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What Is Your Child’s Personality Profile?

What’s your child’s personality profile? In particular, when faced with a conflict or feelings of inferiority, how does your child react? It can be tempting to say, “Oh, she’s just like me!” or “He gets that fighting spirit from his father,” but our kids’ personalities come from more than just Mom and Dad. Understanding them can help us help them when they encounter struggles.

Parenting expert Dr. James Dobson says that to parent well, you must first get behind the eyes of your child to see and experience the world as he or she does. Dobson says that the following personality profiles or patterns offer the most direct and accurate explanation of human behavior that he’s seen and that most children adopt one or more of these avenues of defense. Look through this set of 6 personality profiles and see which one comes closest to your child.

1. I’ll withdraw.

One of the most common ways of dealing with inadequacy and inferiority is just to wave the white flag of surrender. The child who chooses this approach has concluded in his own mind that he is inferior. Or she measures her worth and makes this reluctant admission: “Yes, it’s true! I am a failure, just as I feared. Even now people are laughing at me. Where can I hide?” In the elementary grades, these kids sit year after year in silence with eyes cast downward. Their peers know them as “shy” or “quiet” but seldom understand their true feelings.

We have much greater reason to be concerned about the withdrawing child (from a psychological point of view) than the more aggressive troublemaker. Children at both extremes often need adult intervention, but the surrenderer is much less likely to get it. He doesn’t bug anybody. Adults may fail to notice that a destructive self-image is rapidly solidifying and will never be pliable again. Considering all the alternative ways to cope with inferiority, withdrawal is probably the least effective and most painful. It is, in reality, no defense at all.

2. I’ll fight.

The same feelings that motivate one child to withdraw from society urge a more aggressive boy or girl to fight in response. The fighter is angry, carries a chip on her shoulder, and dares anyone to knock it off. Or he looks for any excuse to lash out, and his temper can be triggered by the most insignificant provocation. If he or she is tough enough to back up the threats, this kid becomes the terror of the playground.

Although inferiority is always distressing, the fighter is less vulnerable to its impact than a withdrawing child. The fighter has a defense, even if it is an antisocial one. The realization of this creates the climate for a dramatic personality reversal during the early teen years. Not infrequently, a quiet, timid child will creep into adolescence as a cautious surrenderer. Having avoided conflict all through life, this child has suffered accordingly. Then, during the natural antagonism of adolescence, he or she learns almost by accident that it hurts less to fight than to withdraw. And suddenly, this shy, meek youngster becomes hostile and aggressive. Parents shake their heads in disbelief as their cooperative teenager declares total war on everyone in sight.

3. I’ll be a clown.

Another common way to deal with inferiority is to laugh it off. By making a joke out of everything, the clown conceals the self-doubt that churns inside. A great many well-known comedians have turned this pattern into a career.

Teachers are well-acquainted with the clowns in the classroom. These skilled disrupters are usually (but not necessarily) boys. They often have reading or other academic problems, may be small in stature, and may do anything for a laugh (eat worms, risk expulsion from school, hang by one toe from a tree). Their parents are usually unappreciative of the humor and may never recognize that the clown, the fighter, and the surrenderer have one important thing in common—feelings of inferiority.

4. I’ll deny reality.

I worked with the teacher of Jeff, a 7-year-old who wore heavy leather gloves to school every day. He was rarely seen without his gloves, even on the warmest days. His teacher insisted that he remove the gloves in the classroom because he could scarcely hold a pencil with his thickly-padded fingers. But the moment Jeff went to recess or lunch, the gloves reappeared. Jeff’s teacher could not understand the motive for this behavior. All through the school year, Jeff had not wavered in his desire to wear those hot, cumbersome gloves.

In describing the problem, the teacher casually alluded to the fact that Jeff was the only black child in a classroom filled with white children. His feelings suddenly seemed obvious. By wearing the gloves, he hid the feature that marked him as different. He was, in effect, denying reality. He wanted to conform so badly that he denied the reality of his God-given difference.

5. I’ll conform.

One of the great myths in the U.S. is that we are a nation of rugged individualists. We really have ourselves fooled at this point. We like to think of ourselves as Abraham Lincoln, Patrick Henry, and Martin Luther King Jr., standing tall and courageous in the face of social rejection. We are fooling ourselves. A major portion of our energy is expended trying to be like everyone else, cringing in fear at true individuality.

Conformity, then, presents itself as the fifth personality profile in response to inferiority. Those who adopt it may be social doormats, afraid to express their own opinions. They seem to be liked by everyone, regardless of the expense to their own convictions and beliefs. For adolescents, whom I’ve already described, the urge to conform dictates most of their activity for a period of 10 or more years. Accordingly, adolescent behavior is the most contagious phenomenon shared from one human being to another.

6. I’ll compensate.

I have presented five common personality patterns that often develop to cope with feelings of inferiority. The selection of a particular pattern may not be a matter of personal choice. It has always been surprising for me to observe how rigidly society dictates which of the five approaches an individual is expected to pursue.

Each of us evaluates what we believe other people are thinking about us, and then we often play that prescribed role. Often, that role is an attempt to compensate for something we appear to be lacking. This is why people who are overweight often feel the need to be funny and why a child whose sibling excels at a sport will try to be good at something completely different.

So which personality profile fits your child?

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