Abstract
The past two decades have seen a resurgence of interest in a very old topic in psychology: individual differences in temperament. The interest reflects a reassessment of the child’s role in early parent-child interaction (Bell, 1968; Lewis and Rosenblum, 1974). Socialization is no longer seen as a unilateral process in which children, initially alike, are shaped into different human beings through the reinforcements of their parents and teachers. Instead, children are seen as active social agents from the very first, influencing others as they are influenced. One effect of this reassessment has been an increasing concern with individual differences in children. We are asking the questions: what are the dimensions of variability in infants? How do parental treatments interact with child differences in social development? Is it possible that there may be no single “right way” to bring up children, but that our child-rearing should be influenced by the characteristics of the individual child?
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Rothbart, M.K., Derryberry, D. (1981). Theoretical Issues in Temperament. In: Lewis, M., Taft, L.T. (eds) Developmental Disabilities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-6314-9_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-6314-9_23
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