Attachment (nurture) + Temperament (nature) = Personality. Attachment, simply put, is what keeps babies alive when they are within their first few years of life. There are different categories of attachment styles: insecure attachment, secure attachment, resistance attachment, and disorganized attachment. Personality is defined as characteristic ways that we interact with the environment and other people.

The goal of this write-up is to showcase an understanding that differences in culture and environment lead to differences in attachment and temperament as a child grows up ( the flower symbolizes the child in our graphic art). When a baby is firstborn, they are given a “starting kit” and have a genetic baseline that is inherited from their biological parents. As they grow up, culture interacts with their genetics to help them adapt to the environment that they live in. Plainly stated, no parenting style is better than another. The job of a parent is to prepare the child for the environment they live in. With these tips, we are applying psychological concepts on an individual level, and taking into account cultural differences. Our society as a whole is extremely diverse, especially in recent years. Mental health workers should have the basic knowledge of cultural differences, how to work with those differences, and specifically for our targeted audience, how to work with those differences in therapy. This is because when it comes to working with kids, everything including culture comes into play. We are trying to apply psychological concepts on an individual level and taking into account cultural differences.

A mix of nature and nurture is what develops a child’s personality and identity. A child is given their genes by their parents and a home, and nourishment, but the child is also given something outside of the parents, a culture. It is inescapable. Culture dictates the social rules, customs, traditions, food, and language that a group of people lives by. It surrounds a child and the child needs this structure for their development.

In Keil’s Developmental Psychology: The Growth of Mind and Behavior he presents a way of looking at culture called the Bio- Ecological Systems Theory. The child and its inner dialogue is the first level, called the Micro-system. Parenting is the second level, with the most contact with the child, this is called the Meso-system; other parts of this system are places that the child spends a lot of their time, like the classroom, neighborhood park, or daycare. Next, there is the Exo- system, which in American culture could be extended family, friends, legal services, and media. The Macro-system consists of the laws, culture, subculture, and social class. The chrono-system holds the idea that the environment changes over time, for example, the pandemic is part of this chrono-system. And finally, the Biological system is the part of the system that influences a person and their identity that comes with the child's genes. A child could be born Biologically female and that will, in our culture, influence parts of how that person's life will end up (2020).

All of these things affect a child's sense of self, social, gender, race, and any other labels the individual takes on. These labels create their sense of identity. This process of development begins within 18 and 24 months of age and continues through a person's life (Diamond 2020). Because this concept for a person is constantly developing, parts of it are also constantly changing. Personality is a constant exploration. As a parent one is attempting to shape an independent human, we can do this by giving them the autonomy and support to let them explore all aspects of their identity (Gopnik 2016).

Our audience needs to understand that nature and especially nurture makes everyone and their cognitive, psychological, and social experience. It is very intricate as there are many influences on a person. The more a person knows about the differences in people the more they are able to sympathize with someone else and this is a quality we want to support in future physicians.

The first social relationship a child experiences is with their caregiver. Parents limit this experience based on their parenting style, which can vary depending on the level of warmth and control. Authoritative parenting has high warmth and control, in contrast with negligent which has low warmth and control. In the case of authoritarian, parents express low warmth and high control, contrary to permissive, which has high warmth and low control. There are more parenting styles, such as helicopter parenting, known for parents who overprotect and help their children with minimal tasks, and tiger mom, known for strict parenting where they expect children to follow a set path such as a career goal.

Parenting styles can either limit or encourage exploration in children. They also tend to vary depending on socioeconomic status and cultural background. Because of this, it can be more likely to see helicopter and tiger-mom parenting in societies that are struggling economically (Pinsker, 2019). If a child does not thrive, there would be more drastically negative consequences; therefore, parents raise their children the best way they know for the child to succeed. In the US, middle-class families are more likely to be authoritative, and lower class are more likely to be authoritarian (Keil, 2014). The effectiveness of nurturing is determined by numerous elements such as cultural and social expectations, economics, and the relationship between the parents and their child’s temperament. It is crucial to recognize parenting styles are diverse, but there are universal issues caregivers should avoid.

After a while, children experience more social interactions that will interact with their development. Friendships start to develop clearly in toddlerhood, and it teaches the act of reciprocity of social relationships (Keil, 2014). School systems can facilitate these social interactions. For example, children are more likely to get to know a classmate in a forest school than a traditional US school system.

The sociometric status, how liked the child is, can later impact personality development. For example, those considered more popular tend to have higher extraversion in the big 5 personality measure (Ilmarinen et al., 2019). Also, bigger social groups have been linked to higher agreeableness (Ilmarinen et al., 2019). From the beginning, the amount and quality of social interactions will help us develop certain personality traits. This represents the entanglement between individual baselines and exposure. If you are considered popular, you have more opportunities to practice your social skills, and if you have a larger group of friends, you can learn how to keep the flow in a social group.

It is crucial to consider the environment and social interactions of a child to understand their situation deeply. The way their parents raise them and other environmental factors plus their temperament will substantially define their behaviors and reactions. Looking at the individual and considering their background and needs will help address their concerns accordingly.

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Keil, F. (2014). Developmental Psychology: The Growth of Mind and Behavior. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY.

Pinsker, J. (2019). Why Swedes are chiller parents than Americans. The Atlantic Monthly. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/02/american-parents-scandinavian-different/582103/Diamond, A., & Ling, D. S. (2016). Conclusions about interventions, programs, and approaches for improving executive functions that appear justified and those that, despite much hype, do not. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 34-48.

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