The goodness of fit is when caregivers recognize their child’s temperament and work with it in order to raise a well-adjusted child.
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No discussion of temperament-based intervention would be complete without acknowledging the pioneering work of Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas. As practicing psychiatrists in the early 1950s, Chess and Thomas (1984) were struck by the amount of blame mothers received for their children’s misbehavior. Contrary to behaviorist and psychoanalytic theories which dominated the psychology field at the time, Chess and Thomas observed that children, beginning in infancy, exhibited what they originally referred to as primary reaction patterns. In 1956, Chess and Thomas and their colleagues began the New York Longitudinal Study (NYLS) to explore how temperament, as they later called the construct, influenced the adjustment of the 138 infants who comprised their sample (Chess, Thomas, Rutter, & Birch, 1963). The results of the study provided a groundbreaking reinterpretation of human development. Although parenting skills were important contributors to children’s later adjustment, the temperament of the child also played a significant role. Some children were temperamentally easy and adjusted quickly to the changes encountered in their daily lives. Others had temperaments that Chess and Thomas characterized as “difficult.” They exhibited negative reactions to even minor events. Still other children were initially slow to warm, demonstrating unease when encountering new people or situations.
Chess and Thomas were among the first researchers to credit children as contributors to their own development—not as passive recipients of caregiving. They described how bi-directional transactions between children and their parents influenced each other’s behavior. The interaction between the child’s temperament and the environment was conceptualized within a “goodness of fit” framework. According to Chess and Thomas (1999, pp. 3) “goodness of fit results when the properties of the environment and its expectations and demands are in accord with the organism’s own capacities, characteristics, and style of behaving.” If there is a match between an individual’s temperament and the environment, optimal development can be achieved. Conversely, poorness of fit leads to maladaptative functioning. They also asserted that when assessing goodness of fit, consideration must be given to the values and demands of an individual’s culture and socioeconomic group.
The goodness of fit model continues to influence temperament-based intervention today. It provides practitioners with a framework for assessing individuals within their specific environmental context. Such an approach is both intuitively appealing and practical for developing strategies to resolve temperament/environment mismatches. Empirically demonstrating the efficacy of such interventions, however, is complicated by its highly individualized approach. Undaunted, practitioners and researchers have made progress over the last decade in demonstrating its utility and efficacy.
Apart from the caregivers roles that affect the development of a child, the child's temperament is also a great factor that determines how the child will adapt to his environment and issues that confront him in his early developmental stages. Their are children who quickly adapt to their surroundings while others will remain apprehensive of things that they encounter often for longer.