Temperament and Personality

Temperament is a person's normal, natural style of behaving and responding to the world. The wide range of temperaments helps explain the wide range of behavior and disposition. Temperament does not dictate what children will do but helps understand how they do it.
Personality is the traits and characteristics that people are born with (nature) combined with the effect of people and environment (nurture). Personality is affected by many factors including temperament, birth order, family size, life events, serious illnesses, deaths, family moves, economic status, gender, intelligence, age, health, and parenting.

REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

• The temperament that children exhibit in childhood is likely to be similar to their temperament as an adult. Although there is some consistency in temperament, it is not an accurate predictor of personality, success, or failure as an adult.

• Typical behavior for children of a certain age and at a certain stage of development is often mistakenly identified as temperament. Children may be behaving in a developmentally appropriate way, rather than having a challenging temperament.

• Behavior is affected by how children feel. Children experience physical sensations differently. Children who feel overwhelmed, irritated, or uncomfortable with the sensations (taste, touch, sound, sight, smell) around them may behave in more challenging ways.

• Labels such as shy, easy, difficult, loud, or impulsive can damage self-esteem. They create expectations for children to act a certain way, and prevent them from branching out beyond the label, and they can last into adulthood.

• Temperament has a large impact on family relationships and children's health and behavior, and it influences the way adults treat children. Due to temperament differences, two children can experience the same family very differently: An outgoing, easy-to-adapt child may ask and receive more affection than a sibling who is sensitive or slow-to-warm up.

• Temperament traits that seem difficult to handle in children, like persistence, are often valuable characteristics to have as an adult.

• Bad parenting is not necessarily the cause when children develop behavior problems or exhibit difficult behavior. Some challenging behaviors are due to a child's environment being out of sync with her temperament and personality.

• Children's temperament can have an effect on how parents judge themselves and their parenting skills. Parents with children who have "easy" temperaments tend to feel successful while parents of challenging, spirited, or "difficult" children tend to feel more helpless and less successful.

• Understanding temperament and personality can improve parent-child relationships. Parents who understand temperament and personality may enjoy their child's unique strengths more and experience greater family harmony. How parents communicate with children has a lasting effect on their personality.

Excerpted with permission from THE FIELD GUIDE TO PARENTING;. Copyright © 2000 Chandler House Press. All rights reserved.