If you're tearing your hair out over your difficult baby who can't sleep or settle down, here's one piece of reassuring news: They are likely to do just as well in school as those babies your annoying friends have who sleep, love the world and are generally happy.

That is, if you hold up your end of the bargain.

According to a study by Ann Dopkins Stright, a professor of education at Indiana University, difficult babies who received "excellent" parenting from their mothers (of course, it's always the mothers on the line, dads get a pass) did just as well in first grade as easy babies who recieved the same level of parenting, as assessed by their first grade teachers.

As someone who had an easy baby and, as we prepare for #2, is very aware of the idea  "what goes around comes around" I eagerly searched the article for a definition of "excellent" parenting.  I mean, I think I am pretty good, but excellent? Unfortunately the article only said that researchers made particular note of two things: warmth and age-appropriate control.

In many ways, it's the very personality traits that make them challenging that also help them respond to their mothers.

"The sensitivity that makes these babies so difficult also may make them much more responsive to the good parenting," Stright said. Conversely, Stright said poor parenting may be more harmful to difficult babies. "The children who did the worst in first grade were the difficult babies who had poor parenting," she said.