Parenting and Temperament
How Understanding Personality Traits can Affect Family Harmony
Jun 17, 2009
At any playground there are children playing alone, kids meeting other kids and some who cling to their parent's leg for half an hour before venturing out to the swings. Temperament is a way of understanding how people are different and it's a great tool to have in a parenting toolbox.
What is My Child's Temperament?
Temperament is a collection of traits or tendencies that make up a person's personality and affect his or her outlook and style of interacting with the world. Some people are quick to talk to strangers, while others wait a while before speaking up. Some people are pessimists and others are optimists. These traits are often identified in other adults, but children have their own temperaments too. These traits can influence the kind of parenting a particular child needs in order to thrive.
Understanding Temperament
Lyndall Shick wrote a book called Understanding Temperament: Strategies for Creating Family Harmony [Parenting Press 1998, ISBN-10: 1884734324], which describes ten major temperament traits that are found in both children and adults. Ms. Shick recommends rating both a child and her parent or other family members on these ten traits to see where there are similarities and where traits are opposite. Anywhere opposite traits are found, such as an outgoing parent with a shy or sensitive child, there is potential conflict as both temperaments require different situations in order to feel comfortable. Relationships between a parent and child in which there are two strong temperament traits in opposition will require ongoing sensitivity and compromise to maintain harmony.
Temperament and Parenting
One of the most useful ways to change a parenting style to promote harmony between temperaments is being able to predict how a particular environment is going to affect a child. An easygoing child may happily deal with a busy shopping center, but one who is highly sensitive to noise and light and doesn't warm up quickly with strangers is going to find shopping a stressful experience. Understanding that a child is stressed by shopping can help his parent plan shopping trips well away from the child's low-energy times of day, or choose to shop when the child can stay at home with someone else. Tantrums and meltdowns can be reduced by choosing activities that suit a child's temperament.
Understanding Temperament is a useful reference for parents with children who have strong temperaments or who have one child with a very different temperament from the rest of the family. The style and tone of the book is somewhat stiff and academic instead of chatty, but the information is excellent and the book contains useful strategies for helping children cope with their temperaments in situations that are challenging to them.
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