SYDNEY It's not your fault your daughter has a flaming temper, gets into fights at school and throws things when she doesn't get her own way.
It's all to do with temperament and temperament is fixed at birth rather than a result of a child's upbringing.
That's the major finding of a landmark study in Australia that involved 2,500 families and looked at the behavioral patterns of children over a 17-year period.
Frank Oberklaid and Margot Prior, psychologists at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, said the results of their study debunk the idea that bad kids were brought up to be that way.
"It challenges the idea that all children should be treated the same," said Oberklaid.
"It was felt that the way kids turned out was very much a function of the way they were brought up and we wanted to challenge that.
We felt there were individual differences in children that were very important".
Depending on temperament defined by one psychologist as the lens through which a child experiences the environment some children will be easy to bring up and some won't.
And it's not hard to pick the toddlers that will turn into teenage monsters because, according to the researchers, "the attributes we see from a very early age just continue and endure".
But don't despair the crucial finding that individual differences in children are the major determinants of behavior only underlines the need for individual attention.
Said Oberklaid: "The message for parents is that parenting needs to be flexible that children differ one from another, that these differences are measurable and that there does need to be flexibility and variability in the way that we approach children".
(DPA)