7. Universal Truth No. 5: All Children Are Born with Unique Temperaments
Does your child wear her emotions on her sleeve? Does she seem to block out the world when she’s reading a book? Does she cower behind your legs around strangers? If a sign on the wall says, “wet paint—do not touch,” would she need to touch it just to see if the paint is still wet?
Would you?
Sometimes our children’s inclinations can leave us scratching our heads. Why might one perfectly normal sibling view the world with more fear or more emotion or less curiosity than another perfectly normal sibling—even though they’ve been raised in the same home by the same parents?
These things, overwhelmingly, come down to temperamental traits—that is, genetically encoded characteristics on which our personalities are based.
To be clear, a great deal of what has been written about temperaments is theoretical, outdated, or misleading. Some websites still refer to the “Four Temperaments”—sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic—none of which actually exist. And lots of people confuse temperament with personality, as though they are synonymous. They are not synonymous.
Temperament: A person’s natural, personal inclinations. Temperamental traits are genetic and never change.
Personality: A person’s qualities as experienced by others. Personality begins with temperament but is changed by environment and develops over a period of years.
There is a strong connection, of course, between temperament and personality in that personality traits evolve from temperamental traits. But personality is highly susceptible to environment. As soon as children leave the womb, they begin to acclimate to their surroundings, picking up on parental, cultural, and social cues, and adapting their behavior accordingly. With time, true temperaments get folded into personality, rendering the inherited traits more or less invisible.
Yet, while the inherited temperaments of babies may not be reliable predictors of long-term personality, they certainly do give us huge insight into the child’s most true “self.” A “self” that always will exist under all those layers of experience and wisdom—even when she is very, very old.
A Fascinating Study into Temperamental Traits
Jerome Kagan, the author of The Temperamental Thread, is the single most influential expert on temperaments alive today. Although he’s not a household name, it’s worth noting that he is named among the top twenty-five most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century—just above Carl Jung and Ivan Pavlov.
Because of the importance of temperament to this book and the girth of misinformation about it in the public realm, we felt it was important to get the facts from someone who really knows them. We reached Kagan by phone in his office at Harvard University.
Kagan told us that humans have as many as 10,000 different temperaments tied into their genetic codes. Each individual temperament, he explained, might make a person sensitive to light or slow to get to sleep or quick to laugh and so on, and then those temperaments combine in unique ways, forming the genetic building blocks of personality. He called these genetic building blocks “temperamental biases.”
“Your experience,” he explained, “takes those initial biases and shapes them into personality—like extrovert, introvert, psychopath, impulsive.”
By the time we reach adulthood, it’s almost impossible to deduce a person’s inborn temperaments from his personality, so grafted are nature and nurture. The younger a child is, though, the more likely it is that we are “seeing” the genetic component of their personality.
Two decades ago, Jerome Kagan and his team launched what is now the most significant and longest-running study to date into temperament. The team isolated two distinct temperamental differences in four-month-old babies: The first group, called “low reactive,” were open to new pictures, drawn to loud sounds, and easy to soothe. Eighty percent of babies belonged to this group. The second group, comprising the other twenty percent of the babies, were called “high reactive.” They were easily startled and scared. They blanched at loud noises, cried upon seeing pictures of unfamiliar faces, and were more difficult to soothe. All the children were then observed, off and on, over many years.
Although there are many fascinating angles to Kagan’s research, the one we want to emphasize is what happens when parents ignore the temperamental biases of their children—or, worse, try to force children to “overcome” their biases to suit cultural norms.
Kagan told a heartbreaking story about a high-reactive boy who grew up in a family that neither supported nor accepted his natural introversion. The boy’s father—a football coach—insisted on pushing his son to play football, to be aggressive, to be fearless.
“But the boy couldn’t do it,” Kagan said. “And it scared the boy.”
Kagan continued to monitor him into adulthood.
“You don’t want parents to try to change their kids’ temperament. You don’t change temperament. It’s like changing the shape of your face.”
— JEROME KAGAN
“By age twenty-two,” Kagan said of the football coach’s son, “he was a very disturbed, anxious [young man] who was having a hard time in life,” all because “his parents couldn’t understand or accept their child’s timidity.”
This is precisely why we believe it’s so important that we parents be able to identify our children’s natural inclinations, and to honor those inclinations, rather than trying to fit our kids into boxes they cannot possibly inhabit.
Gentle Guidance Is Key
Not everything natural is necessarily good.
Just because our kids are biased to act or feel certain ways doesn’t mean that all temperamentally driven behavior must be supported at all times. If a child is highly risk-averse, objecting to new experiences, she certainly will benefit from gentle guidance and regular exposure to new opportunities. At the same time, if we pressure and push our children to change what is fundamentally a part of their personhood, we are in dangerous territory.
When parents inadvertently try to holster their children’s natural patterns of temperaments, Kagan said, the kids’ feelings of self-worth can plummet, and the parent-child relationship can suffer. “If a parent nags a high-reactive child for always being cautious, that will make the child angry at the parent,” Kagan said. “The child feels he or she is not valued. That will certainly contribute to later problems.”
To be clear, temperamental biases are neither bad nor good. Each trait carries pros and cons, depending on the culture and family in which the child is being raised. Some are more suited to certain environments than others; some may be more suited to your family than others. A naturally cautious father may be more comfortable with a naturally cautious daughter; a mother who craves new experiences may prefer it if her son is the same way.
Even so, when we understand that certain parts of our children’s identities are ingrained, present at birth, and immoveable, we are more likely to adopt more patience when dealing with temperamental biases different from our own. This is especially helpful when we have more than one child and feel tempted to compare them.
Watch Those Labels
We are not advocates of labeling children; it often pigeonholes them inaccurately and unfairly. But let’s face it: Humans are natural assessors, evaluators, and judgers. We label. It happens. Given this reality, we’d like to share with you the following list, adapted from Mary Sheedy Kurcinka’s Raising Your Spirited Child. Negative labels attributed to children often reflect strengths that have been overlooked, she said.
If we must label, why not make it positive?
Identifying Your Child’s “Temperamental Characteristics”
Although Kagan is concerned—we believe rightly so—about the mistaken conflation of temperament with personality, we would be remiss not to include a list of traits often used to identify the natural temperaments of children. There are two reasons for this.
First, although scientists have yet to isolate genetic markers for these traits, and therefore we can’t call them “true temperaments,” these particular traits do spring forth at an early age—revealing the likelihood of some sort of temperamental bias, if nothing else.
Second, the list has proven incredibly helpful to a great many parents—including us—in grasping children’s natural inclinations and finding ways to encourage and manage those inclinations—rather than work against them.
Just so we can still look Kagan in the face, however, we will refer to these not as true temperaments but as temperamental characteristics, largely inherent and therefore resistant to change.
“Something you consider bad may bring out your child’s talents; something you consider good may stifle those same talents.”
— FRANÇOIS-RENÉ de cHATEAUBRIAND
Eight Temperamental Characteristics
In Raising Your Spirited Child, educator and author Mary Sheedy Kurcinka suggests identifying children’s temperamental traits on a scale of one to five—with the more extreme versions of each trait listed at each end. We think that’s helpful and have organized the following eight temperamental characteristics in the same way, along with our tips and suggestions for how to uniquely encourage children who fall at either end of the spectrum.
As you make your way through the list, try ballparking where your child falls on each scale, and circle the number that most fits. This, as Kurcinka says, is your child’s “temperamental portrait.”
ParentShift Assignment: Are You a Match?
Once you have identified where your child falls temperamentally, try to find where you might fall. What about your spouse or partner? Identify a few of the temperamental traits that tend to set you off and write down what you could do or say next time it comes up that would be encouraging—rather than critical. “Oh, boy, you have a lot of energy tonight!” versus “You are driving me to an early death, you know that?”
Use this toolkit when a challenge is related to developmentally appropriate behavior and/or to your child’s unique temperament. Examples of age-appropriate behavior may include defiance, using foul language, refusing to share, using bad manners, burping loudly, hitting, lying, sexual exploration, temper tantrums, whining, backtalk, eye-rolling, ignoring parents, and thinking parents are the most annoying, uncool, and embarrassing people on the face of the planet. Temperamental characteristics include emotional intensity, persistence, sensitivity, distractibility, adaptability, regularity, activity level, and approach to new things.
•Check your child’s DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE (Appendix C.)
•ADJUST YOUR EXPECTATIONS.
•QUIT TAKING IT PERSONALLY (Q-TIP).
•EXPECT SOME REGRESSION.
•Know your child’s TEMPERAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS.
•Use ENCOURAGING WORDS specific to your child’s temperament.
•Identify PARENTING OPPORTUNITIES specific to your child’s temperament.
•WATCH THOSE LABELS.
•DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF.