Temperament: The Basic Must-Knows

  • Temperament is a set of inborn traits that will influence your little’s approach to the world.
  • These traits are involved in the development of your little’s distinct personality.
  • They appear to be relatively constant from birth, although time and experiences make them more apparent.
  • They are stable characteristics that are never “good” or “bad.”
  • How you internalize them depends on whether you perceive them as a bad or good trait.

Benefits to Understand + Accepting Temperament:

1. More Empathy, Less Blame

When you understand the temperament of your little, you can avoid blaming yourself or you little for issues that are expected for that temperament. Some littles are smiley and talkative. Others are more pensive and prefer to observe.  Some are sound sleepers. Others need to touch the stove to accept it is hot.

2. Better Pick Your Battles

In accepting your little’s temperament, you can avoid perhaps well-meaning, but ultimately maddening, attempts to control or change it.

3. Set Up for Success

When you understand how your little’s temperament responds to certain situations/environments, you can learn to anticipate issues that might create difficulties. You can prepare for, or avoid, a situation that is a poor fit. Or you can choose situations and activates that “fit,” based on what is best/important to you + your little.

4. Seek to Manage, Not Change or Control

You can be more effective by tailoring your parenting strategies to the temperamental characteristics of your little. Making sure interactions, expectations, rewards, and consequences are realistic for your little.

5. Be the Expert on Your Child –

As you learn more about who your little innately is, you will begin to feel more effective in anticipating, responding + meeting your little’s needs. In other words: You really will know your little the best, know what s/he needs best, and you will be the one whose opinion matters the most when it comes to your little.

 

In the end, the main reason to learn your child’s temperament is to be able to assess for Goodness of Fit.

Click HERE to read more about how to use Goodness of Fit as the ultimate parenting tool.