Better Parenting by Understanding Your Child’s Personality

I first become very interested in personality differences when I noticed a correlation between personality identity crisis’ and mental illness.  Over the last twenty years as a private practicing psychologist, I found myself explaining to many parents that there was nothing wrong with their child, and that what they thought was learning difficulties or defiant behaviour or even symptoms of Asperger Syndrome was in fact, that they were highly creative children.

We are all creative in some way, however some of us are more creative and therefore display ‘highly creative personality traits’ that are often misunderstood as ‘weaknesses’ or worse still, symptoms.  Highly creative people (HCP) can differ to Average Creative People (ACP) in the way they think, behave, learn, socialise, relate to others, and live their life.  ACPs are a lot more structured then HCPs, and this can become a problem for HCPs particularly during their childhood when they are forced to behaviour and think more like an ACP by parents and teachers.  The teaching system is highly structured and tend to teach using a more auditory than visual approach.  Auditory learning is a learning style in which a person learns through listening.  An auditory learner depends on hearing and speaking as a main way of learning.  On the contrary, visual learning is a learning style in which ideas, concepts, data, and other information are associated with images and techniques.  A student who is a visual learner will often find learning the auditory way very difficult, and can fall behind as a result.  Most HCPs cope with primary school years until Grade 3 when the teaching style becomes less visual and more auditory.  A visual learner may find it very difficult to concentrate and process too many words or follow instructions that are too wordy, and this is often misinterpreted as a concentration or learning problem.  I often prove this to parents by asking the child to recall a list of ten items that I give them.  When I ask them to recall the list immediately after reading it, they fail at the task significantly.  However, when I instruct them to visualise each item I read out to them, and ask them to recall the list at the end of the one-hour session, they are able to recall all ten items.  This is because a visual learner needs to encode words into their short-term memory in a visual manner.  A HCP will display they following common behaviours that will drive a teacher up the wall; they will rush writing their story and forget punctuation, or proper letter formation, because they believe the story is the most important part of the exercise, they will be often caught out daydreaming, put only efforts into the assignments that interest them only, projects will have more visuals then words, they are untidy and disorganised, and fidget and tap and doodle.  All of this can be easily misunderstood as symptoms that can land them in therapy or unfortunately cause them to fall through the net.  HCP are highly intelligent and very capable people who are often let down by the education system that does not cater for their learning style.  Further research is much needed to explore how incorporating a visual teaching style within the education system might help highly creative people to learn more effectively.

Common Traits of a Highly Creative Person

 While there are many books on personality differences including the well-known Myers Briggs, that explain how and why we think and behave, I prefer to concentrate on the differences between the Highly Creative Personality and the Average Creative Personality.  It is much easier and straight forward to compare apples to oranges, instead of comparing apples to many different fruit.

Highly Creative People I found to be typically;

Disorganised.  They tend to be more organised for the things they consider to be most important to them or more critical.

Untidy:  They tend to be very untidy and find it more comfortable to live in a ‘mess’ or ‘dishevel’ and to others surprise able to always know where to find what they are looking for.  Because they don’t have their minds occupied with a ‘to do list’ they are able to pay attention more on their actions.

Introvert:  They tend to keep more to themselves and prefer their own company than that of others.  They find it difficult to talk ‘small talk’ and prefer to engage in deep meaningful and interesting conversations instead.  They spend a lot of time in their own company and may have one or two close relationships.

Bored easily:  They tend to require and seek constant stimulation.  As kids they will ask a lot of questions especially curly ones.  Like “what makes the blue colour in the sky? or the yellow colour in the flames of a fire?”.  They enjoy researching on any topic in depth.  Unfortunately, they can rely on food to pick up any negative mood including boredom.  Parents can become very frustrated at their child’s strong interest in playing computer games.  Even as adults, HCP will seek strategic gaming as a means of maintaining stimulation particularly, in times of boredom.

Live in the now: They tend to find it difficult to plan ahead or to set goals for their future and often seen as immature or lazy for this reason.  They are happy to live a simplistic and practical life and not materialistic.

Practical: They tend to live and dress practically and their lack of interest in fashion and material things are not always understood by others.  They dress for comfort and practicality not appearance.  Females are often viewed as ‘tomboys’ for this reason.

Visual: They tend to appreciate beauty and colour and tangible things, the things that others often take for granted like landscape.  They are more likely to remember the food they ate and what they saw while travelling then what they did.

Unable to commit: They tend to find it difficult to commit to something for fear of making changing their minds or not being in the mood when the time comes.  You’ll hear them saying, “I’ll see how I feel” when you are trying to organise an outing with them.

Not career focused:  They tend to find working to be a tool to living the life they need and as such, tend to not be career minded.  They’re ideal life would be to work part-time only or not at all if possible, and fill most of their time with their hobbies and recreational activities.

Unmotivated:  They tend to only be motivated by passion or consequence.  Parents of highly creative kids find it difficult to motivate them to do things they’re not interested in like homework.  This is often misinterpreted as laziness.  Highly creative kids are more likely to respond to consequence for example, having privileges taken away.  Parents will find this form of discipline at times unsuccessful because creative children have the ability to use their imagination to entertain themselves and often not affected by the consequence.  I will often have parents say “I can take away everything and it won’t even affect them”.

Easily distracted:  They tend to be easily distracted.  Parents of highly creative children will find it frustrating to get them ready for school in the morning because they might intend to do what they are asked to but along the way become distracted by things that grab their interest.

Logical:  They tend to think before they act and will weigh things up before engaging in anything.  They are quite mature as children and seek out the company of adults or older children.  Unfortunately, they’re maturity sometimes is camouflaged by the other characteristics mentioned above.

Down to earth:  They tend to be very genuine and down to earth people who find it difficult to put their trust in others that they do not find do the same.

Manipulate:  They tend to be very good at manipulating others to get what they want.  Their overall personality tends to make them appear helpless and this can result the development of dependency on others, often instigated by others not them.

Difficulties inhibiting urges:  What they do, tends to be strongly influenced by their moods, therefore, they can find it difficult to control their urges particularly when it comes to food or spending.