Mom's Secret: Use Enneagram to Understand Your Child Better for Effective Communication (One to Three)

We all as parents know that children, even babies, have distinct personalities:

• Obedience vs. resistant
• Introvert vs. extrovert
• Fast learner vs. slow learner
• Adorable vs. weird (sometimes you may call them asshole)
• And so on…..

How can we be sure that our nurturing is well suited to our child? An enneagram is a powerful tool that helps us to understand the personalities and drives of our children's behaviors. But please noted to beware never try to pick a certain kind of personality trait or behavior to fit in a specific category as labeling. Mostly, the key driver is not obvious to identify. It took me a long journey to identify the key driver for myself. Humans are complicated creatures. The same behavior may derive from the different underlying drives. How to identify the underlying motivation drive is extremely difficult. Therefore, you can regard it as one of the resources references to widen your perspective angle to understand your child better and become a more effective parent.

Remarks: Enneagram is more complicated than it appears on the surface. If you're interested in this subject, suggest finding the expert for help.

1. The Perfectionist

Peter would do everything his parent tells him to do. If you make the rule of requiring him to finish his homework before watching TV, then he would follow your rule strictly. These children view the world should operate with an ideal framework of rules that people should follow. If the other people are not working on that same standards would trigger their anger to judge and criticize. The other side of the coin is that they might appear stubborn and lack of creative thinking. 

Key motivation:

Their drive is anger.  Want to be right, to reform and improve everything, to be consistent with their ideals, to justify themselves, to be beyond criticism so as not to be condemned by anyone.

Parenting Tips:

1. Provide clear guidelines and instructions so that they can easy to follow.
   
2. Criticism or arguments are useless to change their minds.  Use patience to explain with more information to tell your points instead.

2. The Giver

Susan is adorable as she knows quite well to do things that make other people feel warm and cozy.  She had been so sweet to write a few nice words on the cupcake wrapper or reserved the last big apple for mommy to eat.  These children would express their feeling by giving their love, helping others, and desire for others to respond to them. 

Key Motivation:

Their drive is love.  They want other people to like them and love them. Always advocating for love and believe that they know better than anyone else how to love you. 

Parenting Tips:

1. Cold response from parents would cut them deeply.
2. Avoid using shallow praise as they would regard as hypocritical behavior.  For example, when you receive a hand-drawn birthday card from the child, don’t just say it’s beautiful.  Your praise can be more concrete by saying the way she draws the hairstyle and outfit to depict your image on the card is so stylish that you love so much.​
3. Always appreciating their good intention instead of the actual works they had done.  When the child helps you with the chores, your praise can be related to her effort sharing your burden rather than to appreciate her cleaning work.

3. The Performer

Peter is hardworking who seems like always busy to do something.  He performs very well in school, get straight A in many subjects.  While the other children are playing hide and seek games, he gets more interest in playing certain types of games that can redeem gifts or can reward with value.  In the world of these children, everything is a matter of completing a task.  They aspire to find something to do on the condition that the work should have meaning.  Maturity is faster than other same-age babies as you might expect they can stand in 6 months period.  Winning in a competition is vital to them as it meant achievement.  They want to get attention and to impress others.

Key Motivation:

Their drive is completing the task.  Perform a role to complete tasks, to distinguish themselves from others, to have attention, to be admired, and to impress others.  

Parenting Tips:

1. The child is a conscientious self-starter without requiring to exert any pressure on them to do the work.
2.  Make a clear target for them to achieve.
3.  ​Praising them in public.  They always desire to have attention, especially from the person with authority such as parents and teachers. 

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If you're interested in continue exploring personality traits, key drivers, and parenting tips from Four to Nine, please stay tuned for the updated post next week.