Temperament in Children: How to Spot It and Work With It

At four months a baby cannot even sit up, and yet quite a lot can already be guessed about the schoolchild they will become. From the 1980s onward Jerome Kagan at Harvard played unfamiliar sounds to infants and showed them unfamiliar objects. Roughly a fifth of them reacted intensely: kicking, arching their backs and bursting into tears. When he returned to the same children many years later, most of the ones who stood by the wall in new company and sized up a new situation from a safe distance came from that group.

Kagan called it behavioral inhibition, and with it he demonstrated something parents of a second child usually discover for themselves. The tendency to react fast or cautiously, loudly or quietly, is there before any upbringing begins. It is not destiny, because a cautious infant does not automatically grow into a shy adult, but it does mean a default setting that is easier to work with than against.

Nine qualities and three types of children

The most detailed map of this territory was drawn by Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess. Their New York Longitudinal Study began in 1956, followed children from their first months of life into adulthood and rests on interviews with parents about entirely ordinary things: how the child eats, how it falls asleep, what it does with a new toy or with a stranger in the doorway.

Out of that came nine dimensions of temperament. They include activity level, regularity of bodily rhythms, response to a new situation, adaptability, intensity of reactions, sensory threshold, prevailing mood, persistence and distractibility. Each of them is a scale rather than a pigeonhole, and in most children they are scattered: one falls asleep like clockwork and yet jumps at every doorbell.

When the authors checked whether the dimensions cluster, three pictures emerged that almost every developmental psychology textbook has known ever since:

• The easy child eats and sleeps in a regular rhythm, accepts new things without much protest and is usually in a good mood.
• In the difficult child the rhythms are irregular, the reactions strong, and every change takes a longer stretch to get used to. Their crying is louder, and so is their delight.
• The slow-to-warm-up child pulls back from anything new, but without pressure joins in after a few repetitions and eventually comes to like it.

Here comes the part popular accounts usually leave out. Roughly 65 percent of the children in the sample could be sorted into these three groups. The remaining third were combinations, or did not properly fit any of the pictures. So if you are searching in vain for which description matches your own child, that is not an error of observation; it is the most common result.

A more recent view was added by Mary Rothbart, who describes temperament as the interplay of two things: reactivity, meaning how strongly a child fires up, and self-regulation, meaning how well it can slow down again. The second component develops with age, and almost everything a parent can do is aimed at it.

Goodness of fit: the match matters more than the type

The most valuable thing Thomas and Chess came up with is not the typology but the concept they called goodness of fit, meaning the match between a child's temperament and the demands of the environment it lives in. In their observations later difficulties were not predicted by temperament itself but by the mismatch between it and what the surroundings asked of the child.

In practice that means the so-called difficult child is not a worse child. In a family where everyone counts on it taking three weeks to settle into a new activity, and where the bedtime routine runs the same way every time, a fierce temperament grows into an energetic and straightforward person. In a family that reads the same reaction as disobedience and answers it with pressure, it turns into a daily battle and the child also learns that there is something wrong with them.

The same mechanism works the other way round. A calm and adaptable child has it easy almost everywhere, but in a family that treats their low-maintenance nature as a given, they easily become the one who never gets any attention, because they cause no trouble.

Where you will see temperament in an ordinary day

You need no questionnaire and no specialist. You only need to watch four situations that happen at home anyway.

First contact with the new. A visitor arrives, or you walk into a play center for the first time. Does the child run straight in? Do they hang on to your leg for ten minutes and then peel away? Or do they stand and watch for a whole hour and join in only next week? This is the single most telling observation available to you.

A change of plan. A canceled trip, a different route home from preschool, bread instead of a roll. One child shrugs, another rages for twenty minutes, a third asks why it changed and comes back to it again in the evening.

The end of fun. Watch how long the transition from play to dinner takes. Slow starting and slow finishing usually go together, so a child who takes a long time to settle in also needs a longer warning before the end.

Persistence with one thing. How many minutes do they stay with the building blocks when one piece will not fit? Do they give up quietly, or start throwing blocks around the room? Distractibility and persistence are less related than you would expect; there are children who get distracted by anything and yet keep returning to their own project.

Parenting according to what you have at home

The lively child

High activity and strong reactions need two outlets. The first is movement before it builds up; an hour outdoors before homework does more to keep things calm than any amount of persuading during it. The second is clear, brief rules, because nobody listens to a long explanation once things are already rolling.

With fierce reactions it helps to separate the emotion from the behavior. Anger is fine, kicking the door is not, and that distinction fits into one sentence the child hears the same way every time. Praise also works better for what the child managed than for what the child is.

The sensitive child

A lower sensory threshold means the signs in a shopping mall, the label in a T-shirt and a loud aunt really are strong stimuli for such a child, not an excuse. It helps to reduce the load rather than to toughen them up: shorter visits, a quieter place for homework, a calm end to the day.

Intense experience in sensitive children is often paired with replaying things and building worst-case scenarios in advance. It is useful to name what is going to happen, in advance and specifically. "Tomorrow we're going to the doctor, you'll sit on a chair and the lady will look at your throat" does more than reassurance that it will be nothing.

The slow-to-warm-up child

This child needs time, not a nudge. Peel them off you by force at the door of a class and they learn that a new situation ends in a fight with a parent. Let them sit on the bench and watch for three lessons and by the fourth they usually join in on their own.

Arriving earlier than the others works too, because walking into an empty room is a different matter from walking into fifteen ready-made groups. And it pays to say one sentence to the teacher in advance: "She watches for a while, then she joins in." It saves the child a series of invitations they are not ready for yet.

Labels that stick for a lifetime

The greatest damage is done not by temperament but by what the child hears said about it. "He's our wild one" or "she's terribly sensitive" gets said in front of the child a hundred times, and one day they start using it themselves as an explanation for why they will not try something.

So describe behavior, not character. The difference between "you're clumsy" and "that bowl was too close to the edge" sounds like hair-splitting and in a child's head it is completely different information. A description of behavior can be changed; a description of character cannot.

The second trap is the opposite one: trying to break the temperament. A series of birthday parties will not turn an introverted child into a sociable type, only into a child who now also knows that who they are is not enough. When did you last ask your child to be faster than they are able to be?

What can be worked with is self-regulation, not the default setting. A cautious child can learn to speak to a store clerk, a fierce child can learn to leave the room before throwing a block. Both take years and happen in small steps, and in neither case does it change what the child feels inside, only what they do about it. A similar question comes up with adults; see the piece on whether temperament can change.

One boundary to close this section. Temperament explains a style of reacting, not everything. When a child stops sleeping over a long period, loses interest in things they used to enjoy, speaks about themselves very negatively or their tantrums do not ease with age, this is not a question of character and it belongs with a pediatrician or a psychologist. Home typology is no substitute for professional help.

When parent and child do not match in pace

The most common source of tension at home is not a difficult child but the difference between two temperaments in one kitchen. A fast mother with three more tasks already lined up in her head is dressing a slow-to-warm-up child who needs to pull on the second shoe by themselves. Over five years they get through a thousand of those, and both of them walk away angry every time.

Sometimes it is the reverse. A calm father with a slow pace and a lively child who needs movement and noise from first thing in the morning. Dad feels it is never quiet at home, the child feels nobody wants to run around with them, and neither of them is doing anything wrong.

A difference in pace is far easier to handle when you know which side you are on. Our temperament test has 24 questions and takes about four minutes; it is designed for adults, so take it for yourself, not for your child. A parent who knows they speed up and raise their voice under pressure can ease off at the shoes in the morning before the fifth conflict of the week gets going. How to read the results and what to do with them is described in the piece on how to find your temperament.

Try one thing: next week, after every morning or evening conflict, note down what it was really about. Whether it was speed, noise, a change of plan or the end of fun. After seven days the same one thing usually keeps coming up in the notes, and that one thing can be planned differently. The history of the four classic characters and their modern form is summarized in the overview of the four temperaments.