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"Difficult to Raise" — What Temperament Research Actually Means

By Leon MoriguchiPublished May 15, 2026Updated May 18, 20265 min read日本語版あり
Audience
Parents who have felt, at some point, that their child is "hard to parent"

TL;DR

  • ·Temperament — stable individual differences present from birth — is not the same as fate: Thomas and Chess found that whether a "difficult" temperament produces behavioral problems depends not on the temperament itself but on how well it fits the child's environment
  • ·Jerome Kagan's longitudinal research showed that high-reactive infants do not inevitably become highly inhibited toddlers — the caregiving environment moderates how temperament is expressed, and forcing correction of "shyness" tends to worsen the outcomes parents are trying to change
  • ·The practical implication of the goodness-of-fit model is that before trying to change the child, it's worth asking whether the environment can be adjusted to reduce the mismatch

Contents

  1. Lead
  2. The New York Longitudinal Study
  3. Temperament Is Not Fate
  4. Kagan's Behavioral Inhibition Research
  5. Rothbart's Three-Dimension Model
  6. What Parents Can Do
  7. Summary
  8. References

Lead

A lot of parents have, at some point, thought: "My child is difficult to raise." Won't stop crying. Can't adapt to new places. Mood swings are unpredictable. Nothing seems to work.

These experiences are more likely to reflect the child's inborn temperament than any failure of parenting. The trouble is that "hard to raise" tends to slide toward "there is a hard-to-raise child" — a fixed attribute attached to the child. What temperament research has consistently found instead is that "hard to raise" is not a static property of the child but a dynamic phenomenon arising from the combination of child and environment.

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