Openness in Childhood

Long before it can be measured as a personality trait, openness shows up in a child as a particular hunger for the new. The high-openness child is the one absorbed in invented worlds, asking the relentless why behind every answer, drawn to the unfamiliar object on the shelf rather than the familiar one in hand. Rothbart's temperament research locates the seedbed here in approach and perceptual sensitivity, but openness is the Big Five trait that crystallises latest and is hardest to read in the early years, because so much of it rides on cognitive and verbal development that is still underway. What looks like openness in a five-year-old is partly imagination, partly intelligence, partly a nervous system tuned toward stimulation rather than away from it.

In the felt experience of the child, the world is more vivid and more porous. Stories land harder, music and colour and texture register more strongly, and the boundary between the real and the imagined stays usefully thin — the high-openness child plays pretend longer and more elaborately than peers, building worlds that are genuine cognitive workshops rather than mere escapism. Socially this can cut both ways: such children often delight adults with their inventiveness while occasionally puzzling more concrete classmates, and they can find the literal, sequential demands of early schooling a poor fit for a mind that prefers to wander and connect.

The developmental point that matters here is plasticity. Roberts and DelVecchio's meta-analysis established that rank-order stability is at its lowest in childhood, so a child's standing on openness is real but unusually movable — an environment rich in books, questions, and permission to imagine can amplify it, while a narrow or anxious one can press it flat. Soto's work tracing the Big Five across the lifespan finds the trait becoming reliably measurable only as children move through the school years and acquire the language to report an inner life. Childhood openness is therefore better understood as a tendency being shaped than a trait already set.

It is worth saying that high openness in a child is not the same as giftedness, though the two are often confused. A child can be intensely curious and imaginative without being academically advanced, and can be very bright without being especially open. What openness names is the orientation toward experience itself — the pull toward the strange, the aesthetic, the not-yet-understood — and in childhood that orientation is best protected not by enrichment for its own sake but by an adult willing to follow the child's questions wherever they lead, treating the wandering mind as a resource rather than a problem to be corrected.

Patterns to recognise

• ◈The temperamental precursors are curiosity, imagination, and perceptual sensitivity (Rothbart)
• ◈Openness is the Big Five trait that crystallises latest — much of it rides on developing language and cognition
• ◈The boundary between real and imagined stays usefully thin — elaborate pretend play is cognitive work
• ◈Rank-order stability is lowest in childhood, so early openness is especially shapeable (Roberts & DelVecchio)

Reflection questions

The developmental context

The Big Five are not born fully formed; in childhood they exist as temperament — the early, partly heritable styles of reactivity and self-regulation that Mary Rothbart and Jerome Kagan mapped before personality language quite applies. Effortful control foreshadows conscientiousness, surgency foreshadows extraversion, and negative affectivity foreshadows neuroticism. Roberts and DelVecchio's meta-analysis found that rank-order stability is lowest in childhood and climbs steadily with age, so a child's standing on a trait is real but more movable than it will ever be again.

The Big Five emerged from the lexical tradition and were given their modern measurement form by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae’s NEO-PI-R, with the lifespan picture filled in by Brent Roberts, Daniel Mroczek, Christopher Soto and colleagues. Read this page as one developmental lens, not a verdict: each trait is a continuum rather than a category, mean levels shift in patterned ways across the lifespan, and a person’s standing describes a tendency relative to others rather than a fixed type.