Where your child's temperament comes from
The nine traits behind the questions we ask, and the idea that matters more than the label.
You have noticed something about your child that other children do not seem to do. They come apart at the school gate. Or they will not stop once they have started. Or a seam in a sock can end an afternoon.
The nine questions we ask about your child come from one long study that began in the mid-1950s, and from an idea that came out of it which is more useful than any of the labels attached to it. This is where both come from, and what they can and cannot tell you.
It began with nine things to watch for
Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, two psychiatrists in New York, began following 133 children from infancy into adulthood. The New York Longitudinal Study ran for decades, and its first real contribution was deciding what was worth measuring at all.
They settled on nine things: how much a child moves, how regular their sleep and hunger are, whether they go toward a new thing or hang back, how long they take to adapt when a plan changes, how big their reactions are, how much they notice sounds and textures, their general mood across a week, how easily their attention can be turned, and how long they stay with something that has got hard.
Those nine are still the backbone of how temperament is described. They are also, one for one, the nine things we ask you about.
The idea that outlasted the labels
Thomas and Chess also grouped children into three rough types, and it is the types that made it into popular writing. One of them was called difficult, and that word has travelled further than anything else they wrote.
The idea they built their clinical work on was different. They called it goodness of fit: how well what the people around a child are asking of them matches how that child actually works.
That is a claim about a relationship, not about a child. The same child who cannot sit through a long lunch is often the one who will stay with a hard puzzle long after everyone else has wandered off. Change what the afternoon asks of them, and the afternoon changes, without anything about them having changed at all.
This is the part worth keeping. A label tells you what to call the situation. Fit tells you what you can actually do about it.
Three things the research does not say
- Instead of: Your child is one of three types Try: Thomas and Chess measured nine continuous traits and laid three rough categories over the top. The traits are the measurement. The types are a summary of them (Rettew and McKee, 2005).
- Instead of: Some children are difficult Try: That word describes the adult's experience and then attaches it to the child as a property. Our result for that pattern is called Intense, because what is being described is the size of the reaction, not the worth of the child.
- Instead of: There are orchid children and dandelion children Try: The most careful test of that idea followed 1,364 children and found sensitivity to surroundings is spread smoothly across a range, not split into two kinds of child (Zhang, Widaman and Belsky, 2021).
Why we ask what we ask
Our nine questions are those nine traits, one question each, asked about one child.
Two things follow, and both are deliberate. You are the one answering, so what comes back is your observation of your child rather than a measurement of them. And nine questions asked once describe a season rather than a person: sleep, age, a new baby, a new classroom and a hard term all move these answers.
So the result is written as a pattern to work with, not a category your child belongs to. If it stops being true in six months, that is the instrument behaving correctly.
Nine things you have already noticed about your child, and what they add up to.
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- Sources
- Thomas, A., Chess, S., & Birch, H. (1968), Temperament and Behavior Disorders in Children, the New York Longitudinal Study, for the nine traits and the concept of goodness of fit. Thomas, A., & Chess, S. (1982), Temperament and follow-up to adulthood, Ciba Foundation Symposium 89, 168-175, for the follow-up of the 133 participants. Rettew, D. C., & McKee, L. (2005), Temperament and its role in developmental psychopathology, Harvard Review of Psychiatry 13(1), 14-27, for the nine continuous dimensions and the three higher-order categories laid over them. Zhang, X., Widaman, K., & Belsky, J. (2021), Beyond orchids and dandelions: susceptibility to environmental influences is not bimodal, Development and Psychopathology 35(1), 191-203, n = 1,364.