Difficult’ temperament? Our 7-year-old son is very sensitive and throws many tantrums. He usually starts his day in a bad mood, causing immediate distress in trying to get him off to school. He is doing well in school, where he has an excellent teacher who runs a very structured classroom. But, at home, he makes a fuss about everything that doesn’t go his way, spoiling dinner, games and bedtime. He seems to need a lot of attention, yet he often spoils it when we try to give it to him. When he’s in a good mood, he is terrific. He’s also very caring with a baby sister. But right now we are mostly angry at him. How can we turn things around? The above description of a boy was written in a Q&A column (April 2015) to a ‘resident’ psychologist on the website Psych Central, a community of psychologists giving information and advice about mental health, family, parenting and relationship issues. In response, the practitioner (retired Dr Kalman Heller) explains different temperaments and raises the possibility that the child has a ‘difficult’ temperament, citing Thomas and Chess. He reassures the parent that the difficulties are not caused by ‘bad parenting’, but parents do play an important role in influencing the course of development (and if they allow the behaviour to ‘run the house’, it will get worse). Heller also recommends more ‘structure’, noting the difference it makes in school, through clearer limits and consistent reinforcement to create more ‘predictable’ environments (e.g. for getting ready for school) and anticipating situations that may be overly stimulating (e.g. holidays or birthdays) to help him prepare and unwind.
• Do you agree with the assessment of a difficult temperament for this boy? • What about his recommendations for more ‘structure’?
It is difficult to ascertain whether the child has a difficult temperament without knowing his history, especially his behavioural style when younger, as this information is an indicator of stability and continuity, which as we have seen are the key qualifiers for temperamental traits. Still, being hard to please, getting into bad moods easily and very intense emotional reactions are also the key traits of ‘difficult’ children, according to Thomas and Chess. Yet this difficulty seems to be specific to (or be more severe at) home and is perhaps directed at only the parents, since the child is capable of positive behaviour in school and with his sibling. This is not in line with context dependence, as we saw earlier; we could expect an inherently difficult temperament to be apparent across contexts, albeit being expressed differently. Nevertheless, if he is a difficult child, planning well-structured and monitored environments and avoiding overstimulation is probably sound as this temperament is also characterised by lowered adaptability to change and heightened withdrawal from novelty. We refer to the potential importance of school structure for the child’s behaviour in a later chapter (see Chapter 14, ‘Developmental psychology and education’).