Summary:
Children are born with different ways of interpreting and interacting with the world, so the same parenting lands very differently for each child
Temperament is a starting point, not a label or destiny; it can help us understand behavior so we can parent with purpose
Understanding your child’s natural wiring helps you respond to who they actually are, not who you expect them to be.
“Go get dressed. We need to leave in ten minutes.”
One kid immediately asks, “Why do we have to leave now?” Then negotiates whether ten minutes really means ten minutes.
Another is halfway upstairs before they’re side-tracked by their sister doing something fun. They stop to talk, forget why they went upstairs, and simply return seven minutes later wearing only one sock.
Another wants to know where you’re going, how long you’ll be there, what they should wear. And, oh by the way, yesterday you said y’all were leaving at 10:30, not 10.
The last kid just says, “Okay.” But doesn’t actually get moving.
Same parent. Same instruction. Same house. Four completely different responses.
And if you’ve ever noticed that the parenting strategy that works beautifully with one child seems to make another child dig in even harder, there is a really fun explanation!
Your child wasn’t born as a blank slate
Parents shape children enormously. Our relationships, expectations, modeling, discipline, culture, and experiences all matter. But children aren’t blank slates waiting for us to create their personalities. They actually arrive in this world with an encoded wiring called temperament.
Developmental psychologist Mary Rothbart describes temperament in terms of differences in how a child reacts and self-regulates to the world around them in terms of emotions, activity, and attention. The fascinating thing is that it arrives on the scene earlier than you might imagine: at birth! Before the world ever has a chance to influence the typical elements of personality, your child arrives with a temperament.
Read Rothbart’s “Temperament, Development, and Personality”
It comes down to this: children are wired with differences in how they tend to experience and respond to the world.
Some move quickly toward novelty. Others hang back. Some react intensely. Others barely show what they’re feeling. Some are highly active. Some are naturally more measured. Some persist. Some shift. Some need time before warming up.
And those differences affect the parenting relationship because your child isn’t simply responding to what you do. They’re responding to what you do through the way they experience the world.
That explains what we often observe in families with multiple siblings raised in the same home by the same parents, yet come out so different. It’s because equal parenting will not always produce equal responses.
Parenting is a custom job!
Four different ways of moving through the world
For this series, I’m going to give you four memorable patterns for thinking about temperament. For those familiar with the ancient works of Hippocrates and Galen, you’ll know them as choleric, sanguine, melancholic, and phlegmatic. But let’s call the The Mover, The Connector, The Analyzer, and The Keeper.
These aren’t boxes to put kids in, labels to slap on them, and certainly not excuses for unhealthy behavior.
But they are a key to understanding what each individual child needs to thrive. Think of them as four ways children may characteristically move through the world:
The Mover tends toward action, agency and influence.
The Connector tends toward people, relationship and shared experience.
The Analyzer tends toward understanding, accuracy and preparation.
The Keeper tends toward stability, harmony and consistency.
If you recognize these in yourself, it’s no surprise! What we see in childhood carries into adulthood. It’s our wiring!
You may even recognize tendencies from more than one of them that show up in your or your child’s behavior, and that’s no surprise because we have elements of each. But overall, we have a primary temperament that influences how we perceive and interact with the world.
Contemporary temperament science is actually much more dimensional than the old idea that every human being fits neatly into one of four types. But these four patterns give us useful language for beginning to notice something parents have observed for centuries:
Children don’t all notice the same things, value the same things, or respond to the same experiences in the same way.
And interestingly, Scripture gives us a beautiful illustration of that.
Four men. One Jesus. Four accounts.
Think about the four Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell us about the same man: Jesus. And yet, when you read them, they don’t read the same.
Mark moves. His Gospel is famously fast-paced. The Greek word often translated as "immediately" or "at once" appears repeatedly, propelling the narrative from one action to another.
Matthew analyzes. His Gospel is carefully structured, opening with genealogy, repeatedly connecting events to Old Testament prophecy and fulfillment, and organizing Jesus’ teaching into substantial discourse sections. He continually helps the reader understand how the pieces fit together.
Luke connects. His Gospel gives particular attention to people and human encounters with compassion, meals, women, children, the poor, outsiders and those on the margins. Again and again, Luke draws our attention to whom Jesus sees, welcomes and restores.
John keeps. His Gospel sounds different from all three. It’s slower, reflective and deeply contemplative, repeatedly returning to themes of abiding, remaining, knowing, believing and loving. Rather than rushing through events, John lingers over their meaning and the enduring relationship between Christ and His people.
I’m not suggesting we can administer a temperament assessment to four men who lived two thousand years ago. I’m suggesting something more beautiful:
Different people can encounter the same truth and notice different things about it.
One notices activities and events. Another notices relationships. Another notices details. Another notices harmony and continuity. And we benefit from all four Gospels.
What if we began looking at our children with that same appreciation for difference?
Who do you seem most like?
Temperament is a starting point, not a destiny
This is where temperament teaching can go terribly wrong.
“He’s a Mover. Of course he’s bossy.”
“She’s a Connector. She just talks a lot.”
“He’s an Analyzer. That’s why he’s so rigid.”
“She’s a Keeper. She’s just not very motivated.”
No. Temperament should never become a way of stereotyping children. Instead, it gives us a set of better questions to ask on our quest to personalize our parenting:
What if that Mover’s desire for control contains the raw material for leadership?
What if that Connector’s constant talking contains the raw material for extraordinary relational intelligence?
What if the Analyzer’s endless questions contain the raw material for discernment and wisdom?
What if the Keeper’s reluctance to be rushed contains the raw material for steadiness and peace?
Now our parenting goal changes. We’re not trying to remove temperament. We’re helping our child learn to steward it.
And that’s where we begin this series.
Try this: Notice It · Name It · Nurture It
Get curious this week. You don’t have to know their temperament quite yet. We’ll get there. But first…
· Notice It ·
Watch for patterns. What does your child do when plans change? When they’re excited? When someone tells them no? When they enter a room full of unfamiliar people? When something becomes difficult?
Don’t evaluate it yet. Notice it.
· Name It ·
Instead of immediately naming the behavior as bossy, dramatic, stubborn, shy, lazy, perfectionistic, simply **name what you observe: They really want a say in what happens.” They come alive around people. They need more information before they’re comfortable moving. They seem to prefer keeping things steady. That is very different from assigning character.
· Nurture It ·
Ask one final question: What might be here that needs developing rather than eliminating? You don’t have to excuse challenging behavior to become curious about what sits underneath it. Because next week we’re going one layer deeper to understand what each temperament values, because those values are strengths, but can also become weaknesses, so let’s learn how to guide development by understanding their wiring.
Want the full framework? The book is available on Amazon: Notice It · Name It · Nurture It
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Though I'm more familiar with the older version (choleric, etc.), these temperament types are a bit easier to see and work with. I can easily find where our own kids were growing up, and it's fun to watch what characteristics our grands are exhibiting more at this stage/place in their lives. But how fascinating that the four apostles behind the four gospels fit so beautifully into one of each of these categories! I'm excited about this new series... your work is always so practical. Thanks Bethany!