CHILDREN
Isabel Meyers asserts that when dealing with people,
especially with children, one needs to relate on the basis of one's
own perceptive function (sensation or intuition). Nothing causes
more trouble to children, she claims, then to be handled with the
judgmental thinking or feeling function. It is tragic when a child
is brought up under pressure to be something other than which his
or her own nature needs; this is different from expecting the child
to be who he or she is but asking them to increase their present
level of actualization. The judgmental person must be careful not
to try to program a child into feeling required to do the
impossible: always be on time, always be clean, always be polite.
Sometimes people in their sixties come up after they hear about
personality types and express the relief that for the first time in
their life they are confirmed in the legitimacy of being who they
are and as they are. They say,
"My mother, father, teacher, and boss never liked me. It is
great for me to find out I am a legitimate type."
Of course, all the types have certain negative qualities.
Unsympathetic people of a different type pick those things out for
emphasis.
The book PEOPLE TYPES AND TIGER STRIPES, by Gordon Lawrence,
gives some suggestions for determining which type a child is. Once
one of my neighbor's children asked to take the Myers-Briggs test
when he saw me scoring some. He was nine years old. Although too
young for the test, he is bright, and I let him do it. The test
showed that he was not yet more developed in a function with
respect to the thinking-feeling or sensation-intuition polarities.
But he did test as more judgmental than perceptive. We told his
mother about this. It corroborated her observations and was
important because all of the others in is family are perceptive.
She gave him some responsibility for decisions and they carried out
those decisions, which is often hard for perceptive to do without
making changes.
Children of different types can be motivated differently. The
sensation child needs to be given something specific to do. The
intuitive type needs to be inspired. The feeling type will act in
order to please someone. A feeling child is motivated for school
work, not out of intrinsic interest in the subject matter, but to
please a parent of teacher. The thinking child needs to know the
reasons for things. In religious education, the thinking type will
ask why the different elements of the ritual are practiced. The
feeling child probably does not care.
At one California parish 750 families took the Myers-Briggs
Indicator. We found that when a child was topologically different
from the parents he or she was likely to be treated as the black
sheep of the family and picked on. this happens almost inevitably
with an introverted intuitive child as there are so few in the
population. It can be just tragic for a sensation type child to
have two intuitive parents. If the parents do not understand, they
will unreasonably expect too much creatively. One can usually tell
if a child takes stories literally, and is therefore the sensation
type, or if a child automatically understands them metaphorically,
through a developed intuitive function.
Parents can be helped to see the most effective way to
motivate a child. It is not effective to scold a child with such
things as,
"Why don't you clean up your room more often! You never help!"
By recognizing the motivation pattern of the type in question, the
parent can learn to speak much more appropriately and effectively.
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