Know Your Parenting Personality: How to Use the Enneagram to Become the Best Parent You Can Be

Description

This book is well written and extensive in describing the nine enneagram types as they might relate to parenting. Each one includes examples of situations and potential pitfalls as well as advantages. That said, I was disappointed about a couple of things, which limited the usefulness of the book in my mind.

There is a quiz at the beginning, the answers of which are supposed to tell you which enneagram parenting type you are. While the examples are fairly good, anyone who knows about the enneagram diagram knows that determining your type is rather complex and most people don't fall cleanly into only one category, but have influences from other types, i.e. wings, and move toward other types when at their best, or digress in unhealthy circumstances. While the information presented here is good, I'm afraid a fair number of readers will see themselves in multiple types and may become confused about how to proceed.

Ms. Levine uses different names for the types than I've seen used in other material and makes no attempt to relate them to one another. If you know nothing about the enneagram, obviously that won't bother you, but it bothered me. I was also hoping there would be something to help parents identify their children's types since parents are not operating in a vacuum. All in all, I felt the book has value in helping parents recognize how their personality type, whatever it is, may be affecting their children in ways they didn't expect and we all want to be better parents, so that is useful, but from the enneagram perspective, it's not as detailed as I was expecting.