Understanding Temperaments
Adults: Accentuating Positives, Managing Triggers
You can better understand how your child feels when you look at your own temperamental traits and how they affect your views and reactions.
Some thoughts regarding different temperaments and their affect on how adults organize their lives and parent:
- Highly active parents have the energy to keep up with busy kids, but they may find it challenging to sit down and read a story.
- Low-activity parents are there to spend quiet time with kids, but may have trouble keeping up with their more active children.
- Intense parents are passionate and deeply love their children. An intense parent may find it much harder to control his emotions, and may yell more loudly and need to work harder at managing triggers.
- A highly persistent adult can focus on achieving goals. As a parent, she can give children her full attention.
The challenge comes from interruptions. A persistent parent really needs to look at his expectations, and structure time to accomplish tasks while also nurturing and taking time out to meet the children’s needs.
- Sensitive adults can be quite attuned to their children’s emotions, but need to be aware of their thresholds and triggers. If crowded places or noise trigger frustration, minimize your exposure to them. It’s hard to parent when you’re at your limit.
Empathy is the ability to understand how another feels. When you can understand how your child feels and validate those feelings, you help your child develop her sense of self.
By noticing your own temperamental traits and reactions, you’ll discover your own share of challenges when your unique traits don’t work in your favor. Helping your child effectively deal with her individual traits at a young age will help bring out the best in her temperament as an adult.
