Blog 9

Overall I thought that this chapter was very interesting; however, the part that I found most interesting was the section about temperament and the model that Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess developed having to do with infant temperament.  There were a few reasons that I thought that this research was interesting, the first being that I am a nanny for twins that are currently nine months old, but I have been with them since birth.  Reading about the different categories is interesting because I can place the twins into the easy childhood category, and being able to relate what I read to my daily routine is very interesting to me.  I also thought that is was interesting because it talked about how from knowing what the child's temperament is as an infant you can help people predict how the child will behave later in life and in certain situations like entering school.  the example the book used states, "children showing the 'difficult' pattern in infancy were at greater risk than the other groups for adjustment problems in early and middle childhood...The 'easy' infants tended to show fewer of these difficulties later in development" (337).