Discovering Your Child's Personality Type

Many experts agree that the key to great parenting isn't designing and maintaining a fixed set of rules that should work for every child (spare the rod, spoil the child-style parenting). Instead great parenting relies on learning what works best for each individual child and tailoring your parenting style to that child. What works great for one child will cause a lot of problems for another. A critical element of tailoring your parenting style to your child is knowing you child's personality type.

The Enneagram personality-typing system provides a great way to define and explore your child's personality. Discovering an adult's personality type can be simple. There are nine basic types and all people clearly fit within one, usually with a secondary type or "wing." Many books have been written about how to type workmates or love partners to help understand them and deal with their personalities. If you're interested in learning about the Enneagram, there are many resources available on the Internet.

Typing a very young child can be challenging. For one thing, a child may "try on" different personalities as they develop. Generally a child will settle on a primary personality type by two or three years of age. Sometimes sooner. Sometimes you'll notice certain behaviors that clearly belong to one personality type and others that could belong to any. The challenge for a parent is to assess which behaviors are unique to each type. The list below may help you begin to type your child.

1. Type one children want to do things perfectly so they can be accepted.
   
2. Type two children want to help you so their needs will be met indirectly.
   
3. Type three children want to been seen as successful to get approval.
   
4. Type four children want to be creative and understand self to find connection.
   
5. Type five children want to understand the world to avoid being overwhelmed.
   
6. Type six children want to feel secure and accepted to avoid feeling abandoned.
   
7. Type seven children want to experience as much as possible to avoid feeling deprived.
   
8. Type eight children want to be self-sufficient to avoid being taken advantage of.
   
9. Type nine children want to be calm and accommodating to feel connected.

Parent Softworks provides a simple, easy-to-use way to discover your child's personality type and offers advice and guidance based on the Enneagram. You don't need to know anything about the Enneagram to use Parent Softworks to its fullest. All the personality-typing mechanisms have been taken care of behind the scenes.

But Parent Softworks isn't only a personality test. You get a ton of tools for tracking your child's important information, keeping memories, printing an ID or one of several handy forms and a whole lot more to make your parenting job easier. Go back to the Parent Softworks page to learn more about this wonderful new program.