The book ‘Know Your Parenting Personality’ by Janet Levine details nine personalities based on Enneagram (E-model) theory. The Greek word ‘ennea’ means ‘nine’ and ‘gram’ means ‘graph or model’.
Know Your Parenting Personality
Understanding these personalities can guide you to become a better parent. Some of the desired goals are to establish a strong connection with your child, to change self-defeating behavior patterns and to deepen the communication with your child.
The nine personalities explained in simple and straightforward language are:
- The helper
- The organizer
- The dreamer
- The observer
- The questioner
- The entertainer
- The protector
- The peacekeeper
- The moralizer
My parenting personality
After going through the nine personalities, I identified myself to fall under ‘The observer’ parent. I learnt that my positive characteristics are the following:
- Rationality
- Calmness and balance
- Objectivity
- Creative synthesizing of ideas
- Big picture thinking
- Predictability
- Non-judging
- Restraint
The negatives of being an ‘Observer’ parent are:
- Requires privacy, guards time and energy
- Draws back from personal interactions
- Secrecy, overvalues independence
- Prefers non-engagement in emotions
- Tendency to be minimalistic in the physical world
- Lacks spontaneity, emphasizes controlling emotions
- Overvalues the self, takes a detached, observing stance
- Compartmentalizes, keeps family, work, other areas of life separate
- Non-communicative, interactions can be problematic
The book also describes strategies to overcome the shortcomings of each personality. For myself, I need to take the following actions:
- Show my emotions
- Practice role-model spontaneity for the children
- Trust myself to do the right thing
- Allocate more time to handle conflict
- Put more effort to share myself with my family
- Be more aware of my needs for energy management
- Manage my big-picture thinking
- Practice social skills
Once you have finished the book, you would have gained the essential knowledge about your personality type and have a deeper understanding on your parenting strategy. If you have patiently gone through the material, you would have a better sense of self-awareness that will help you to become a better parent.
If you have a strong desire and sense of purpose to improve your parenting skills then I recommend you to pick up the book as soon as possible and start on the journey for yourself.