What percentage of children are classified as having a difficult temperament?

• A. Approximately 10%.
• B. Approximately 25%.
• C. Approximately 40%.
• D. Approximately 60%.

Answer: (A)

Understanding temperament helps explain why some infants show more challenging, demanding patterns and how common that pattern is in the population. In the classic framework of infant temperament, children are grouped into categories like easy, difficult, and slow-to-warm-up. The number fitting the difficult pattern is relatively small. Research by Thomas and Chess showed about 40% are easy, around 15% are slow-to-warm-up, and roughly 10% display a difficult temperament, with the rest falling into other or mixed patterns. So the best choice is that approximately one in ten children have a difficult temperament. If we consider the other options, they would imply a much larger portion of children with difficult traits, which isn’t supported by this well-established distribution.