Behavioral Problems and Their Prevention

Abstract

In this article we will review two broad areas of knowledge (individual differences and parenting) that are directly or indirectly related to behavioral problems in young children and one specific problem area (toilet training). INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES One of the major advances in preventive pediatrics over the last ten years has been the recognition of how individual differences in the behavior and temperament of children affect parents and parenting. Although most parents with more than one child have intuitively recognized that all children are not alike, it is only fairly recently that many of us, as physicians, have acknowledged the fact that difficult children are not necessarily the result of bad parenting. One of the most clinically useful ways of looking at individual differences has come from the research of Thomas and Chess. These investigators became interested in why, in many families, only one child would get into difficulty while the others were doing fine. Preliminary studies strongly suggested that environmental variables alone could not account for the range of variation in behavior seen within a single family context. These observations led to a formal research project in which 136 children were followed from 3 months of age into adolesence. The study focused on how these babies differed from one another in the earliest months of life and the implications of these differences for the parents taking care of these infants.