ABSTRACT
I first became acquainted with the temperament research of Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess with their 1970 Scientific American article, “The Origin of Personality.” I went on to read their 1963 book, Behavioral Individuality in Early Childhood (Thomas, Chess, Birch, Hertzig, & Korn) and their 1968 book, Temperament and Behavior Disorders in Children (Thomas, Chess, & Birch), and have kept on reading their books with pleasure (Chess & Thomas, 1984; Thomas & Chess, 1977, 1980). In the early 1970s, I was interested in genetic influences in personality development, at a time, just 20 years ago, when it was literally dangerous to consider genetic influence in human development. Although times were changing, environmentalism continued to have a stranglehold on psychological, especially developmental, research. For this reason, it was comforting for me to hear Thomas and Chess, speaking as much from their vast experience as clinicians as from their research, boldly shout that the emperor of environmentalism has no clothes, or at the least is quite skimpily clad. They spoke out against what they called the mal de mère syndrome, in which all maladjustment was laid at the doorstep of the mother. They argued that parents reflect as much as they affect temperamental dispositions of their children in a dynamic process of interaction. In 1956, they had launched their New York Longitudinal Study, which, a decade later, provided strong support for their view that children are temperamentally different early in life and that these temperamental dimensions show increasing stability throughout the life course and increasing ability to predict later behavioral problems.
