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.