Category Archives: Parenting

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Myers-Briggs #5: MIT

With my talk now officially less than two weeks away, I’m coming back to this topic. {wink}

The Most Important Thing about the Myers-Briggs tool (to me, obviously, I’m the one writing this) is the necessity of understanding and accepting our differences.  Especially when it comes to our children.

There is a quote I picked up some time ago, and tucked away in my noveling notes, because it fit one of my characters so well:

I don’t think the deepest hunger of the human heart is to have love for one’s self. Rather, it is to be loved. My goal is not to sit in a room or on a hillside and tell myself how much I love myself. My goal is to mean something to the people who mean the most to me.

My hunger is to have somebody big and powerful and important in my life say, “I love you,” and then I will have the confidence that I am loved. When that big and important and powerful person hurts me and humiliates me and beats me down, it creates the deepest and the most excruciating pain I can ever experience.

(From Pain and Pretending, p. 142; emphasis added)

The point is I don’t see the value in (directly) teaching anyone (our children included) to love themselves.  I think (especially for our children) our job instead is to communicate our high esteem and value for them as they were created. 

When they perceive that we value them, they will have a solid foundation to learn how to value themselves.  (This in contrast to having yet another “to-do” on their list that we don’t do– like going to school.)

Our tendency as human beings is to see where we’ve got it together, assume (not unreasonably) that this is the definition of “together” and try to guide other people to the truth we have discovered.

This is not necessarily bad, because we all can learn from one another.  Where it becomes harmful is when we don’t notice that we are shaping someone into our own image, rather than letting them grow as their differences would take them.

And this does not mean surrendering to the weaknesses of any type: this is where sensitivity and wisdom must combine.  Just because I know my ENFP daughter doesn’t inherenely or automatically “think things through” doesn’t mean I give her a pass to be loopy.  It means (ideally) I have more patience with her as I specifically coach her through this weak spot.

If I can emphasize anything about understanding your child (or any other person in your world, for that matter), get to know who they really are, and strengthen them to become the best version of that they can be.

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Parenting with M-B Insights

Young children can be divided into four groups, just as adults can, but because Children’s types are still developing the groups are designated only by dominant process: N, S, F or T.

Children whose dominant process is N tend to be very imaginative, seeing possibilities, thinking of the future, frequently storytellers and often lost in their own world.  They can be very focused on things others don’t notice, and still miss the obvious.  These are the kids who genuinely don’t notice they’re stepping on the only book left on the floor.

Children whose dominant process is S tend to be very grounded and practical children.  Their wants and delights are physical: bright colors or quiet spaces, building towers and watching how they fall. Their distractions and distresses, also lean to the physical: the cold, a stickiness, or stone in the shoe. They have a high attentiveness to the information gathered through their senses: tastes, textures, sounds sights and smells.

Children whose dominant process is F tend to be very aware relationally, either with regards to how their behavior affects others, or how others’ behavior affects them.  Compassion, people-pleasing and cries of unfair are all things that seem to show up “early” in these children.

Children whose dominant process is T tend to be very confident.  They know what they want and frequently how to get it.  They value competency, proof, and proving themselves. They are often more interested in things than people, and can seem mature for their age, based on their lower emotional volatility.

Continue reading →

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Myers-Briggs Personality Theory, phase three: Preferences and Processes

So first we looked at the terminology for M-B observations, then after ending up with 16 combinations we looked at how they subgroup into four distinct quadrants.

In preparation for phase three, I’ll review/rephrase a bit of P/J explanation.

My mom has this great line that is used to explain just about every confusing thing people do:

Your perception is your reality.

How you see the world shapes who you are.  And you can’t convince someone they’re not seeing something they see.

Continue reading →

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The Other Difficulty With Differences

I outlined my basic observation of differences here.

Another angle is that by doing things differently we begin to measure personal success in terms of success of the model we employ.

For example some parents (usually of only one child), directly attribute their child’s good behavior to their exceptional parenting skills.

This could be accurate, or it could be self-delusion.  I tend to take their gushing advice with a grain of salt, wary of such a small sample size.

Just yesterday I was talking with another mom about homeschooling and we were comparing methods (not competing, just finding out. She’s literature-based; I do half our subjects with workbooks and the other half orally).  I felt a warm, cozy comfort at our easy conversation, how we both tied our choices to our personalities and lifestyles, rather than the inherint *rightness* of the method itself.

I said so to her, saying how thankful I am to have several years “this way” behind me now, so I can compare a  track long-enough to let me see both when and how my method really works and when it doesn’t.  But how, over all, it averages out as effective.

My biggest discomfort in these “differences” interactions (whether it’s about parenting or schooling) is when someone attributes to the method what could just as easily be individual variation.  For “failures” or “successes.”

Natasha was reading by age five.  Melody, in the same environment, was still slogging through her phonics workbook at age six.  Some people asked if we were doing the right thing. If we were using the right curriculum.  And I did compare it to some other options, but felt nothing offered more than what we were using already.

Now seven, and nearly finished with those questioned phonics workbooks, Melody has a *solid* foundation that she builds on every day.  She has developed independent study skills, problem-solving skills (we’re still working on focus and speed, but we’ve got time), and I couldn’t be more pleased with the progress she’s made.

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There is so much individual variation between children that I really think once you have something solid (by any objective standard you can measure), as long as it’s not actually making life more complicated (we had one of those, too), it’s a matter of persevering.

Elisha has begun the same series of workbooks– despite my intent to hold him back one more year– and I can already see that he, like Melody a year ago, isn’t quite clicking with it.

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I haven’t decided if I’ll do an enforced hold until he’s older (my original plan) or keep working intensively with him.  One of the reasons I love the 50% workbooks approach is that it allows me to work independently too.

The books we use are so gradually advancing that the kids can frequently “self teach,” which is really important to me.  Not because I want to keep them out of my hair (they wouldn’t be homeschooled if that was important to me), but because I se my life as been one long string of self-teaching.

I consider it one of the most-valuable life skills they can learn, so I’m thankful to have found texts that reenforce this value of mine.

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One of the reasons studying personality has been so important to me is how it allows me incorporate that understanding of equality into interactions where differences could start to look like mistakes. Like someone “getting it wrong.”

What I want to remember, what I want to extend grace over, is that correct can be a lot-broader of a path than I choose to walk myself.

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Repentant

Now I am sincerely sorry for ever telling my kids to ignore a sibling’s teasing because “You know what they’re saying is not real.”

I wish now I had instead used the time to urge the offender to “practice telling the truth.”

Because now hearing as fact what I disagree with– even when I don’t feel deceived by it– feels like an assault on already embattled walls, and that from a side that was supposed to be safe.

And when a little person is little, I’m thinking now that a blue sky being blue is not something s/he should have to defend.

It doesn’t set a healthy precedent.

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Specializing… soon.

Just now I’m feeling like all I want to do in my free-time is write, but I have to admit that there are are more interactive projects out there, and a lot of them look really cool both to me and my kids.

Here’s what I’m tucking away for later.

And a recipe to file away for when we seriously try for dairy-free: Coconut milk

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Mom Phrases

By unscientific estimate these are currently my most-used mom-phrases:

  • Low voice.
  • Swallow before you talk.
  • Knees under the table.

I love how they are examples of the economy of language, and the extra elements that come from having story and/or experience behind them.

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“Low-voice” came out of a conversation I overheard in high school. The mother of a friend described a woman with an in-home daycare who had a passel of preschoolers and no high-pitched squeals or auditory explotions because she consciously emphasized this concept of “low voice,” teaching both pitch and volume.

Children really can learn to control their voices.

Granted, personality plays a role: Melody has the hardest time with this of any of my children.  Even so, she knows and has proven the capacity to control her volume– with cuing. Her difficulty is the punch of an opening: it just explodes out of her with all her joie de vivre.

My favorite application of this is when my children are engaged in some crazy-wild child’s play and “scream” and “yell” in intensity-modulated voices.  It doesn’t always work without reminders (as I write this I’m reminding the kids to control their play-noise), but the reality is that asking or requiring self-control over voices is not unreasonable and actually can work.

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Swallow before you Speak still makes me smile when I say it.

When we first got to this stage of parenting (when children can both feed themselves and speak) I used the tried-and-true Don’t talk with your mouth full.  But the kids took it literally and, well, emptied their mouths when they had something too important to wait to say.

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Knees under the table.

This is our latest acquisition, and it does so much it’s already topped my list.

You see, if your knees are under the table, you’re at the table. You’re close enough to eat over your plate/bowl, (the required position for little children) and you’re interacting over the table rather than chair to chair.

I don’t know about other families, but this precludes the majority of our table-time and food/mess issues.

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We have other phrases too, but these are the ones I was thinking of today– phrases that don’t seem to lose their usefulness by repetition.

I know those who think having to repeat yourself is a sign of poor or ineffective training, and that can be true. But I subscribe more to the model that parenting (in part at least) is about carving neural pathways, and I believe that repetition is one of the tools of that.

This is why I like consistent phrases. After a while they have a track playing in their little heads and I don’t need to say it as much.

Case in point: On our way home from anywhere I used to rehearse with the children what we would do when we arrived. Now all I do is ask, “What do we do when we get home?” “Wash hands!” comes the chorus from the back seat.

And lately they’ve been the ones initiating the ritual in the car, and following through without being reminded.  I count that a parenting success.

What are your favorite parenting phrases?

Do you use them yourself or just like the idea?