Perhaps you have spent time with a number of infants. How were they alike? How did they differ? How do you compare with your siblings or other children you have known well? You may have noticed that some seemed to be in a better mood than others and that some were more sensitive to noise or more easily distracted than others. These differences may be attributed to temperament. Temperament is the innate characteristics of the infant, including mood, activity level, and emotional reactivity, noticeable soon after birth.

Video reviews Thomas and Chess’ dimensions of temperament, the three temperament styles, and goodness-of-fit. Please note: the video discusses using challenging or spirited in place of difficult for one of the temperament styles. This is an ongoing conversation in the field, but we’ll use difficult in this class as that’s still the mostly widely used term in the field.

In a 1956 landmark study, Chess and Thomas (1996) evaluated 141 children’s temperament based on parental interviews. Referred to as the New York Longitudinal Study, infants were assessed on 10 dimensions of temperament including:

• activity level
• rhythmicity (regularity of biological functions)
• approach/withdrawal (how children deal with new things)
• adaptability to situations
• intensity of reactions
• threshold of responsiveness (how intense a stimulus has to be for the child to react)
• quality of mood
• distractibility
• attention span
• persistence

Based on the infants’ behavioral profiles, they were categorized into three general types of temperament:

As can be seen the percentages do not equal 100% as some children were not able to be placed neatly into one of the categories. Think about how each type of child should be approached to improve interactions with them. An easy child requires less intervention, but still has needs that must not be overlooked. A slow-to-warm-up child may need to be given advance warning if new people or situations are going to be introduced. A child with a difficult temperament may need to be given extra time to burn off their energy.

A caregiver’s ability to work well and accurately read the child will enjoy a goodness- of-fit, meaning their styles match and communication and interaction can flow. Parents who recognize each child’s temperament and accept it, will nurture more effective interactions with the child and encourage more adaptive functioning.^[1]

Parenting Is Bidirectional

Not only do parents affect their children, children influence their parents. A child’s characteristics, such as temperament, affect parenting behaviors and roles. For example, an infant with an easy temperament may enable parents to feel more effective, as they are easily able to soothe the child and elicit smiling and cooing. On the other hand, a cranky or fussy infant elicits fewer positive reactions from his or her parents and may result in parents feeling less effective in the parenting role (Eisenberg et al., 2008). Over time, parents of more difficult children may become more punitive and less patient with their children (Clark, Kochanska, & Ready, 2000; Eisenberg et al., 1999; Kiff, Lengua, & Zalewski, 2011). Parents who have a fussy, difficult child are less satisfied with their marriages and have greater challenges in balancing work and family roles (Hyde, Else-Quest, & Goldsmith, 2004). Thus, child temperament is one of the child characteristics that influences how parents behave with their children.^[2]