Child Psychology: Understanding Children And Their Temperaments

By Priya Florence Shah

One of the most sensitive and important issues parents have to contend with is the matter of their child’s temperament.

Understanding children and their temperament is one important key to better growing-up development of each child’s personality vis-à-vis the world at large.

Understand Your Child’s Temperament

There is never a better way of knowing your child than understanding his temperament. Doing so means you accept his uniqueness and not your pre-conceived ideas about him before he showed up in your life.

Understanding his temperament will help you in letting go and not blame yourself or your child for situations that are normal as seen from the point of view of your child’s temperament.

Understanding your child’s temperament can help you and your spouse plan strategies to deal with complicated circumstances and situations your child may find himself in. Mild situations need not escalate into major conflicts or difficulties that may cause harm for all parties, especially your child.

You will also understand better how your child learns on his own accord. Experts place fast-adjusting temperaments as those who learn more by doing and practicing. Slower-to-warm temperaments learn by watching and rehearsing internally.

Remember, everyone is different. In this situation, you will learn to forgive yourself and your child after some bad times.

As authorities had expressed before, there are no bad temperaments, only that some are more challenging than others and it is up to you to meet up these challenge. Even the most challenging of situations can be “planned” in some way because it had been understood.

With everybody having their own temperaments, you will have to accept that yours and that of your child might not be great going together at present circumstances.

However, you may want to look at the possibility that your child’s temperament might just work out fine for him out there in the world. It could happen, too, that maybe in the future your lives may work out fine.

Easy/Flexible Temperament

This child has a generally optimistic outlook, can adapt quickly and is usually positive. He is an easy learner, eats and sleeps regularly (has no trouble sleeping), pleasant and cheerful, And maintains a low-intensity mood.

He can be a crybaby and feels deeply some situations, but he has few significant emotional outbursts. This type comprises about 40% of all people.

Feisty/Difficult/Spirited

The Feisty/Difficult/Spirited type has about 10% of the population, the opposite of the Easy /Flexible. This child is difficult to nap or feed in regular ways. Moreover, he has irregular bowel movements, and sometimes shows his mastery with some things in general.

He has tantrums, is fussy with things, hard to transition and is often unpleasant in manners and ways. On the other hand, he or she is bursting with energy, gets into mischief, and is capable of exploring anything with great intensity.

This type attracts all kinds of negative things and it is easy to scold, punish or even resent this child with this kind of temperament.

Slow-To-Warm Types

The 3rd temperament type is aptly called Slow-To-Warm. 15% of the population belongs to this category. Sometimes, these guys are mistaken for shy or highly-sensitive persons (which they sometimes are).

They usually observe a lot on the outside of things before coming in. he or she may have an irregular sleeping, feeding and other personal habits. This child seems to be always enjoying things or doing them at his own sweet pace.

The rest of the population (35%) cannot be categorized or typed into a group with a pervading form of temperament to classify. The only feature they have is that they all have all features of all three temperaments.

In all these temperament types, you will also find yours. Understanding children and their temperaments also includes understanding your own.

Doing so will open your eyes to the many areas where you can connect to that of your child’s, whether you are compatible with each other or not.

This article may be reprinted with attribution to www.lovingyourchild.com

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