The Words You Speak And The Tone You Use Can Impact Your Child’s Temperament

Children are constantly learning as they grow older from their own explorations, their peers, and most importantly, from their parents. It was thought that your child’s temperament was genetically predisposed and wired at birth. However, a recent 2016 study, has suggested that a child’s environment plays a crucial role, that includes how and what a parent says to their children on a daily basis.

What is temperament?

Temperament is how a child adapts to his environment and his or her emotional style. For the most part temperament is an innate quality of each individual child, yet it can be heavily influenced throughout the early years of a kid’s life, by their experiences and interactions with other people, their environment, and their overall health.

By the time your child reaches school, their temperament will be well defined. “However, their behavioural adjustment depends a lot on the interaction between their temperament and yours, and how others respond to them as well, or their overall comfortability they fit in to the surrounding environment and the people around them” says Mary Clark, a psychology writer at Essayroo and Best Essay Services.

Characteristics of Temperament

The following characteristics make up your temperament:

• Sensitivity- This has to do with how sensitive you are to sensory stimuli. How much discomfort do you feel when you hear a loud noise and how well do you tolerate it?
• Regularity- Do you enjoy a regular schedule or prefer spontaneity?
• Activity level- How active are you on a daily basis? Do you enjoy a lot of activity, or do you prefer more quiet, sedentary activity?
• Intensity-How easily can others tell how you are feeling? Do you show a big response when you are upset, for example, or do others have to guess how you are feeling?

• Persistency-Are you able to stick with a task? Are you likely to move from one activity to another without finishing or do you stick with one task until it’s finished?
• Adaptability- How do you do with change? Do you jump right into a new situation, or do you take the time to assess a situation before stepping in?
• Distractibility-Are you able to pay attention for long periods of time or do you get distracted easily?

Your temperament determines how you perceive and respond to your child’s behaviours and influences your child and your discipline strategies you use.

How the words you choose and how you say them can impact your child.

In the 2016 experiment, 15 children at 15 months of age were taught by researchers how to play with toys while sitting in their parents’ lap, while another researcher, called the ‘emoter’ would either react with anger and say sternly “That’s aggravating” or react neutrally and say in a neutral tone “That’s interesting”, while the infants watched this demonstration. Later, they let these children play with the toys. The children who had been responded to with anger were less likely to play with the toys.

What this means for parents is that how we say things and what we say can have a massive impact on our child’s behaviour in the moment, but also how they react to future instances. “If you react angrily, because you are noise sensitive to certain sounds, for example, over time a child will generalise your reaction and may become hesitant and fearful in new environments with new toys, afraid of making too much noise,” says Ian Marvel, a blogger at Research Papers and Top Essay Services.

How can you use this information to help your children?

You can use this knowledge to impact your children in a positive manner. By using a positive tone and positive statements around your small children in various situations, you help them react in a more positive manner. You can teach your child to not fear new places or new people in this way, while using a stern tone to help them understand dangerous items and situations, so they will avoid them in the future.

How you speak to your children is critically important to their own temperament as it can impact how they react to different situations in the future. Equally important is the tone you use. You can use this information to help you encourage your children’s emotional growth more effectively.