care arrangements for difficult infants. Indirect effect via susceptibility to psychosocial adversity Temperament may also be related to differences in vulnerability to stress.
Not all children are adversely affected by the experience of specific stresses, such as admission to hospital. Pre-school children repeatedly hospitalized are at risk for later educational and behavioural difficulties but only if they come from socially disadvantaged backgrounds Quinton and Rutter, It has proved more difficult to establish whether temperament does influence susceptibility to adverse experiences.
Most children respond to this event with some upsurge of behavioural disturbance, such as an increase in demands for parental attention or in crying. Which behavioural response is shown is related to prior temperament. Unfortunately their data do not suggest any clear pattern of any one aspect of temperament being more significant than any other. Indirect effect on range of experiences An important aspect of the transactional model of development is that as children become older they increasingly come to influence the range of environments they encounter and the experiences these create.
During infancy, children with different temperament styles evoke different responses from the people they encounter, for example, active, smiling infants are more likely to be smiled at and played with than passive unresponsive infants.
As children become more mobile and more independent they are able to select for themselves between alternative experiences, for example, a shy, behaviourally-inhibited child may avoid social encounters.
This may accentuate temperamental characteristics: the avoidance of meeting other people prevents the child from becoming socially skilled and therefore more reluctant to engage in social behaviour in the future.
This may have a wider impact on their development. For example, Rutter has demonstrated the way impulsive, active children are more likely to experience accidents, presumably as a result of their selecting more risky environments to play in. These alternative mechanisms for the impact of temperament on the environments the child experiences can be classified into three types of gene-environment correlation.
These can be illustrated for temperament. One is passive gene-environment correlations which are produced when the child is being cared for by parents who share similar temperaments to the child.
A child with a high intensity of reaction is more likely than other children to be cared for by a parent who has a similarly high intensity of reaction. Such parent—child pairs are likely to be creating experiences for the child which will be eliciting much aversive stimulation for the child. This was illustrated in the earlier example of sociable children evoking more social stimulation from carers. The third type is active gene-environment correlation which arises from the child actively seeking environments that suit its behavioural predispositions.
Children with a low threshold of responsiveness are likely to seek less extreme and more predictable environments. An important feature of the Scarr and McCartney theory is that they propose that as the child becomes older the mix of these correlations will change. Initially the passive and evocative correlations will dominate. The evocative effects will remain fairly constant. The significance of passive effects decline in importance as the child encounters a wider range of people than just primarily the parents.
Clearly active gene-environment effects are likely to become dominant as the child has greater and greater freedom to select its own activities. Since the formation of attachment is bound up with how an infant behaves towards the caregiver during the first year of life it would seem likely that infant temperament is a significant element.
It is surprising, then, that although some research has found that infant irritability and negative emotionality are linked with the avoidant type of insecure attachment, numerous studies have found no evidence that infant temperamental differences are associated directly with secure versus insecure attachment classifications in typical development Goldsmith and Alansky, It might be expected that caregiver personality differences would thus be found to be associated with infant attachment security, but here again few direct effects have been found Egeland and Farber,
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