I often hear from parents that common parenting advice hasn’t worked well with their children, or that what was effective with one child did not seem to work with another child. This often comes up with children who tend to have strong emotional reactions or who seem to have less self-control than other children. Parents sometimes find it challenging to support positive development in children who show these qualities. There may be several reasons for these challenges, but one may be related to a child’s temperament. Rarely does parenting guidance take children’s temperament into account.
For a more complete description of children’s temperament, check out a recent Psychology Today post about child temperament by my colleague Maria Gartstein. In brief, temperament is a set of biologically based characteristics that include emotional reactions as well as efforts to modulate or regulate emotions and behaviors. Temperament characteristics include individual differences in emotion reactions such as fear and frustration, as well as smiling and laughter. They include aspects of our self-regulation, such as our ability to manage our attention, emotions, and behaviors. However, certain characteristics can be particularly challenging for parents and educators who work with children. These are fearfulness, fearlessness, frustration, impulsivity, and inflexibility.
Fearfulness and Fearlessness
Fearful children experience higher levels of fear than might be warranted in a situation, and they can experience distress and anxiety, typically in situations that are new, unfamiliar, or vague. Fearful children might cry, whine, withdraw, avoid, or have tantrums when faced with novel situations, tasks, and people. This can be a problem for their social-emotional development if they do not engage in developmentally appropriate opportunities, especially new social opportunities. At the same time, fearfulness can make children more careful and more likely to follow rules when they understand them to be for their safety or protection or to avoid the threat of getting in trouble.
On the other hand, fearless children generally do not slow down in dangerous situations. They don’t see cues of threat, danger, or punishment. This information simply does not get treated with priority. Fearless children are easy to engage in new, exciting activities, and the challenge for caregivers is ensuring their safety and carefulness in “risky” situations.
The temperament dimension of fear is unique in that both very high and very low levels can present challenges for parents. However, the challenges are very different and require parents to tailor their parenting in different ways to be effective. Parents sometimes respond to fearful children by either overprotecting and accommodating children’s fears or becoming angry or frustrated. Either response can increase children’s fearfulness over time.
To help fearful children reduce how much their fear drives their behaviors, parents can build a warm positive relationship with their children, fostering trust so that when they gently encourage feared activities, their children are more likely to try things. This requires parents to be gentle, firm, and consistent, and it also requires parents to be aware of and manage their own emotional reactions and to control their tendency to be overprotective or to react with anger.
Children who are very low in fear are usually enthusiastic and excited about diving into a situation, and parents can enjoy their children’s delight and energy. However, fearless children are also less likely to see the risks or dangers in a situation. For parents, this can be scary, particularly when typical warnings about safety do not seem to work. Being effective with fearless children requires an appropriate balance between proactive guidance and structuring of a situation, firm boundaries, and consistent limit-setting, combined with promoting a warm and supportive relationship.
Frustration
Easily frustrated children can react strongly with anger or frustration when they have limits placed on them, particularly in situations when they are blocked from doing or having something they really want. Often their reactions are stronger than one would expect in the situation. In response to these strong emotions, parents more often respond with anger, harsh comments, or punishments. Interacting with easily frustrated children can be frustrating. For starters, parents can build their own emotion regulation strategies so that they are able to respond calmly and reasonably. Using preventive approaches can also make a difference. Parents can proactively build a positive relationship with their child, which the child will experience as rewarding, and this relationship can be used to encourage and reinforce desired behaviors. Parents can ensure that they have established clear, developmentally appropriate expectations, limits, and rules that they consistently enforce, and they can focus on increasing rewards for desired behaviors instead of punishments for inappropriate emotional outbursts. Importantly, parents can also work to understand their children’s goals and the sources of their frustration and provide coaching to help them manage their emotions and develop more effective strategies for meeting these goals. Investment in these efforts can lead to less time spent dealing with angry outbursts and more time in positive interactions with your child.
Impulsivity
Impulsive children tend to do first and think second, going after things that they want or activities they experience as rewarding. They often struggle in situations that demand persistence with something they do not find inherently enjoyable, which means that they can appear to avoid putting effort into things, and others may perceive them as lazy.
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Impulsivity stems from sensitivity to rewards coupled with little ability to slow down or refrain from behaviors that are inappropriate in a situation. Impulsive children often go after something they want without pausing to think or be effective. They often forget to finish a task or have a hard time completing their homework, and they more often break rules or do risky things. These behaviors can be incredibly frustrating for parents and other adults in the impulsive child’s life. Parents who are able to build strong, positive relationships, provide guidance and structuring, and be consistent in setting limits can support the development of better self-regulation. When parents and children can settle into routines that strengthen a positive relationship and support the children’s ability to meet expectations and rules, both parents and children can spend more time enjoying children’s passions, creating fun and rewarding times together.
Inflexibility
The temperament characteristic of flexibility refers to how easily a child copes with or adapts to uncertainty and change, or how easily a child can shift from doing one thing to another, or to switch gears when solving a problem and the first solution isn’t working. The child who is higher in flexibility is more adaptable to change. Conversely, the child who is low in flexibility struggles with change or ambiguity, which sometimes leads to arguments.
For children who rely on inflexibility to cope with fearfulness or anxiety, parents can try some of the practices suggested above for fearfulness. Children who tend to be inflexible also benefit from reminders that something that feels uncomfortable or awkward is not the same as something being dangerous, and that they can learn to tolerate some uncomfortable feelings.
Since inflexible children struggle with making choices or trying new things, one useful strategy is to give them opportunities to practice these skills in small doses. Start with simple choices (e.g., choosing between two lunch options, or between two outfits for an outing the next day). Make sure these are offered when there is enough time to manage decision-making. Learning to be more flexible does not have to be tedious if the choices are all acceptable, for example, when all lunch options are your child’s preferred foods and the unselected ones can be enjoyed later. Presenting children with these small challenges goes better when there is a foundation of a positive, supportive relationship. Enjoy activities with your child, talk about things you both enjoy, and plan fun activities that can present opportunities for making choices and changing things up a bit.
You can learn more about tailoring parenting to children’s temperament in Parenting with Temperament in Mind, which I co-authored with Maria Gartstein.
