Let's dive into some of the theoretical approaches to temperament in psychology. This may seem boring to some of you, overly-simplistic to others (I'm often in this camp), or just plain irrelevant to those of you suffering through intense sleep deprivation. All fair criticisms, I think. But I'd like to just get a few ideas out about the broad temperament styles before we all start to concretely speculate about their implications for children's sleep. If nothing else, this post will make you thankful that you skipped that application to grad school in developmental psychology.
I mentioned in Part I of this series of posts on temperament that there are many ways to divide the pie of temperament, and many books have been written on the subject. One of the original systems for delineating temperament styles in infants and young children was developed by Thomas & Chess in the 60s and 70s. It's what I like to call the "three little bears" approach (too hot, too cold, juuuuuust right kinda thing). Here's a reasonable summary of their research approach, the methods they used to categorize kids, and some of the conclusions they came up with. (It's more complex than I can give credit to in a blog post.) According to these researchers, of the children who could be classified, about two-thirds were labeled “easy” and the remainder were divided almost equally into “difficult” and “slow to warm up.” The easy child adapted smoothly to new experiences, was generally happy, and had few difficulties eating or sleeping. Difficult babies were irritable, fussy, and reactive, they generally cried a lot, and they tended to have irregular eating and sleeping habits. Babies who were slow to warm up would often withdraw from new experiences or people, and they adapted to these experiences only slowly, after repeated exposure. The first groups of children, easy and difficult, probably bring clear images to mind for anyone who’s spent time with children. Indeed, some babies seem to take challenges and novel experiences in stride, whereas others fuss and cry when they are challenged, when their expectations aren’t met, or when they are tired, or hungry, or just plain moody. The "easy" group grow into toddlers who, though rambunctious and defiant to some degree, generally end up cooperating with parents and accepting most situations. Difficult toddlers, on the other hand, can be extremely challenging. They are the ones for whom nothing seems to work, for whom every choice is intolerable, and who fight or resist many parental directives, from putting on their socks to eating what’s in front of them (or eating anything at all except jellybeans and olives). They're also often the ones who are "overly" sensitive to certain foods and to unfamiliar textures, and so on.
The final group, "slow to warm up", seems to apply to children who were more precisely described by Jerome Kagan’s research in the 80s (he's recognized as one of the most prominent developmentalists in the field; he's controversial and damn interesting to boot). Kagan delineated a group of babies who would freeze or withdraw when faced with loud noises, novel sights, and new people. He described these babies as anxious or inhibited. These anxious/inhibited children generally showed a high, regular heart-rate and they would startle very easily and quickly. If we compare “difficult” babies’ and these anxious/inhibited ones, the difficult babies' temperaments seem to revolve around the emotion of anger — they react to many of their challenges by throwing fits of rage or they are often in an angry huff when things don't go their way. But inhibited babies’ predominant emotion is anxiety or fear. They react to strangers with intense shyness, they are often afraid of anything remotely risky (dipping a toe in the water, loud traffic, crawling too far, but especially interacting with new people).
Now remember, I'm referring to infants and young children (we tend to think about temperament as "personality" after early childhood). So what happened to the anxious/inhibited kids when they grew up? A certain proportion of these babies would grow into inhibited, overly-cautious teenagers and adults, a few would develop full-blown anxiety disorders, but the VAST MAJORITY would end up just like most other children, with no real emotional problems at all. So let's be clear here: No one is suggesting that early, biologically-based temperaments do not or cannot change with particular types of EXPERIENCES and exposure to particular environments. Nature and nurture are inseparable and suggesting one trumps the other is silly (it's my blog so I get to say these kinds of sweeping generalizations. And you can — and SHOULD — tell me I'm wrong if you think so).
So these are some of the VERY basic ways that the temperament pie has been sliced. MANY other systems of classification have been put forward as well, of course, but a surprising number don't differ significantly from these basic types. So how does this all relate to sleep? Well, that's the trouble: I don’t have enough information/data/research to suggest a particular approach to sleep training based on children’s temperamental traits. There’s simply no empirical research that has tried to identify the best match between different temperamental styles and different sleep training approaches, nevermind matching these different styles to the best TIME to sleep train. However, we can speculate, (and Marc and I did, in the book) why certain children with various temperaments might respond better or worse to some sleep training strategies administered at certain periods in development.
What are some of your best guesses? How do you think your chid's temperament has influenced his sleep habits? Did you change your mind about the methods or the timing of sleep training when you understood your child's temperament better? Do you think that one particular method or one particular stage to sleep train is most appropriate for all kids, no matter their temperamental style?
I keep reading about these temperament issues, and while I *would* characterize my son as “slow to warm up” I would *not* characterize him as anxious or fearful. Instead, he just seems skeptical and cautious to me. He doesn’t startle easily, either, confounding categorization further. It reminds me of how often people think “introverted” means “shy” when in fact a better description is “finds people draining” whether or not one is “anxious” around people.
I’m trying not to project my or my husband’s personality traits onto my son, but as I watch him be reserved and take in the lay of the land before committing to an activity, it feels more to me that he’s simply temperamentally cautious/quiet/calm. So he doesn’t really fit the ‘easy’ or ‘anxious’ categories to me.
I suppose this could just be quibbling over terminology, but I always hated being told I was ‘shy’ (which seems pejorative and limiting) when in fact I just found that having to deal with a lot of people in short periods of time drained my reserves. Still does, but I have much better coping skills now than when I was a kid.
Anyway.. hard for me to tell what this all means for sleep because we’ve been painfully teething for weeks and I’ve given up anything beyond trying to get through each night by any means necessary (and without a whole lot of medication, if possible).
Lyn, you could be writing about my 22 month old son, whose orientation toward the world is as such: everything, I mean EVERYTHING, novel is treated as dubious until proven otherwise. He is cautious, sometimes fearful, and emphatically says, “no…no…all done!” when in new situations. THe good news is that one neutral exposure to the new thing is typically sufficient for him to come around the next time he encounters the new thing.
Case in point — yesterday, I was listening to my Ipod and thought he might like to listen too. He adores all music so this novel form of listening to music might be well-received. NO! First time, listening to a song he knows with ear-buds and he says, “No! No! No!”, shakes his head, and pushes the ear buds away. This morning, he goes right up to my Ipod, puts in the ear buds,asks me to turn it on, then does a happy dance when the song comes on and bursts out in gleeful laughter. The Ipod is no longer DUPO (Dubious Until Proven Otherwise). It is PO.
There’s a caveat here — I suspect that if I tried to intiate the second exposure to the Ipod, I might have gotten the “no!” reaction again. He prefers to be in control of exposure to new things too. He is his father’s son.
Back to sleep training. We Ferberized in the second window (5-6 months). The first two days sucked (crying for 45 and 30 min respectively), then he adapted and learned to put himself to sleep. I forget how many days it took until he was going to bed without any tears — it didn’t take longer than a week.
Alone & awake was DUPO for a couple of days, but then he adapted, provided we were consistent and didn’t introduce anything novel during training — we had a solid routine and stuck to it religiously until it seemed like he was going to sleep easily.
We had predictable hiccups with sleep, coinciding with the phases that BedTiming discusses but, interestingly, never with *going to sleep*, just early am waking.
We wonder if the consistency of going down might be related to our decision to only let him have soothers & his blanky in his crib. We wanted him to associate these soothing objects with sleep and sleep only so that when he went to bed, there was a ‘treat’ waiting for him in his bed — his Ollie (the blanky) and his sou-sou.
We think this may have had the added benefit of making sleep in new locations easier for him to adapt to, provide he has his ollie & sou sou and the room is dark. We also schlep him about a lot, so he’s also used to sleeping in a pack n play.
He’s now pretty flexible in where he can sleep. For example, he now sleeps in a toddler bed at day care, and doesn’t even need a sou-sou there! So the sou-sou & blanky become even more exclusive delights.
We may have set ourselves up for future pain when the sou-sous go away, but hey, we’re all sleeping well.
Our children have made it clear from the beginning that while they are both from the same gene pool, they are very different children.
She is now a little over a year and had started to look like she would be sleeping through the night soon but molars hit and we’re currently riding out the storm but are hopeful that she’ll come around soon after they finish cutting through.
When Charlie was tiny, it took us ages to figure out when he was tired and then how to set up an environment that he could sleep in. It was at least 3 months before he slept independently for more than 20-30 minutes at a time and a couple months after that to get a 45 minute stretch. He required a lot of help to learn to do any sort of self-regulation and how to “turn off” enough to give in and go to sleep and learning to make it through the light sleep stages independently was a very difficult skill for him. After trying most everything else, we finally did a modified Ferber around 9 months. With Charlie, if you were in the room with him, he would desperately try to interact and would become increasingly frustrated if you simply tried to pat him or just sat with him. Even with a high level of consistency, learning to learn his ridiculously hard to discern cues, an iron clad schedule, etc, it took months to get a 2 hour stretch and he didn’t consistently sleep through the night until he was well into 2. The key with Charlie seemed to be his intense social and learning drive. He wanted to be with you, interacting, all the time. It meant he smiled early, talked early, etc and he seems quite bright but all those social skills came at a high price. And, while he really enjoyed new experiences, he was very uncertain about caregivers other than his father and I so breaks for us were hard to come by.
Megan is 20 months younger than him. When she was a few weeks old, I had nursed her in bed and snuggled her up to me while I read a book. I had to get up for a minute and called my husband in to watch over her. She stirred briefly, noticed I wasn’t there, resettled herself and went back to sleep. She did a 4-6 hour stretch at birth. As she got older and more aware of her world, her sleep got somewhat less easy. She also has a fairly high learning and social drive and has hit her milestones even earlier than her brother. But, her main sleep difficulties seem to lie more in the realm of attachment. In an ideal Megan world, she would always sleep touching me. This is very sweet but became a rather unworkable situation as she got older. At the same time, when we’ve worked on teaching her to sleep, we can pat her and she gets comfort, not frustration from it. She is content to have you in the room with her. We’ve been able to use much gentler techniques with her, which was a boon to my sanity.
My daughter tends to fluctuate from one end of the spectrum to the other. For a few months, she’d be considered “easy” and in the next couple of months, morph into “difficult”. In another couple of months, she’s “slow to warm up”. Some of it tends to depend on what is going on at the time. For instance, if our routine is undisturbed, she has consistency in who is around and the activities around her, she’s easy. If there are new people, changes in the typical routine, or is introduced to something new, she can be either slow to warm or difficult. At the moment, she’s difficult. She’s 10 months, so she’s right in that 9-11 month difficult stage, we’ve had a few schedule changes, and my sister is visiting from out of state with her 3 kids, and my daughter doesn’t know them at all. This makes her slow to warm at best and insanely difficult at worst. She’s been clingy, won’t sleep without me for both naps and bedtime, and she is reluctant to play with her toys without me holding her or right beside her.
I believe (in my degree-less mind) that temperament can be caused by genes but still influenced by experience. I don’t think it’s one or the other. Perhaps underlying she has a tendency to be difficult when placed in trying situations, but is usually quite easy when she has consistent structure.
I am almost kicking myself when I say… as a teacher I know that many of these “difficult” tendencies can be indicative of learning disabilities. My husband has ADHD and our daughter is very similar to him in temperament. I am by no means attempting to diagnose my 10 month old with ADHD, but it would make for an interesting study in regards to temperament, and which of those difficult babies grow up to have learning disabilities or other challenges, and how many do not. Just a thought.
Great comments! First off, if you re-read my post, there’s a HUGE caveat hidden at the beginning of my description. In the second paragraph, I mentioned, “… of the children who could be classified…” Which means that there were a boatload that this classification system FAILED to identify accurately: kids who fell through the cracks, who were a bit of this and a bit of that, high on this and low on that and couldn’t be pushed into this simplistic 3-category system. I totally agree with Lyn and Meredith: this system of classification DOES miss the mark on some kids. And, Lyn, I don’t think it’s just about terminology and you’re quibbling. Both you and Meredith have identified another “type” that psychologists often talk about. I’ll be talking next about psychologists who more recently became interested in thinking about temperament less as a “behavioral” pattern and more about biological/arousal/regulation dimensions (those who are better or worst at regulating their arousal levels and the style with which they do so).
What’s fabulous about what both Meredith and Becky have talked about is how exquisitely sensitive mothers can be to their children’s temperaments and adjust their sleeping arrangements and expectations to match their children’s needs. I’m LOVING reading about the specifics of how you women set up and carried through sleep training or whatever you want to label it.
That reminds me of the huge research on the “matching hypothesis”: that kids will do just fine no matter what temperament they have as long as they have a good match with their mother (e.g., if a high needs/high arousal kid has a mom that is very energetic, very alert, very flexible, he does great; if instead this same child is paired up with a mom who is more low energy herself, who is more of a laissez-faire mom, he won’t do as well… BUT the key here is this latter mom will do just GREAT with a mellow, self-regulating baby…). In some cases, genetics helps the probability of getting a good match, but in other cases, not so much. One of my twin boys is temperamentally (and physically) the CLONE of my husband (and he baffles me), his brother is temperamentally so much like me (also physically) — one kid I instantaneously know what he needs, the other is a constant problem-solving struggle for me.
@Grace: Yeah, you nailed a very good point. In our book we mention that some psychologists have suggested that children going through a stage transition resemble other children going through the same transition MORE SO than their OWN previous personalities before the transition period. Also? Almost ALL kids are more clingy, needy, whiny, angry, fussy and DIFFICULT at 8-11 months. I’d never do a study on temperament and test kids during these stage transitions (hmmm… I wonder how many have done so… OH! That might be such a cool review paper. Ahem. Carry on.)
The study that you mention would be interesting to conduct has been done, at least in part. Here’s the reference, if you’re into that sort of thing: “Temperament at 7, 12, and 25 Months in Children at Familial Risk for ADHD”
Infant and Child Development, 17: 321 – 338 (2008)
Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com).
Interestingly, they defined being “at risk” for ADHD as the father having been diagnosed. If you don’t have access to the journal online, send me an email and I can send it off to you (ONLY if you’re interested in bland academese writing though; and you may NOT be, given your child is in the heart of a transition period).
Fascinating topic. I look forward to reading the next part.
My older one is one of those easy children based on this temperament sorting but my second one might be one of those cautious children or difficult ones. It’s hard to tell since he’s 15 months right now and he’s going through a fussy phase but until the fussiness started he was definitely trending towards being the cautious child.