Understanding Your Child's Enneagram Personality Type - The Eagle, AKA Enneagram Number 3

This is the seventh of a series based on the MTH workshop, Parenting to Lost Childhood Messages, offered by Suzanne Stabile and Barbara Rila, PhD.

Parenting an Eagle, AKA Enneagram Number 3

The Eagle proudly performs in ways which they hope ensure love. Their fear of being unloved as they are permeates relationships. Eagles seek to perform in a pleasing way for parents, as a hedge of protection against rejection. Therefore, an adopted Eagle is particularly sensitive to being the child the parent wants, rather than feeling accepted as they are.

Adoption typically offers genetic dissimilarity. The child’s skills, talents, and treasures will often not match those of the parents. The Eagle adapts to adoption by trying to be and become the child they believe their parent wants, rather than being who they uniquely are. This creates a distance between parent and child, because the child does not reveal genuine feelings and thoughts, nor do they assert their right to be different from the parents. And parents who are not sensitive to this, inadvertently play into providing the child a script and map to follow which may not work for that child.

Parenting an Eagle requires self monitoring. Conveying inappropriate expectations, wishes or demands of the child will place conditions on their love. Already concerned with adapting self to other’s standards, the Eagle will struggle to become the expected, rather than the real self. Falling short of the parent’s expectation threatens loss of love; therefore, being one’s self threatens loss of love.

Sensitive parents will celebrate their child’s differences from themselves, siblings, and even from their own expectations. They will admire the Eagle’s uniqueness and differences from self and family members. Parents will cultivate the skills of the Eagle even when vastly different from other family members.

An Eagle child also needs to develop realistic self appraisal. Shortcomings and deficits are feared by the child who ‘knows’ this will cause rejection. Consequently, they may cultivate a braggy interactional style, inflating self worth and denying failures. Helping them achieve a balanced sense of self, with both positive and negative attributes is important.

An inherent emotional dishonesty in the Eagle may seriously affect the parent-child relationship. Eagles need time to discover their own feelings and wishes, so when an important discussion needs to happen, parents can give them thinking time on the topic before actually discussing the matter. The child should be prompted to consider their real feelings rather than the right feelings before having to talk about the issue. If they lack words to express feelings, a feeling word list or feelings faces chart can assist the child in identifying their own internal experience.

If adoptive parents fail to honor the Eagle’s intrinsic worth, the child will struggle mightily with the question of being loved for themselves. And attachment will not thrive unless the child feels loved for self, rather than living up to parental expectations.

Understanding Your Child's Enneagram Personality Type - The Bee, AKA Enneagram Number 1

This is the sixth of a series based on the MTH workshop, Parenting to Lost Childhood Messages, offered by Suzanne Stabile and Barbara Rila, Ph.D..

Parenting a Bee, Enneagram Number 1

A Bee struggles to be good, believing they must not make mistakes in order to hang on to the love of their parents. This is a terrible burden for the Bee, feeling love is conditional upon their being good children. As a result, Bees are constantly self monitoring using their own internal alarm system to find mistakes. They become their own worst critic.

A Bee who has been adopted is particularly insecure if they associate their abandonment by the birthparents as being due to a flaw within themselves. They often internalize this so deeply that it drives their relationship with the adoptive parents. Over-eagerness to please the parent, pervasive misrepresentation of truth and motivations, and brittle reactions to correction are all signs the Bee is struggling with adoption issues. Their fear is they will also be abandoned by the adoptive parent if they make a mistake. This is very painful for the child and perplexing for the devoted adoptive parent, who finds the Bee to be emotionally fragile in spite of constancy of their love and commitment.

Like the Owls, Bees require low impact discipline. Correction should be calm, brief, and consequences mild. Parents should avoid strong emotion when correcting, even to the point of controlling voice tone and volume, facial expression and body tension. Bees will be highly sensitive to both verbal and nonverbal criticism, judgment and disapproval. They will even perceive criticism when it is not present, and will need reassurances with self doubt.

A couple of low impact disciplinary strategies are the one-minute-scolding and the love sandwich. A one-minute-scolding essentially limits the duration of parents’ fussing for misbehavior and mistakes. With the Bee, it would be important to tell them they are getting a one-minute-scolding, then offer it, and end the intervention promptly. And parents: no more grousing after that!

The love sandwich offers a statement of love for the child, followed by the correction, and sandwiched with another statement of love. It goes something like this: ‘Punkin, you know we love you very much. So when you bark at us, we don’t like it. Please use a polite voice. We love you and like to feel your love.’ This correction softens the criticism and builds in reassurance for the hypersensitive Bee.

Because the Bee is determined to be good, they are motivated to avoid accepting responsibility, admit mistakes, and may be prone to giving the ‘right’ answer rather than the ‘real’ answer. They may even cloak their real feelings, offering up the right feeling when asked.