Among the vast array of parenting information currently available in books, magazines and on the Internet, it’s refreshing to read a book offering a roadmap for helping parents reflect on how to adapt to each of their children’s individual personalities. Take a look at Great Parenting Skills for Navigating Your Kid’s Personality. (Note the clever word play on GPS.) The Canadian authors, coach/facilitator Kate Jones and educator Wayne Jones, provide a readable and positive approach for understanding different personality styles of parents and children. Particularly, they remind us to step into another’s shoes before acting. The authors share their knowledge, experience and parent-child examples developed through years of presenting parenting workshops on the four temperaments, sometimes known as the four colors of personality.
The Jones authors recommend to parents:
“Using your knowledge of your child’s particular colour preference, you are in the unique position of possibly being the one to introduce them to their inborn abilities, and to help them develop these talents over their growing years in a positive way. . . . This, in turn, will raise their self-esteem and prepare them to face their world with confidence, with assurance, and a belief that the can succeed.”
(Great Parenting Skills for Navigating Your Kid’s Personality, page 39)
What’s the Difference Between Temperament and Personality?
Temperament refers to a set of inborn traits that determine how a person approaches the world. While temperament is not learned, parents can nurture a child’s positive traits as he/she grows. Personality builds upon temperament, develops over time and is effected by social and educational experiences, as well as life challenges. Personality is expressed as characteristic patterns of behaviors, feelings and attitudes.
Great Parenting Skills offers a roadmap for a proactive approach for parents to understand and work with, rather than against, each child’s individual personality style. One of the enticements to read this book is in Chapter 1, the short Personality Dimensions® quiz which the reader is invited to take to reflect on his/her own natural tendencies in various life situations. The idea for parents is that understanding your own style, and recognizing the styles of other people, will help parents respond more sensitively to their children, co-parents, and co-workers. The quiz is a brief, 10-item tool with no right answers, which asks each person’s preferences in such areas as communication, relationships, learning environments, and group situations. Self-scoring sorts the responses across 4 personality dimensions, and may reveal that you have a blend of the 4 personality styles.
The tool is based on Carl Jung’s psychological theory of personality types. Although based on the same 4 types, it is a much simpler tool than the Myers-Briggs assessment which is broken out into 16 subtypes, and is commonly used in the workplace for hiring and to facilitate employee and customer relations.
Personality Styles: 4 Colors
The Joneses label 4 distinct personality styles as: 1) Organized Golds, 2) Authentic Blues, 3) Resourceful Oranges, and 4) Inquiring Greens. Using colorful, jargon-free terms, they illustrate the tendencies of 4 children characterized by each of the personalities as they walk through an imaginary trip to Disney World. As readers, we view the world through each of the 4 children’s eyes, discovering what each one values, what makes each feel good, and what makes each feel successful. In addition to the 4 personality dimensions, the authors also devote a chapter to another Introvert-Extrovert aspect of personality, which they fondly name the “Innies-Outies”, based on where people derive their energy. This may be one of the first aspects parents notice about their children’s personalities during infancy. If a parent and child are similar in personality, it can feel like a perfect match between parent and child during their interactions. If they are opposites, it could push a parent and child to the edge of family disaster, unless the parent understands and adapts to his/her child’s needs.
The intriguing message from this book is the reminder that we all have personal tendencies, stemming from temperament and personality, which influence our behavior. However, just because we are born with or have learned these tendencies, it doesn’t mean they can’t be overridden. Sensitive parents who understand individual differences can learn to understand their own personal tendencies and adapt to and support the tendencies of their children, which will strengthen their parent-child relationships. This flexibility greatly eases the parenting journey and helps children learn to respect peoples’ personal differences.
How Observational Assessments Dance with Self-Report Assessments
This sounds like a perfect time to discuss how self-report and observational assessments can be a two-step dance to guide services. Using the Personality Dimensions®, the parent can sort out his/her own personal tendencies and those of his/her child to better understand their behaviors. When using an observational parent-child interaction assessment, like KIPS, a practitioner can capture a snapshot of the parent’s behavior, identifying their strengths and needs, during a brief parent-child play observation. By reflecting on the results of the 2 tools together, the parent and practitioner could devise goals for the parent to adapt to his/her child’s needs. Ongoing observational assessments could track progress in meeting these goals and provide insights for further improvement. For example, an Organized Gold Mom may prefer to use predictable routines when playing with Legos and to finish what’s started in a timely fashion. But her Inquiring Green Child may prefer the excitement of dumping all the Legos out of the box, trying every combination of colored blocks he can devise, and creating the tallest tower ever built. With an observational assessment we would likely see the Mom’s need for improvement in the KIPS item, Promotes Exploration/Curiosity as she encourages building the same purple castle as yesterday and rushes her Child to finish up, not allowing sufficient time or opportunity to explore building variations. The personality assessment could lead to an understanding of why there’s a mismatch between Mom and Child behavior, and help Mom learn to allow more time for her Child to explore, while also offering new Lego discoveries.
GPS for Parenting
The point of Great Parenting Skills is to create a guide for how to enhance parent-child, grandparent-child and family relationships through understanding and navigating individual differences. Short-term, this will help parents and children get along better and build stronger relationships. Long-term, it will teach children to learn by example to appreciate and respond sensitively to individual differences in other people as they venture out to the world. For regular readers of the KIPS Blog, the GPS phrase may ring a bell. Last year we posted a blog titled Parenting Assessment as GPS: How and Why to Set Limits with Children. This book offers a worthy complement to the KIPS parenting assessment to guide the next steps after identifying individual parenting strengths and needs. Its theme resonates with the aims of the KIPS parenting assessment, to nurture insights and map a path to nurturing parenting. By observing and assessing each parent’s individual strengths and needs in parenting, then discussing why the parent and child behave as they do, you can work together with parents to develop meaningful goals to target the changes they would like to make to improve their parent-child interactions. Great Parenting Skills provides a tool for making those changes by offering a guide for how parents can understand their children’s individual personality styles and respond positively to them.