Why I believe in Parenting by Temperament: Part II Nurture and Discipline

Posted on May 18, 2012 by INTJ

The fit (misfit?) between your child’s temperament and your own is no small matter in good parenting.  If it is as normal as breathing for you to pick up anything dropped on the floor almost before it lands, if being late to an appointment causes you to break out in a quiet sweat, if the most visited screen on your iphone is your daily to-do list, then the best of children are going to make you a little crazy.  If inside the new person there is a little you, however, just waiting for time and opportunity to follow in your footsteps, it won’t be too bad.  Tidiness will break out before you know it and the small person will begin lining her shoes up in the closet, putting toys neatly in the toybox, and keeping a cover on her toothbrush.  You will soon smile and think how easy it is, just a few gentle words of direction and reminder and all is well.

But, but, what if the small one is a grasshopper instead of an ant (in Keirsey’s preference terms, a Perceiver instead of a Judger?)  What if glorious chaos, toys covering every inch of the floor, yesterday’s clothes still in a pile near the closet, storybooks conveniently open on the floor, on the bed, on the dining table?  Then what?  You may start with the same gentle reminders and explanations, but curiously, nothing changes.  Months go by, maybe years, and you become increasingly stern and angry.  You vary between thinking that this girl behaves like this just to irritate you, and wondering if the family got the wrong child at the hospital.  Temperament matters.  It can make parent/child relationships remarkably easy or extremely diffiicult.  Understanding the real dynamics will not work miracles if you two are very different, but it can certainly help you to find a better strategy and a better pathway. Continue reading →

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Why I believe in Parenting by Temperament–Part I.

Posted on May 8, 2012 by INTJ

Since our first books were published in 2004, and our more recent book in 2009 (Parenting by Temperament:  The New Revised Raising Cuddlebugs and Bravehearts) we have been trying to spread the message that knowing the temperament of the parent and the temperament of the child can do wonderful things for parent and child relationships, and for parenting and disciplining in really smart, effective ways.

There are two somewhat separable ideas here.  The first is the enormous parent temptation to (not so much remake as make) our children in our own image, or into a glorified model of our own ideal image.  When David Keirsey originally wrote “Please Understand Me” his introductory pages were directed mainly at the adult, but they reverberate intensely in how we think about our children.  He said “People are different in fundamental ways.  They want different things;  they have different motives, purposes aims, values, needs drives, impulses, urges.  Nothing is more fundamental than that.  They believe differently; they think…perceive, understand and comprehend differently….Differences abound and are not at all difficult to see, if one looks.  And it is precisely these variations in behavior and attitude that trigger in each of us a common response:  Seeing others around us differing from us, we conclude that these differences in individual behavior are but temporary manifestations of madness, badness, stupidity or sickness…we rather naturally account for variations in the behavior of others in terms of flaw and affliction.  Our job…to correct these flaws.”

If it is common to see the differences in others as flaws–and it is–how much more true is this when we look at our children?  First of all, by definition your job as a parent is to bring up happy and successful children.   I remember my teenagers arguing one day about whether I pushed them down specific roads.  The oldest (with an ironic grin) said in effect “Oh no, mom, as long as we are all happy, have good friends, have lots of good goals and ambitions, you really don’t care what we do.”  That was all too true.  There was a fair amount of wiggle room in there, but still! Continue reading →

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Effortful control: The uber temperament?

Posted on April 29, 2012 by INTJ

(German readers, please forgive the use of uber without an umlaut.  I don’t know how to do it in this program).

Do the various temperaments stand on their own?  is it possible that there is a still higher regulator?  In 1985, Mary Rothbart, a highly respected developmental psychologist, suggested that there was such a factor and named it “Effortful Control”.*  Effortful control is composed of a number of related abilities that aid us in regulating our reactions, focusing attention, intentionally approaching (or not) situations and people,  inhibiting our own impulses where this seems wise, and even calming or distracting ourselves where this seems wise.  It adds up to a complex system of self-regulation.  Rothbart comments “Effortful control as a temperamental dimension in itself…refers to superordinate self-regulatory systems that can assert control over the reactive and self-regulatory processes of other temperament systems, so that an analogy to “effort” or “will” is appropriate….Operationally, Effortful Control is reflected in individual differences in the ability to voluntarily sustain focus on a task, to voluntarily shift attention from one task to another, to voluntarily initiate action, and to voluntarily inhibit action”.

Effortful control emerged as one of three factors in a study that was done on the Children’s Behavioral Questionnaire in 2001.  What they found was a very general factor (effortful control) and two more specific factors with multiple subfactors.  Of these two, one was labeled Extraversion/Surgency and included such subfactors as high activity, smilling and laughing, impulsivity, and positive anticipation.  The other was labeled Negative Affectivity and included fear, anger, sadness, discomfort and a lack of soothability.  These two factors relate to and resemble three of the Big Five factors–Extraversion, Neuroticism and Conscientiousness.  (Openness was not really measured in this study, and Agreeableness had some complex relationships).**  The new and important conclusion from this study was that effortful control was not simply another factor, but a superordinate one.  That is, it helped to regulate the outcomes of the other factors.  Rothbart et al. had this important comment about this :  “What does effortful control mean for temperament and development?  It means that unlike early theoretical models of temperament that emphasized how people are moved by the positive and negative emotions or level of arousal, people are not always as the mercy of affect.  Using effortful control, people can more flexibly approach situations they fear, and inhibit actions they desire.   The efficiency of control, however, will depend on the strength of the emotional processes against which effort is exerted.”** Continue reading →

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Free Temperament Book in a Tit for Tat

Posted on April 19, 2012 by INTJ

NOTE:  SORRY TO SAY, THE FOLLOWING ONLY WORKS FOR U.S. AND CANADA!

We are offering free copies of our book Parenting by Temperament in return for joining our Forum.  This forum, (GO HERE) of course is also free of charge.  It is a place where people interested  in temperament in children and their parents can ask questions of the authors and ask questions of one another.  To get the book you have to go to the Forum and register (and wait patiently for us to be sure that you are a real person and not a spam factory).  After that you can post a request for the book and we will ship it to you, and look forward to your questions.  The below link will give you more detailed information.

ABOUT OUR FORUM  (detailed information on the Forum and on registration.)

 

 

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Temperament: Tiger Moms and Chinese Children

Posted on April 19, 2012 by INTJ

The story of the Chinese Tiger Mom has received great attention–and deservedly so. At the center of it all is Amy Chua, a Yale law professor and mother of two daughters. She has had a best selling book, and widely read articles, both online and off. *  Time Magazine published a detailed review of her parenting model and her more recent thoughts about this and about the storm of praise, criticism and horror that followed her original publication.**

Tiger Moms, in Professor Chua’s model are strict and demanding beyond the wildest American dreams. Among the things that her daughters were “never allowed to do” were “attend a sleepover, be in a school play, complain (about it) watch TV or play computer games, get any grade less than an A…. ” She says “If a Chinese child gets a B–which would never happen–there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and then work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.”

The prime example in all of this is the story of her younger daughter, Lulu and a piano piece called “The Little White Donkey” It requires that the two hands simultaneously play radically different rhythms, and is apparently really challenging. Chua says of this “Lulu couldn’t do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart.” Lulu threw an all-American style tantrum but her mother refused to back off. She says “I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn’t let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling….Then out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together–her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing–just like that.” The end of this tale is that Lulu was ecstatic and played the piece over and over in total delight. Continue reading →

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The Four Temperaments and politics, strength, strife and what to do about it!

Posted on April 6, 2012 by INTJ

There is a newly published book out called Quiet:  THE POWER OF INTROVERTS IN A WORLD THAT CAN’T STOP TALKING.  It looks intriguing and will no doubt generate new thoughts for another day.  Today, however, there is an introductory piece that fits our current theme like hand in glove.  It says:

 A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent Van Gogh.  I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists;  it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted and the weakhearted.  It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy’s feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight. . . .Indeed the presence of outstanding strengths presupposes that energy needed in other areas has been channeled away from them.

                                                                                             Allen Shawn

In describing my “pure” SPs, SJs, NFs, and NTs I have tried to invent creatures that were designed and motivated only by their two intense temperament preferences.  In doing that I have certainly created largely hypothetical people that neither existed in the past nor exist in the present.  I qualify this with the word “largely” however, as it is my feeling that we all will, in the course of a lifetime, encounter a few people who come startlingly  close to being one or another of these four pure temperament types.

As I began thinking about this, I was certainly interested in what sort of world they would want and what sort of world they would create, but my larger intention was to try to imagine what kind of world they would need, given our real planet, as it is, full of all sorts of temperaments and types. Continue reading →

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Temperament: Why we need all the temperaments to make the world work!

Posted on March 24, 2012 by INTJ

Do we really need all four temperaments to make the world work?  We can answer this in two very different ways.  First, if–as in the recent mind experiment blogs here–the whole world consisted of only one temperament, then perhaps not.

Let’s think about the Artisan SP world first.  Assuming that Artesans had little or no interest in complex learning in the academic STEM areas (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), it would be a technologically simple world.I suspect SP people would be just as happy without computers, iphones and ipads, and just as content to ride horseback as to fly about in 747s.  Music and art might not reach the complexity that is possible after many years of study, but again, there is no reason to think that it would be any less enjoyable.  On the whole I would think that SPs would enjoy life, with less angst, depression or stress than any other temperament–especially with no Guardians warning about future calamities, no Idealists trying to analyze their happy-go-lucky behavior, and no NTs trying to make them buckle down and accomplish serious things..

But–there is a sort of grasshopper side to the SP that might lead to disaster, depending on circumstances.  If the SP world was perpetually middling-warm, with gentle rains that filled the lakes but never overflowed them, with endless amounts of similarly endowed space to expand in, and no fierce predator animals to overwhelm them, and no virulent diseases to wipe them out, the SP world might be a kind of perpetual Eden.

On the other hand, if there were serious and continuing hazards, the life of the pure SP might not be so desirable.  Assume a real world distributed much like the one we know.  Even if our SPs had developed in a warm and pleasant part of the world, chances are they would outgrow it.  The lack of scientific study would make it unlikely that modern methods of contraception would have developed, and the SP temperament would make it unlikely that any sort of simpler “rhythm” method would be observed very strictly.  So, they would probably outgrow paradise and have to move on to less and less hospitable areas.  If the stock of local animals was slowly depleted, and/or moved further and further from the human predators, hunting would become more arduous.  Complicate this with snow and punishing temperatures in the winter and it would become necessary to set aside summer bounty for winter survival.  These are ant skills and, as noted, there is a strong grasshopper side to the SP.  Definitely not an advantage in hard times. Continue reading →

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Temperament: What if Keirsey’s Rationals (NTs) really did rule the world?

Posted on March 11, 2012 by INTJ

Rationals as rulers of the world!  That might be a scary concept.  This is the last of the series in which we have asked this question about each of Keirsey’s four temperaments (the SP Artisans, SJ Guardians, NF Idealists, and now the NT Rationals.)  In each case we have mainly thought about it from the point of view that each temperament was pure.  For the NT this means that all scores in the Thinking (T) and Feeling (F) preference scale were Ts–all thinking and no feeling at all.  With that, all scores in the Sensing (s) and Intuitive (N) preference scale were N–all Intuition and no Sensing at all.  With that is the assumption that the preferences for Introversion/Extraversion and Judging/Perceiving  are basically neutral in this imaginary type.  So the question is–what would the world be like if every human being, from the very beginning was a pure Rational NT–all Thinking and Intuition and no Feeling or Sensing.  To get things started here is the Summary of Keirsey’s description of the the NT Rational.

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IN SUMMARY:   Rationals are classed as Abstract Utilitarians.   Like NFs they think and talk about ideas and possibilities, rather than daily events.  Unlike NFs they do this in very precise and unemotional ways, always careful to qualify ideas with maybe, possibly, etc.  Where we summed Idealists as “passionate communitarians”, a good term for Rationals would the “passionate achievers“.  Making things better and more efficient seems to be a deep innate drive that dominates over social support and social approval.  In any conflict between what logical analysis suggests and what emotional feeling suggests, logic is the probable winner.  They strongly attempt to control emotion in both language and action, in keeping with the preference for logical solutions.

The greatest intellectual strength is in Strategy–long range planning within systems.  Second to this is Diplomacy–which for them is probably the route to getting others to accept your plans!

In education, career choice and outside activities, scientific and technological interests dominate.  Even where career interests focus on human behavior the interest is in understanding systems that govern it and ways that these might be improved.

In Orientation, they are pragmatic in relating to the present, skeptical (but not long-range pessimistic) in relating to the future, and relativistic (perhaps) about the past.  Their place is always where two or more things intersect, opening up new ideas and possibilities, and their time is the Interval or segment of time of any event.

They value being calm, trust reason, long for achievement, seek knowledge, prize deference and aspire to be true wizards.

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Question one:  Assuming human life began in parts of Africa, and gradually migrated northward, would NTs be likely to migrate to far northern and less hospitable climates?   One of the early questions that I asked about a world full of only SPs was whether northern Europe, Russia, northern Asia be populated as they are today.  I concluded that SPs would be more likely to stay where the living was easy and the climate was pleasant, so wouldn’t go toward less comfortable parts of the world unless population pressures forced it.   When discussing SJs and NFs I assumed that they might go to more difficult living areas if population pressures pushed them there, but would not have temperament-related urges to do so.  (Both SPs and NFs might have curiosity about new places, but I can’t see SPs moving permanently to locations where food or shelter were a serious problem.  NFs might have a lot of intellectual curiosity, but with a pure NF population I think their answer to proposing a  permanent migration might be a little like proposing to go to Mars in our world (all very interesting, but resources can be so much better spent on our children, our ailing and elderly).  But NTs?  Their curiosity and desire to explore would not be blocked by emotional arguments.  On the contrary they might argue that new forms of food might be found, new medicines found etc. and more generally, it is always better to know more about the unknown–and, besides all that, it would be very interesting. Continue reading →

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Temperament: Describing Keirsey’s Rationals (NTs)

Posted on March 2, 2012 by INTJ

This week, we look at Keirsey’s description for  NT Rationals.  In previous weeks we have looked at his temperament descriptions for Artisans (SPs), Guardians (SJs) and Idealists (NFs) and then asked what the world would be like if everyone the same temperament and and that group ran the world.  For example, what if every human, from the beginning was an SP, and therefore, SPs ran the world, how different would it be from the world we know?  Obviously, it has never happened, but it is interesting to think about.  Each of these descriptions is taken from Keirsey’s book Please Understand Me II, and in each case I have tried to be faithful to Keirsey’s views.

Rationals–Abstract Utilitarians.  Rationals share abstract language with the Idealists, but tend to use it very differently.  Keirsey notes that “Like the NFs, the NTs choose the imaginative, conceptual or inferential things to speak of over the the observational, perceptual or experiential.”  More simply they are fascinated with ideas and theories, far more than with ongoing, everyday events, and that is what they mainly talk about.  The two temperaments diverge greatly, however in the ways that they do this.  As we noted in describing the NFs, Keirsey sees them as moving quickly from a few facts or particulars to “sweeping generalizations”.  NTs, on the other hand are very careful in drawing conclusions.  They are “unusually exacting about definitions” and are much more likely to say that something is possible, likely, or even probable, than to just leap to the conclusion that it is absolutely true, as NFs might.   Similarly, their descriptions are much less colorful.  Where the NF might describe something as glorious, or devastating, the NT might say that the same conclusion is  encouraging, or unfortunate in outcome.

With the SP, the NT shares the Utilitarian approach to life, in being much more interested in what works than in how their actions might be seen by others.  As Keirsey puts it “Not that rationals prefer to be immoral, illegal or illegitimate…they do not refuse to cooperate with their social groups, but… they see pleasing others and obeying rules as secondary considerations…” Continue reading →

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Temperament: What if Keirsey’s Idealists (NFs) really did rule the world?

Posted on February 23, 2012 by INTJ

Our issue of the day is asking what the world would be like if Keirsey’s NF Idealists truly ruled it.  In last week’s blog I did my best to describe Keirsey’s NF Idealists on his terms.  Bear in mind as you read this that I am assuming in order to keep it simple, that there is no important effect of Extraversion/Introversion or of Sensing/Perceiving.  That could not be true in the real world but adding those in would complicate this thought experiment beyond any reasonable bounds.  A second assumption is that these NFs are purely that.  They would answer all N/S questions in the direction of N (Intuition), and all F/T questions in the direction of F (Feeling).  This is possible, as I have seen such answers on our own Harkey-Jourgensen scale, but it certainly would be rare in the real world.  Below is last week’s summary of this Idealist description.

 IN SUMMARY:  The NF Idealist and Abstract Cooperator is abstract in word, in        language, and in a passion for the future.  If a person could be said to be abstract in deed, also, this would be the model.  They are passionate communitarians, caring more for the needs and feelings of every individual than for any hard fought group decision.h.  Whether it is the best decision is less important than whether it is the decision that promotes consensus and minimizes disharmony.  Anger and conflict are deeply painful and avoided at almost all costs.  According to Keirsey, their greatest intellectual strength is Diplomacy with Strategy as a close second.

NF interests focus on people with positions in teaching, counseling and mentoring very common.  Related to this they are often excellent in personnel positions, in hiring, training, and skills development.  Others find their finest roles as activists in human rights and related political social areas.  Careers in commerce or science are relatively infrequent. College majors are generally in the humanities and social sciences, though art also is of interest.

Their self-image is built on genuinely being a caring and benevolent person.  It is nurtured both by the bonds they feel with others and the kindesses they extend to others and by the relfection of this in how they are treated by others

In the present they are oriented toward ways to improve life for self and others, and the future is where they see these coming to fruition, believing always that better things are coming.  Their special place is on the pathway to wisdom, understanding and a better future.  With this, their time is always tomorrow.

They value enthusiasm as a daily way of being, trust their own intuition, especially about other people, yearn for romance as “idealized love”, and passionately seek identity as an understanding of the self–generally a life-time quest.  Very similar to this is their search for the ultimate meaning of life.  They most prize  being really seen (recognized) by another as the unique individual that they see in themselves, and aspire to be a true sage, ever questing after knowledge and understanding.

In the first scenario, here, I am assuming that all human beings on planet earth are NFs as they have been described above, and that this has been true from the beginning of human life.  I will follow the same set of questions used for SPs and SJs.

What would education and commerce be like.  That is really two questions–one easy and one hard.  I would think that the equivalent of our K-12 schooling would be very loose and free, with much emphasis on learning at your own pace, and exploring the things that interest you.  I would expect a great deal of emphasis on creativity, and learning about ideas of all sorts. What I am suggesting was perhaps best described by A. S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill, who “believed that the happiness of the child should be the paramount consideration in decisions about the child’s upbringing, and that this happiness grew from a sense of personal freedom. He felt that deprivation of this sense of freedom during childhood, and the consequent unhappiness experienced by the repressed child, was responsible for many of the psychological disorders of adulthood”.* Continue reading →

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