I was struggling with a really understanding Devon and what motivated him. This was before Carol Tuttle had released the Child Whisperer, but she had other books explaining the typing system, and I was led to learn more about it.
And when I figured out Devon’s type things made so much more sense.
And since that point, she wrote The Child Whisperer, which I think came out in 2014 or 2015. I don’t know.
I recommend this book to all my clients with challenging children!
But I recommend all my clients who are parenting challenging children to read this book because it’s a really great understanding.
I love that. It’s so simple. There’s just four different types and it is the simplest system I’ve found to understand others and yourself and your children, and you can even see your baby’s type. So definitely, go ahead and look up Carol Tu, get the child whisper, read it or listen to her podcast. , It’s really great.
Brief overview of the types
So I’m going to give you a brief overview of the types and then share how understanding Devon’s type helped me so much over the years, as well as of course understanding my own type. So again, there’s four types and most of us have like our top type and then a secondary type. And we all have all of them, but just in different.
levels, I guess you could say.
So, type one is a very fun personality. They generate a lot of ideas, and they tend to have a lot of movement and energy.
Type twos like to gather ideas. They’re more go with the flow energy and have a lower movement.
type threes like to put ideas into action. They have a lot of movement and energy and a pushing energy to get things done.
And then type four s like to observe and perfect ideas. They have the lowest movement of them all, and they tend to see things in black and white.
Again, this is a very basic, basic explanation.
The child whisperer. Carol, of course, goes into much, much more detail and she also talks about how your children were as babies can really give you an insight into their types.
Because as they grow, if we’re not supportive of what their natural type is, they might actually shift their behavior and the way they act, the way they move to fit more into what we expect from them. I love how she shares messages and words that each age. Type child needs to hear. She’ll have like type one, there’s chapters for each one.
And so, she’ll talk about the type one child and then these are words that they need to hear as babies or as toddlers or as teenagers, And so I find it really helpful and easy to use book. It’s a very complete and very helpful in understanding your children as well as understanding yourself.
And when I know who I am and when I know who my children are. It’s so much easier to enjoy each other and respect each other.
Christmas present example, understanding his typed helped us stay connected.
I’m going to give you an example of Devon. So, he’s a type four three. His dominant is a type four. He has a very perfectionist attitude in some ways and low movement..
I learned about this not long before Christmas, and I gave him a present.
When he opened it up, he said, this is good, but it would’ve been better if like you’d gotten me this other thing instead. If I hadn’t recently learned about the types, I would’ve seen this quality as being critical, and I had felt like Devon was very critical. But after I’d learned about the types, it helped me to appreciate this quality.
So, when he said, it is nice, but it could have been better if blah, blah, blah. In the past, I would’ve just been offended and upset.
But this time I was able to see it was his perfecting nature coming through. He actually did like it. He just knew that there was a better possibility out there. I was able to teach him from a place of love and acceptance that it is not socially acceptable to make comments like that about a gift.
It’s okay that he thought that, but that it could hurt someone’s feelings if he said it. Basically. I was like, “That hurt my feelings when you said that. It’s better if you just say thank you for the gift and inside it’s okay you think that.”
Giving him the social training that I felt needed to happen in that instance.
And I was able to do this from a place of love because I understood and honored his type.
This is life changing. It’s very different from where I would’ve been a year before where I would’ve been hurt or irritated and maybe even yelled at him or just totally disconnected from him. Leaving us both feeling lonely and unheard.
So that’s how his type four energy showed up in a very specific circumstance.
Hiking disaster explained by his type 3 energy.
So, his type three energy, you may remember the story I shared an episode or two ago where we were hiking with him and he wanted to go down into this ravine that wasn’t safe and we had to cut our hike short. So, this was his type three energy of pushing forward, combined with his type four energy, that black and white thinking. In his mind, the ravine would be fun
and he thought it was safe and nothing could change his mind about that. And that type three energy of pushing forward, that combo is what created that scenario.
Now, if I had understood types at this stage in my parenting career, I could have maybe handled this situation differently. Maybe I would’ve, we would’ve just stopped and sat down and really listened to what his thoughts were about it and then explain why I thought it was dangerous, and then give a clear option. Either push forward on a fun hike, staying on the trail, or we get to turn around and possibly with this conversation he could have pressed forward focusing on hiking the trail. Who knows? But given that I didn’t understand this three, four nature that was coming up, I just gave up and we turned around.
So this four three combination was really confusing with me for Devon because he could be so still and chill so much of the time, but when he got an idea stuck in his head, he would push forward no matter what, and it always seemed to surprise me because that type three energy would sneak in and boom, he would do something even if it made no logical sense.
Even though I learned about his energy types when he was around 11 or 12, it wasn’t until he was 16 and snuck down to Mexico, and got kidnapped. That I realized I needed to pay attention to everything that he mentioned and to take it seriously. When he said, I want to go down to Mexico to see the start of the Baja 1000, and kept bringing it up, even though we were like, no, it’s not safe to go to Mexico right now.
We should have seen that as him having something stuck in his head that like type four focus and know that type three energy was going to push and make it happen. And boy did he, now that’s a story for another day .
So your tip for today is to go ahead and read The Child Whisperer or Carol Tuttle, I believe, has an email series you can sign up where she teaches you the types.
I really love the book because it’s so relevant if you’re raising children or even if your children are adults, and it even helps you to type yourself, which I didn’t really go into that here, but that definitely helped me to better understand myself and respect that and interact in a positive way with others.