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How to Nurture Your Childs Nature
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By
Teri Degler
"My two girls were different right from birth," says
Vancouver mom Suzanne Sherkin. "Lauren, my first, was so quiet
and calm, I could have - not that I ever would have - left her on
the change table and walked across the room. What a shock when Aviva
came along! I couldn't take my eyes, let alone one of my hands,
off her for a second. It was easier to change her on the floor!
Now that she's 12, Lauren is quiet, thoughtful and focused, and
ten-year-old Aviva is, well, she's a whirlwind."
The debate about whether it is nature or nurture that makes children
like Lauren and Aviva so different has been raging for over a century.
And although almost everyone agrees that both heredity and environment
have a part to play, for the last two decades "nurture"
has generally been considered the more significant of the two.
Lately, however, a number of scientific breakthroughs have stressed
the role of heredity. They include the discovery of a so-called
"happy gene" - a gene found in cheery, look-on-the-bright-side
folks and missing in the grumpier portion of the population - and
yet another gene thought to be directly related to impulsive, risk-taking
and thrill-seeking behaviour. These and other scientific discoveries
are beginning to validate something parents like Suzanne Sherkin
have known since the beginning of time: Each child is different
from the word go.
Children are indeed born with certain characteristics, says David
Factor, a Toronto psychologist and father of two. These characteristics
are known as temperamental traits. "A child's temperament,"
he explains, "is part of her overall personality.... It can
be thought of as the child's personal style of behaviour, a sort
of a modus operandi that is present in varying degrees in any situation
she is in." (Personality is a much broader term than temperament,
encompassing a host of traits and dispositions that underlie each
individual's unique way of thinking, feeling and behaving. Temperament
is more specifically related to the way we approach life and relate
to the world.)
Factor says his experience, as a professional and as a parent of
two girls with differing temperaments, has shown him that temperament
affects not just how "easy" or "challenging"
a child is but everything from which discipline techniques work
to how you gain a child's co-operation in everyday situations. Understanding
temperament can improve both the way you relate to any one child
and how the entire family interacts with one another. This is true
because, even though temperamental traits may be innate, children's
upbringing and environment still play a major role in how those
traits express themselves - and in the development of their personalities
overall.
The early credit for identifying these traits and showing how they
affect parent-child relationships goes to a husband-and-wife team
of U.S.-based psychologists, Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess,
who began doing long-term studies on temperament in the 1950s. In
one paper Chess summarized the importance of their work for parents:
"Right from the start babies are different. Each has his or
her way of showing feelings and responding to the world.... Being
alert to these temperamental differences and understanding how they
require different caregiving approaches are crucial to nurturing
children's healthy emotional growth."
Chess and her husband identified nine basic traits: activity level,
biological rhythms, initial reactions, adaptability, distractibility,
mood, intensity of emotions, physical sensitivity, and persistence.
They then discovered that these traits tended to cluster together
in certain children, giving them temperamental styles that fell
into three basic types. According to their research - and a number
of subsequent studies - about 40 percent of all children have the
easy type of temperament. These kids tend to be moderately active,
have low-key emotional expression, good adaptability to change,
regular sleeping and eating habits, and a generally positive mood.
They have good attention spans and are not excessively sensitive
to the sights, sounds, smells, tastes or physical sensations that
bombard us every day.
In contrast, about ten percent of all children exhibit what Chess
and Thomas call the difficult - also called, more positively, the
"challenging," "feisty" or "spirited"
- temperament. These children's traits tend to fall at the opposite
end of the scale from those of "easy" children. They tend
to be highly active, have very intense emotions, be slow to adapt
to change, and so on. Another 15 percent of all children have traits
that cluster in a different way and fall into a category called
slow-to-warm-up. We often think of these children as rather shy
or cautious; they tend to respond to new situations by withdrawing
at first and to be generally slow to adapt to change.
Chess and Thomas's pioneering research laid the groundwork for
a number of popular books, including The Difficult Child and Raising
Your Spirited Child , that have provided helpful information on
how to moderate negative traits and see them more positively. They
have also made it clear that parents are not necessarily to blame
for every behaviour their child exhibits. While these books focus
on the challenging temperament the information is relevant to many
parents: The total of the percentages in Chess and Thomas's three
categories is only 65 percent. This means that more than one-third
of all children have traits that don't cluster together in any particular
way. This is significant because any particular trait - especially
when it falls at either extreme on the scale - can cause difficulties
or call for special responses.
Virginia Gater, a Vancouver mother, knows this first-hand. Her
five-year-old, Alexandra, has always been a very easy child. As
a baby she was generally happy, not fussy. However, when it comes
to adjusting to new situations, Alexandra has always had a tough
time.
For example, says Gater, "A few months ago my husband and
I had to go out of town for a few days, so my parents came to the
house to stay with Alexandra and Olivia, who was about 22 months
old at the time. Even though Alexandra adores her grandparents,
she had a very difficult time with the change. She cried frequently,
was easily upset, and was very unhappy the entire time. Olivia,
on the other hand, was perfectly contented and hardly seemed to
notice we were gone."
Alexandra, her mother explains, has been like this since she was
a baby. She was never comfortable being held by new people, and
she began to "make strange" at a much earlier age and
in a much more frantic manner than most children. She even was several
months old before anyone other than her mother - even her father
- could take her out alone.
Since Alexandra has always been so contented and easygoing in other
respects, her parents felt confident that her withdrawal from new
situations wasn't indicative of any deeper problem. And once they
accepted that this was simply "the way she was," they
were able to come up with ways to deal with it. Instead of trying
to rush or push her into new situations, they learned to let her
take her own time and gradually adapt. Although this meant that,
when Alexandra was younger, they couldn't take advantage of babysitters
or other caregivers as often as some parents can, their approach
has paid off. "Even though Alexandra still clings to me a bit,"
says her mother, "she is much better with new people than she
used to be, and she's adjusted extremely well to kindergarten."
Sarah Landy, a leading authority on temperament and head of the
infant and preschool program at the Hincks Centre for Children's
Mental Health in Toronto, points out that, although temperamental
traits can be modified or changed in the way they are expressed,
they can't really be stamped out. When parents don't realize that
a temperamental trait is an intrinsic part of a child's make-up,
they often assume that he is "just being difficult." This
can lead to negative cycles of interaction that affect the whole
family.
James Davis (not his real name), a Vancouver father of three, explains
how this scenario played out with his middle child, Katy, who is
now 12. From an early age, Katy had an extreme sensitivity to anything
that touched her skin - socks, tags, the list goes on.
Before the family realized that Katy's skin really was extraordinarily
sensitive, everyone assumed Katy was just giving them a hard time.
But after Katy's parents came to accept her sensitivity, they learned
to make allowances for it. "We learned we could prevent hassles
if we made sure her 'comfortable' clothes were laundered and ready
to go and extra time was set aside for getting her dressed. We also
cut out the tags on her new clothes and washed them until they were
soft." Although all these special responses have taken time,
they've been worth it because they have nipped many negative interactions
in the bud.
According to Landy, one of the keys to understanding how your child's
temperament influences family relationships, is to understand your
own. In her counselling groups at the Hincks, she encourages all
participating parents to rate their own traits as well as their
children's. Says Landy, "This helps parents discover what pushes
their own buttons." It also helps them see, for example, how
an extroverted, impulsive parent might have more difficulty understanding
a child's shyness than a more introverted parent would, or how a
loud, active, hot-tempered child might seem "troubled"
or even "disturbed" to quiet, withdrawn and reserved parents.
Marie Goulet, who teaches early childhood education at George Brown
College in Toronto, adds that it is also important to realize your
own temperament can colour whether you think of a particular trait
as positive or negative. Thinking of a highly active child as having
"high energy" rather than being "hyper," she
explains, helps you accept the trait and helps the child develop
a far better self-image. Developing this more positive attitude,
however, sometimes means you have to let go of your expectations.
Consider the example of the macho, sports-oriented father who has
a withdrawn, cautious son. If the father respects his son's temperament
and lets him do things at his own pace, the boy may well come to
enjoy sports. If the boy doesn't, however, the father will simply
have to let go of his expectations. This isn't always easy. Says
Factor, "Accepting the child you have, if he is very different
from the one you thought you'd have or wanted to have, can be like
going through a kind of grieving process."
Factor also points out that taking temperament into account helps
you realize that parent-child relationships are a two-way street.
"There is a lot of emphasis on the fact that parents affect
the child. But it is also true that children - and their styles
- affect parents and the way we parent." Understanding that
at least some of the ways our kids act and react may be predispositions
they are born with - neither their fault nor yours - can ease a
whole lot of tension and maybe temper some of the more "temperamental"
moments in family life.
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