"Terrible twos" due more to parenting
than to child's temperament

Jay Belsky, distinguished professor of human development and family studies, Sharon Woodworth, postdoctoral fellow, and Keith Crnic, professor of psychology, draw that conclusion from their study of 69 central Pennsylvania families rearing first-born sons.

The study, which is continuing as the children approach school age, suggests that how parents manage the period of budding individuality during years two and three makes a difference in how easy or difficult these children turn out to be later on.

Mothers, fathers and children in the study were observed interacting in their homes during two separate visits when the boys were 15, 21, 27 and 33 months old. The researchers looked for specific infant, parent and family characteristics or attributes to try to determine why some families had trouble during the second and third year of a child's life while others do not.

They found that children's own temperaments were not reliable predictors of troubled interactions. For example, babies who were negative and cried more often at one year of age did not more frequently turn into "terrible twos."

More than 20 hours of daycare in the first year of life, however, were found to increase the probability that a vulnerable family would have trouble managing its toddler. Daycare was not found to be troubling in families that had few vulnerabilities in terms of infant, parent and family attributes.

Belsky notes, "I really think that the 'terrible twos' is a case of a few bad apples giving the barrel a bad name. Most two- and three-year-olds are not 'terrible' in the popular sense of the term."