Bringing Your Newly Adopted Child Home -- Temperament
By Dr. Patti Zordich
Is this concerning behavior due to trauma, attachment experiences and adoption, or is it the child’s personality, the way they were born? Often newly adoptive parents, counselors and caseworkers often attribute the adopted child’s difficult behaviors to the fact that they were adopted or the result of trauma. However, the difficulty may in fact be due, in part, to the child’s temperament, and/or a mismatch between the child and parent’s temperament.
What exactly is temperament? You’ve probably heard of the nature vs. nurture debate about how we come to the way we are; how our personality develops. For a while now psychology has conceded that it is both nature (what we are born with) and nurture (our upbringing and other environmental factors) that determine why we are who we are.
The nature part is called temperament. Thomas and Chess first introduced their New York Longitudinal Study in 1952, in which they identified nine temperament traits. 1 through their research, Thomas and Chess determined that we are born with our temperament and live with it for the rest of our lives. In other words, our temperamental traits are stable throughout our lifetime and are resistant to change despite changing circumstances and experiences. 2
It can be helpful to familiarize yourself with Thomas and Chess’ nine temperamental traits. Here are the traits according to Thomas and Chess:
Activity: Is the child constantly active or more relaxed?
Rhythmicity: Is the child regulated in terms of sleeping and eating, or more chaotic?
Approach/withdrawal: Does the Child move toward new objects and/or people easily, or tend
to shy away?
Adaptability: Does the child seem to be flexible or rigid when changes occur?
Intensity: Are the child’s reactions (either negative or positive) intense or calm?
Mood: Is the child’s mood generally negative or positive, erratic or even?
Persistence and attention span: Is the child persistent or give up easily?
Distractibility: Is the child easily distracted or does the child tend to stick with an activity
despite distractions.
Sensory Threshold: Is the child bothered by sensory stimuli such as noise, texture or
unbothered by them?
You might be wondering how this information can be useful when you’ve just brought your newly adopted child home, or you’ve been a family for several years. Understanding temperament can assist parents to:
Be more aware of your child’s temperament, accept your child as he is and refrain from
comparing your child to others.
Become aware of your own temperament, and strive to use this information to help you improve
the quality of the relationship between you and your child.
Understand and accept the differences between your temperament and that of your child’s.
Enjoy the interaction between your temperament and that of your child’s.
Set clear limits that correspond to your child’s temperament.
Prevent melt-downs in your intense child by decreasing intense and unexpected experience.
In the next Adoption blog post I’ll introduce a scale that you can use to identify where you and your child fall on each of the traits from mild to intense, identify any temperamental mismatches between you and your child, and explain some ways you can use this information can to inform your parenting style. In the meantime, I recommend the book Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide For Parents Whose Child Is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, persistent, and Energetic, by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. She provides great information about how to use this information about temperament to reduce problem behaviors and improve the quality of relationship between parents and their “spirited” children.
1 Thomas, A. & Chess, S. (1989). Temperament in clinical practice. The Guilford Press, New York, NY.
2 Ibid.