What Makes Children The Way They Are

At four months Clem screamed whenever he was bathed, and at six months he invariably yelled at the sight of a spoon nearing his mouth. When he was two years old he screeched while being dressed, and at seven he shrieked for half an hour after failing to hit a ball as far as he wanted to. Yet he was not sick, retarded, psychotic or even the victim of mishandling by his mother. He was simply what used to be known as a difficult child, and chances are that he was born that way. So, at least, believe Psychiatrists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, of the New York University School of Medicine, and Pediatrician Herbert Birch, of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

After 15 years of research, the three doctors conclude that most babies can be placed in one of three categories that mothers were using long before child psychology became popular: difficult, slow-to-warm-up or easy. Like Clem, all difficult infants (about one in ten) react intensely to everything: instead of soft crying, an enraged howl; instead of quiet chuckles, uncontrolled laughter, sometimes ending in a paroxysm of hiccups. Eating and sleeping schedules are irregular, and everything new requires long periods of difficult adjustment. Easy children--the most numerous category--are regular in habit, sunny in mood, quick to adapt. And the slow-to-warm-ups are just that: not very active at first, rather negative in mood, and likely to back off from new situations.

Thomas and his colleagues are not yet sure what creates the characteristics, but much evidence suggests that the differences are largely inborn. One argument for this view, they say, is that temperament appears very early, before environment has had much effect. Similar child-rearing approaches do not seem to produce similar children either: one laissez-faire mother may find herself with a difficult child; another, equally permissive, may have an easy offspring. Moreover, family disorganization leads to very mixed emotional problems among the very young. Whatever its origins, temperament needs to be understood early, the investigators believe. Identifying a child's customary response keeps parents from blaming themselves for troublesome behavior and helps them develop appropriate ways of handling a child. Firmness, for example, can save a difficult baby from becoming a tyrannical adult. Most important, in an age overafflicted by clinical pigeonholing, an understanding of temperament prevents parents--and teachers--from imagining that some deep intellectual or psychological disturbance underlies every home and school difficulty. By way of illustration, the doctors cite the case of Annie, a slow-to-warm-up child of seven who at first did poorly in an accelerated school program. She was quiet, never volunteered and often made mistakes. But her mother, aware that this was Annie's normal reaction to new situations, protested a teacher recommendation to return the child to a regular class. Handled patiently, said her mother, Annie would eventually do superior work--and she did.

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