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It's not easy to talk about your feelings when you're four weeks old. That's a shame, because from the moment we're born we have a lot to say. If parents knew how to respond, troubled babies might be a lot less likely to grow into troubled kids. For all the progress that science has made in unraveling the secrets of the child's brain, it's moms and grandmothers who have always had the right idea. A child with problems, they insist, makes no secret of it from the start, coming into the world timid, moody, jumpy or worse. Experts often dismiss such claims as nonsense at best, blame ducking at worst, but there may be more to it than that. A growing body of research shows that newborns do tip their emotional hand early on, giving parents a chance to take control of behavioral problems and maybe even prevent conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or depression from fully taking hold. Says Lawrence Diller, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco: "Using parenting techniques tailored to a child's personality can improve things dramatically for both parents and kids." The idea of revealing infant behavior is not new. In the 1950s, husband-and-wife psychiatric team Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas, both now 87, identified nine parameters of temperament—activity level, attention span, adaptability, intensity, distractibility, mood, sensory threshold, response to challenge and predictability of functions such as eating and sleeping—that emerge at about four weeks and indicate a lot about personality. "At one month, behavior starts to be discernible," says Chess today. "These differences define it." Half a century ago, that message didn't get through. Chess and Thomas were dismissed as "determinists"—a damning label in an era in which babies were seen as blank slates upon which parents could write any personality at all. But practitioners see new wisdom in the old findings. Using their methods as well as newer personality tests, behavioral scientists find that only 60% of babies have easy temperaments from birth. Most of the rest exhibit significant moodiness, defiance or other traits that place them in the so-called difficult category. Without intervention, 80% of these kids—mostly boys—will act out, becoming oppositional and hyperexcitable, and run a greater risk of developing ADHD. The remaining 20%—mostly girls—become withdrawn and run a greater risk of developing phobias, depression or compulsions. Clearly, not every baby in the difficult group deteriorates this way. One key is the parents. To be sure, if a child is apt to a clinical condition such as ADHD, even the most deft parenting won't avert the problem altogether—but it can improve things.
单选题1.As regards the idea a baby's mom and grandmother have of the baby, experts show_______.