Question

The doctor describes the role that parents play in responding to their children. As she states in the clip, parents "are not going to change the temperament, what they can change is their own behaviors in response to it." What does the doctor mean by this statement? Explain the impact parents can have in how they choose to respond to their child's temperament. (220 word count)

Answer 1

The study of child development give insight into development and is divided into three categories broadly:

1. Physical: physical body changes including the skills gained such as gross-motor and fine-motor coordination

2. Cognitive (Social Emotional): processes children use to gain knowledge and includes language, thought, reasoning, and imagination.

3. Social Emotional: Social- learning to relate to other, emotional- feeling and expression of feelings. Part of this development: Trust, fear, confidence, pride, friendship, and humour

Why parents' change in behaviors response to temperament matters?

Children are best imitators, they learn emotions, behaviour and response to temperament from primary care caregivers (parents) later in life through teachers and peers. So it is utmost important how parent can either help child develop or leave child incapable of conscious situation appropriate emotional regulation for life.

Lessons from child neuropsychology

Emotional Regulation: A child is born with three primitive emotions: joy, anger, sadness. Later as children grow they develop fear, sense of self, shyness, surprise, elation, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride and more. Primitive emotions are controlled by brain stem, limbic system and hypothalamus. These gradually give over control to cerebral cortex as development happens with time.

Emotional capacities develop through the experience of being parented. It is parent who provides external regulation which becomes internalized.

Later (age 4 to 6) the Dorsal-lateral pre-frontal cortex develops allowing self-control which will have its foundation on what has been internalized.

Development of Empathy: This seems to develop very early in most children’s lives (at about 14 months). Empathy is about understanding other peoples thought’s. A few children in my experience seem to lack empathy as a developmental disorder. Sometimes this seems to occur for children with traumatic childhoods with experience of early violence, according to Dr Jonathan Reed it is rare and is more associated with the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which in turn is associated with a discrete network of brain processes involving face processing (fusiform gyrus, inferior occipital gyrus), emotion (amygdala, insula, ventral stratum and other structures) and with action perception (mirror system).

Looking at above brain development facts we know the importance of parent’s response to child will have on his/her life. As child is still learning , early in life he is not capable of having much control over how he reacts, and the responsibitlty to teach and also to watch self's response comes to parent.

1. One of the first and most important relationships children experience is with their parents or primary caregivers and the quality of this relationship has a significant effect on later social development
2. Factors that can contribute to an inability to develop age-appropriate social skills include everything from the amount of love and affection the child receives to the socio-economic status of the family
3. Children and parents share the same genes and therefore are likely to be somewhat alike to start with.
4. Children who are difficult are going to influence the way their parents react to them and as mature adults it is responsibility of parent to respond to difficult behaviour with intelligence and search for possible roots to these behavioural issues which can also be brain disorders, genetics, diet, family dynamics and stress, and then treating them accordingly.