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.