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Parents often do not become believers in temperament until after the birth of their second child. Before this time, their child's behavior may be seen as a simple result of their upbringing,“a tribute to" or" the fault of" the parents. With the second child, management strategies that worked well with the first child may no longer be effective. Problems experienced with the first child (in feeding, sleeping, coping with strangers) may not exist with the second, but new problems may arise. Such experiences suggest strongly that" nature" as well as “nurture" influence child development, that children differ from each other from early in life, and that these differences have important implications for parent-child interaction. A number of these individual differences fall under the rubric of child temperament, which we define as individual differences in emotional, motor, and attentional reactivity to stimulation, and in patterns of behavioral and attentional self-regulation. The modern understanding that children make important contributions to their social interactions has two major roots. The first is temperament research initiated by Thomas, Chess, and colleagues in their pioneering New York Longitudinal Study (NYLS; Thomas, Chess, Birch, Hertzig, and Korn, 1963). The second is Bell's (1968) reconceptualization of socialization as a mutually interactive process, with both child and caregiver seeking to redirect, reduce, or augment the behavior of the other. These insights led to the recognition that children differ in such qualities as responsiveness to parental socialization strategies, capacity to control their emotional reactivity, and capacity to bring pleasure or distress …