Family Personalities: Interview with Sandra

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So I was first introduced to Myers Briggs personality types, when I was in corporate world. And it's used there for fostering team communication and all that sort of things. You can find Myers Briggs personalities all over the corporate world, and trainings and stuff like that. I began using it in my personal life because I found it so powerful when I discovered my own type. This is the personality type model that has the four letters. So like, for example, I'm an INFJ, which stands for introversion, intuition, feeling and judging.

When I left Corporate I brought this home. I started to wonder, when can I figure out my kids’ Myers Briggs personality types? And how does that look in childhood? Is there anything that I could help them with if I knew more about their personality types? And so I started looking into it and sure enough, you can type children. I just kind of dove into the research myself and figured out my children's types and found out that understanding them on that level was so helpful to our parenting.

There are four personality preferences, and one of them is the introversion extroversion. There are no families I've worked with where the children are exactly the same type as their parents. And a lot of times, people parent their children the way their parents parented them.

But what I soon discovered was that my kids have very different needs from me, because they're very different people. And so if I try and parent them the way I wish I was parented. I'm not going to be meeting their specific needs. So understanding kids type can really help you cater your, your parenting to exactly what they need.

my mom is very extroverted and she was kind of like the main parent who kind of took me everywhere and was involved in getting in activities and everything. And she really valued extraversion. She had a really hard time with how hesitant I was with things. Naturally, very shy. And she pushed me to be as extroverted as possible. And sometimes, in some ways, I'm really glad she did, because she got me into things like theater, which got me really comfortable being in front of people. But in some ways, it was harmful because she would get me involved in all sorts of activities and I didn't have enough time to myself to recharge, and that can breed anxiety right when you're not getting your alone time that you need.

We are a family of introverts, which in some ways makes it a lot easier, cuz we all get it, we all get each other's needs. And of course, we have other Myers Briggs preferences that are very different from one another. But one thing I really try to keep in mind with my children is that they need that time to prepare. I advise parents of introverted children, to get them to their activities on time or early so that they have time to kind of see what's going on and feel settled. introverts don't like being late a lot of the time because they're shoved into the center of attention walk into a classroom late.

So if you have any listeners who are introverted parents with an extroverted child, they do have needs that might be hard for you to meet as an introverted parent. And as introverts when we want to communicate our thoughts to people, we much prefer to process think about what we're going to say, once we know what we're going to say, then we say it. Extroverts, a lot of times are just thinking as they speak, and they're speaking is their thinking. So if you have an extroverted child, they might have a tendency to kind of ramble. Our tendency might be to cut them off or tune them out. Try to realize that you're actually cutting off their thinking because they're trying to process through something and they need to speak in order to get that thought out.

Extroverts like to be working with friends, they like the buzz and the noise around them. So if you have an extrovert child, they might like to do their homework with you or with a friend in the middle of the kitchen while things are going on. Whereas your introverted child is going to need a more quiet space where there's no interruptions or noise.