Research on temperament suggests the importance of education to help child-care workers, teachers and parents realize that children’s behaviour and emotions are not the sole result of social learning. Instead, children differ from an early age in their reactivity and self-regulation and may follow different pathways to developmental outcomes. Temperament also suggests specific interventions, such as training in attentional control that has been successfully used with four-year-olds and can be adapted to preschool settings. Such training has proven useful for children with ADHD as well, and appears to have general positive effects on children’s cognitive processing.
Different parenting strategies appear to work better for children with certain temperaments. This can be explained by the “goodness of fit” theory, as suggested by Thomas and Chess. Children who are aggressive and difficult to manage seem to benefit from a parenting style involving more restrictive control and lower parental negativity. Shy children appear to benefit from being encouraged by parents to explore novel situations and are more likely to remain shy and inhibited if parents are overprotective.
Fearful children tend to develop greater early conscience and do best under gentle parental discipline that promotes internalized conscience. More fearless children appear to benefit more from maternal responsiveness and their own security of attachment in conscience development.
Individual differences in effortful control, although partly due to heredity, are also associated with the quality of parent-child interactions. Warm, supportive parenting, rather than cold, directive parenting, appears to predict higher levels of effortful control. It is therefore important that parents and other caregivers be encouraged to interact with children in ways that foster the development of effortful control.
Finally, some children pose greater challenges in certain contexts to parents, teachers and other caregivers because of their temperaments. In such cases, caregivers are likely to benefit from additional support and education. For example, caregivers can be helped to avoid negative responses that might naturally be evoked by children with more difficult temperaments.
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