See Your Child’s Unique Personality Traits

Parenting can be fun, frustrating, rewarding, challenging and sometimes just downright hard at times!

Do you ever wonder why those mastered ‘parenting skills’ that works so well with one child are out the window with another?

Well, God has given each of our children unique personality traits, talents and temperaments. That’s kind of a no-brainer.   But as a parent, that also gives us clues for how to motivate, encourage, discipline and appreciate each other’s God-given talents.

It also points to professions that they would excel in. An engineer, doctor, or pilot will struggle to be a comedian, actor or ‘used car salesman’, and vice versa.

When It Comes To Parenting

And just like your children, you as a parent ALSO have unique personality traits, talents and temperaments.  This consciously or unconsciously affects your parenting style.

The trick (or at least one of the tricks) to effectively parenting is to tailor YOUR parenting style to meet your children’s specific needs.  Once you learn how to do that, you can understand, appreciate, accept and enjoy your children and their God-given uniqueness. Learning to see you children’s unique personality traits  and work with them, will make you a better parent.

Ask These Two Questions

In my business, I teach companies how to improve communication skills using these same, proven principles I’m going to briefly explain to you.    Once you begin to understand and appreciate people, employee discord can be turned into an effective, cohesive team. It works similarly with your personal relationships.

You can see your children’s unique personality traits, especially when you know what to look for. You can often begin to get clues as to their behavioral styles as they begin to get more expressive, even as early as a few months.

It all begins with these two questions:

Question 1:

Is this child more outgoing or reserved?

Question 2:

Is this child more task-oriented or people-oriented?

Now remember, we are all a BLEND, so at different times each of us will be more like one characteristic than another (for each question).  So, answer each question as a ‘generally speaking’ type of situation.

For example, generally speaking, I am nearly always outgoing, and more people oriented.  But when I’m trying to get something done, I get much more task oriented than people oriented.

Putting It All Together

Follow the graphic to the right and put it all together.  When you divide the circle into quarters, which quadrant does your child fall into?

Now, ask and answer the same 2 questions for yourself.  What quadrant do you fall into?  Do you and your child fall into the same quadrant or different quadrants?

Are you beginning to see how complicated effective parenting can be?  But don’t give up!  The whole point today is to give you hope and resources to help.

There is biblical application to this, too. Each of the disciples also displayed these personality traits.  Probably, the easiest to recognize are Paul, Peter, John and Thomas.  Christ displayed them all.  I can write about that another time.

Powerful Resources to Help!

In you business life 90% of your successes are related to communication skills and only 10% to your technical skills.  In you personal life, 100% of your relationship successes are related to your communication skills!

In my business, I use the DISC model of human behavior, for several reasons. You can read about them here if you like.  

But here, I want to share with you a really great book that will help you parent your children with their unique personality traits in mind.

It’s called Different Children, Different Needs by Dr. Charles Boyd.  It is an amazingly simple, yet effective book on understanding the DISC model of human behavior and applying to parenting situations.  It is also applicable to anyone who works with children in any capacity.

Actually, you could probably think of this book as a manual. I encourage you to keep it handy and refer to it often.

You can find a link to this book as well as other resources in the Resources menu to the right.  Feel free to explore and get acquainted with them. Some are no-cost, so make sure you check them out!  These resources are just as applicable to personal relationships as to business relationships.

Disclaimer

When you follow these links, you will get my business affiliate 10% discount off any order you make (and I will make a small commission also).  To know you are receiving the discount, look for the Happy People Enterprises logo at the top of the webpage.  If you are not sure, type in the code: smile.

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