The minute your baby is born, you begin to wonder what they will be like when they grow up? What kind of personality will they have? Will you be able to influence how they turn out?

Psychiatrists have defined 4 main categories of personality types using a clinically recognized system of character evaluation.

These 4 types are:

• A novelty seeking personality is characterized by impulsive actions.
• A harm avoidance personality is characterized by pessimism and shyness.
• A reward dependence personality is prone to addiction.
• A persistence type personality tends to be hard-working and a perfectionist.

There’s a question on personality that’s been keeping scientists busy for years now. Is personality due to nature or nurture? Well, these researchers from the US, UK and Italy seem to think they have found proof that it’s the former rather than the latter. They report that different personality types have different brain structures. For example, novelty-seeking types had a structurally bigger area of the brain known as the inferior part of the frontal lobe, whereas harm-avoidance types had significantly smaller volumes of tissue in the orbitofrontal area and the posterior occipital region.

It seems that personality depends on the anatomical structure of the brain, structure that you were born with. In other words, your personality was already determined at birth. This report can either give us comfort or despair about our own personality.

• Comfort – because it’s not something that we do but something that we are.
• Despair – because it’s something that we are and therefore cannot be changed.

But what about the personality of our children? Can we still do something about it? What about our baby having a brain scan to determine his or her future personality? The researchers think this isn’t actually such a bad idea because once you know what to expect, you can alter the environment to minimize the risk.

I personally find it a bit scary. What if I find out that  my baby is predisposed to become a pessimistic introvert, a compulsive workaholic or worse a drug addict? How would affect the mother-child relationship?

On the other hand, I still believe strongly in the power of nurture, e.g. the family environment. I also believe that these so-called personality types are rather artificial categorizations. Most people I know, including myself, exhibit some characteristics from each of the 4 types. No, I’d rather see my children’s personalities unfold as they grow. I’d rather that they grow without expectations, preconceptions and predispositions. Surprise me, my darlings.

So what do you think? Want to look into your baby’s brain?

After I read Amy’s post about different personality types among siblings, I started thinking about the personalities my two kiddos have. My daughter and son have their similarities but they also have big differences too. While my daughter will play dress up my son can’t stand the stuff. My son is happy to wrestle and scream all day long, but my daughter can only take that for so long before she wants to do something else. In other words, they each have their own preferences and that’s fine with me because it keeps things interesting around the house.

Here is the thing about baby personalities that you may not realize: Your baby may wind up with a personality that clashes with your own. I don’t mean this in a bad way, as though the personalities clashing is a sure-fire way to destroy the baby-parent bond. What I mean is that you should brace yourself to one day look at your child and think to yourself, “How in the world did you form this personality?”

Here is an example. I like to have quiet alone time once in a while and love to have an afternoon nap every day. Of course, this is in an ideal world and the vast majority of the time I don’t get quiet time or a nap. Why? My daughter will not nap and can go go go without stopping all day long. She’s happy as can be as long as she has something to do, and there is hardly ever a time when she decides to go off and do something on her own without first being prompted to do so by her exhausted parents.

The other day I was particularly exhausted. My son had gone down for his nap and I was hoping to take a little rest. My daughter comes up to me.

Her: “Mommy, let’s pretend I’m a princess and you’re the queen and we’re going to the ball.”

Me: “Sweetie, Mommy needs to take a rest. It’s been a long day.”

Her: “But Mommy, play pretend with me. Hey, can we make some Jell-O? I really want to make some Jello-O.”

It was then that I looked at her and thought to myself, “Have I taught you nothing about how to relax?”

The fact is that she just doesn’t need little bits of rest throughout the day. She doesn’t need quiet time like the rest of us. She’s a rarity among humans: She keeps going until bedtime, and doesn’t pause until then…and she’s happy to do so.

I’m happy that she has her very own personality, but it still surprises me that in a house full of people who like to relax she would rather go go go.