Moving Against the World: Life-Course Patterns of Explosive Children

Do ill-tempered children become ill-tempered adults? What are the life-course consequences of such an explosive interactional style? What processes can account for the persistence of maladaptive behavior across time and circumstance? To answer these questions, this study used data from the Berkeley Guidance Study (Macfarlane, Allen, & Honzik, 1954) to identify children with a pattern of temper tantrums in late childhood (ages 8-10) and to trace the continuities and consequences of this behavioral style across the subsequent 30 years of their lives. Life-course continuities in this behavioral style were found for both sexes. Men with histories of childhood tantrums experienced downward occupational mobility, erratic work lives, and were likely to divorce. Women with such histories married men with lower occupational status, were likely to divorce, and became ill-tempered mothers. It is proposed that maladaptive behaviors are sustained through the progressive accumulation of their own consequences (cumulative continuity) and by evoking maintaining responses from others during reciprocal social interaction (interactional continuity). The need to delay gratification, control impulses, and modulate emotional expression is the earliest and most ubiquitous demand that society places on the developing child, and success at many life tasks depends critically on the individual's mastery of such ego control. In this article, we looked back at the life histories of children who were failing to achieve such mastery, who, at age 10, were still reacting to childhood frustration and adult authority with explosive temper tantrums. We sought to discover whether such ill-tempered children become ill-tempered adults and, if they do, what the causes and consequences of such continuity are. The continuity of maladaptive behavior has long been recognized as a challenge to psychological theory. If behavior is largely sustained by its consequences, then adaptive behaviors should show continuity almost by definition. (Research confirms that it is the adaptive or "ego resilient" individual whose personality displays the strongest continuity across the life course [Block, 1971].) But why should maladaptive behaviors persist? What are the processes that sustain them across time and circumstance?