Monthly Archives: April 2016

How Can Teachers Respond Optimally to a Child’s Temperament?

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How Can Teachers Respond Optimally to a Child’s Temperament?

Teachers’ concerns typically focus on young high reactive(HR) children’s withdrawn or constrained behavior – their preference to watch other children play rather than to join them; their hesitancy in physical games on the playground; their clinging to a parent at drop off; their reluctance to enjoy messy sensory stimulating activities; and their general reluctance to take risks, especially in unfamiliar situations. Often, teachers organize their observations in functional categories such as “separation”, or “peer relationships”. Of course, there can be many reasons why children cling to their parents at drop off or why they do not play with their peers (see below).

In order to identify a HR child, you must listen carefully to the parents. The first clue parents will tell you is that “I was very shy myself.” The second clue is “She is completely different at home – outgoing, active, playful.” The first clue is important, because as we noted in the first posting of this sequence, temperament has an important genetic component. The second is important because HR temperament is primarily about an excitable limbic system. That means that the child is more sensitive to the perception of threat, and the new, the novel, the unpredictable, are threatening. Home is usually familiar and unthreatening. Because of this important factor, I have begun to do home visits when I consult to teachers and parents of children whose teachers have these concerns.

One such child was a 4-yo girl I will call “Jessica”. Her parents described her as loving, sweet, empathic, and smart. She was also “really shy”, and they worried that she was “not comfortable in her skin”. At home, she was confident, free, and creative, but at school she didn’t show these traits. She preferred to play with the teachers instead of the other children. When she went to birthday parties, she retreated into her shell, hiding under her mother’s sweater. Her preschool teachers suggested the consultation because of their concern that she was not engaging with her peers.

“Melinda”, another child, was 3-yo when her teachers expressed concern to her parents that she did not play with her classmates but sat quietly doing activities on her own. Although she looked content, they could not really tell how she was feeling and what she was thinking. On the playground, she liked to swing on one particular swing and got quite upset if that swing happened to be taken by another child.

4-yo “Benjamin” was a quiet, pleasant child whose teachers had to place limits on the time he spent with a girl classmate, Hannah, since she began to look uncomfortable with the degree of physical contact between them, as he insisted on holding her hand and sitting so close to her that he was always touching her. Benjamin explained that he loved Hannah and wanted to marry her, but Hannah complained that she wanted to play with some other friends in addition to Benjamin. In response to the teachers’ limits, Benjamin slowly began to play with other children and has now made a number of friends. Even so, he was often found sitting quietly alone at a table, busy with an activity put out for the children that day.

In the case of each of these children, the teachers balanced their encouragement to take risks in the classroom against their acceptance of the children’s need to “take their time”. As time passed, each child became more comfortable in the classroom. Jessica became animated and playful with the other children. Melinda began to play with her peers and ceded her favorite swing to other children. Benjamin even began to assert himself when another child started to boss him around. It is unclear what precipitated the transformation in each child’s behavior, what allowed these children to be more comfortable in school. In one case the birth of a sibling seemed to introduce possibilities of greater competencies and higher status. In another case my home visit may have been reassuring to the parents. In the third case, the teachers’ more active coaching in social situations combined with acceptance to private school may have been instrumental. Most likely, a combination of these factors played a role. However, the easing of pressure of some sort plus the introduction of new positive possibilities for the future must have figured in all the changes. In any case, we will never know for sure.

Other Reasons for Children to Withdraw:

One important acknowledgement is that there is a large overlap between temperament and sensory processing. Most children with HR temperament have some sensory sensitivities. It is also that children may withdraw if they are sad or depressed. Finally, children with other processing difficulties – for example, auditory processing in which case they have difficulty making sense of verbal communications – may withdraw. In older children, learning disabilities may cause them to “give up”.

How Can Parents Respond Optimally to a Child’s Temperament?

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There is evidence that infant reactivity is related to the predisposition to have an excitable limbic system. There is also evidence that there is influence in uterine environment that can affect temperament. But biology is not destiny. There are ways that parents and teachers can help HR children moderate the effects of their high sensitivity.

The balance between protecting and promoting is a challenge for all parents to achieve, but it is an even greater challenge for parents of HR children. By protecting, I mean softening the bumps in the road of life – allowing the child to stay home from a birthday party or speaking for the child when he greeted by an unfamiliar person. By promoting, I mean insisting that the child take the risks that he needs to take to build a strong body and acquire necessary skills, such as eat healthy foods and engage in physical activity. Often the parents of HR children tone down their expectations of their child, either because they fear the child will fall apart when required to take the risk, or because they “know their child’s limits” and have rationalized a permissive parenting style. Other times, parents of HR children push the child beyond her limits and cause her to withdraw further or “give up”. Even good parents can err in either direction. Sometimes one parent takes one position and the second parent takes the other. This is particularly problematic because the polarization that results increases the stress on the whole family and erodes parental collaboration.

How can parents find this balance? First of all, there is not one balance to achieve. Each family must experiment until they find the “right” balance for their family – and since families and especially children are always changing – the trial and error efforts never really end. Snidman reported that researchers who did extensive home visits on 4 families – half HR and half LR babies – found that in the HR cases the mothers who set firmer limits on their children’s behavior helped their children feel more comfortable taking risks. In the case of the LR children, the mothers’ behavior made little difference. Of course, this is a study with a very small n despite the extensive observational data, but it is consistent with my clinical experience. By setting limits on their HR children’s behavior, parents communicate to their children their comfort with their children’s initiative. It is also true that setting limits can slip into a struggle pattern, and that is a problem to be avoided if at all possible. In my experience, it is easier to get into struggles with a HR child then with a LR child. That is because stress causes everybody to expend energy in order to manage it, and that drains energy, pulling everybody in the direction of simpler, more reactive behaviors. Struggles definitely involve simple, reactive behaviors. The HR child is always under more stress than the LR child, and this is especially true when faced with a challenge. Those of you with HR children will recognize the dread provoked by adding an additional demand to the morning routine.

The ideal to work towards is one in which you “choose your battles” and support a child in taking health-promoting risks up a point, then protecting him if he shows that it is too much for him. These caregiving behaviors are always evolving and frequently include corrections or “repairs”. Corrections and repairs are not something to be afraid of. They are what we learn from.

I will discuss the ways teachers can respond to a HR child in the next posting.

Why is Temperament Important to Parents and Teachers?

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Roughly 10-20% Caucasian children are shy and hesitant in unfamiliar situations. Another 10-20% are sociable and intrepid in response to novelty. The underlying features of these predispositions usually referred to as “temperament”, remain remarkably consistent over time. It has also been found that the caregiving environment in the early years can significantly influence the behaviors characteristic of these temperaments. That makes the study of temperament particularly relevant to this blog.

Nancy Snidman, a colleague of the pioneer researcher in temperament, defines temperament as a “predisposition to respond to the environment in certain ways” (lecture to UMB IPMHPCP, March 6, 2016). The baby comes into the world with certain temperamental qualities. These temperamental qualities may be due to genetics or epigenetics – influences from the environment in the womb. Children’s temperament influences the way they react to their environment – physical, social, and emotional. For example, a child’s temperament affects the way they react to novelty, sensory stimulation, or transitions. How does temperament at infancy translate to temperamental characteristics such as shyness in a preschool child? What does the “shy” infant look like as an older child or adult? Snidman and Kagan did a series of longitudinal studies to try to answer these questions.

Kagan and Snidman studied 400, 4-month old babies and classified them as high reactive (HR) and low reactive (LR) on the basis of their response to auditory, visual, and olfactory stimuli. They observed the babies’ responses in the form of heart rate increase, motor arousal (such as limb flexion and extension, motor tension, and back arch) and fretting or crying. They looked for the extremes of HR and LR babies and started to follow them.

They postulated that the HR children had inherited a low threshold of excitability in the amygdala; a part of the mid-brain called the limbic system, and the related limbic areas. The amygdala sends signals to the autonomic nervous system, communicating a sense of threat in the environment.

They studied the babies’ physiology and behavior in response to a number of laboratory procedures, from 9 months to 15 years. Some of these procedures were mild, such as puppets or tasting sweet and sour liquids, and some were more challenging, such as a toy robot and a stranger approaching wearing a lab coat and a gas mask. The two extreme styles of temperament, HR or LR, or behaviorally inhibited (BI) – shy, wary of novelty, slow to approach, or behaviorally uninhibited (BU) – sociable, comfortable with novelty, were remarkably consistent over the years.

Interestingly, the researchers found that as the kids got older the physiological markers were more important than the behavioral ones. This was because the children were taught to be polite. It was less the general behavior to strangers that distinguished the HR from the LR kids, and more the smiles and spontaneous comments. When children are presented with the same stimuli in repeated exposures, for example when they are shown invalid pictures (a horse head on a fish body), they usually habituate to the stimulus. That means their reaction becomes smaller with repeated exposures. In the case of HR kids, however, there is no habituation! That means that although they look more and more like their LR peers in terms of social behavior, their heart rate, pupillary dilatation, muscle tension, and stress hormones remain more reactive.

This is very interesting to me in my work with children and families. For more than two decades, Attachment Theory has dominated research in child psychology. This way of understanding child development minimizes the contribution of temperament. Yet, I have found temperament a very useful way of making sense of some of the problems that parents bring to me regarding their children’s behavior. It is also helpful to me when I consult to preschool teachers. In the next blog posting I will describe how I use ideas of temperament to help parents and teachers understand the children in their care.

Readings

Schwartz C, Snidman N, Kagan J (1999). Adolescent social anxiety as an outcome of inhibited temperament in childhood, JAACAP 38(8):1008-1015.

Kagan J (1997) Temperament and the reactions to unfamiliarity, Child Development 68(1):139-143.

Kagan J (1989). Temperamental contributions to social behavior, American Psychologist 44(4):668-674.