The Deeper Ground of Presence
Most parents today are overwhelmed by advice. One book advocates for positive discipline, another for attachment strategies, and another for academic readiness. But when the noise fades, a more essential question lingers: What actually shapes a child’s resilience and self-compassion?
The answer, across decades of psychology and child development research, is deceptively simple: the quality of presence. When children feel seen, met, and understood, their inner world organizes around the concepts of belonging and strength. When presence is absent, no amount of strategies can fill the gap.
This is the message at the heart of Nurturing Essence: A Compass for Essential Parenting and The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life.
Nurturing Essence explores how attunement and curiosity provide the ground for resilience. It draws together developmental theory and essential psychology to show how parenting is less about fixing behaviors and more about cultivating conditions where essence can shine. As one passage notes:
Parents face a delicate challenge: supporting their child’s necessary ego development while helping them maintain conscious connection to their essential nature. This isn’t about preventing personality development, which would be neither possible nor desirable, but about fostering development that remains permeable to and informed by essence.
The Enneagram World of the Child expands the view, showing how early family dynamics and parental personality patterns shape the child’s sense of self. It reveals how parents’ unconscious attitudes toward anger, shame, or fear become the air a child breathes—and how awareness transforms these dynamics into opportunities for growth.
The Enneagram World of the Child reveals itself as more than individual personality development; it is the dynamic interplay between the family ecosystem, shaped by the parents’ patterns, and the child’s emerging emotional subjectivity. Perhaps this book’s most profound insight is that supporting our children’s healthy development begins with us, the parents.
For therapists, coaches, and educators, these books offer a new language to bring into their work —one that integrates psychology and spirituality, grounded in research and lived experience. For parents, they are a reminder that the most important gift they can give is not mastery of the latest technique, but their attuned presence.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. His newest book, Nurturing Essence: A Compass for Essential Parenting, invites parents to discover the role essence plays in child development. He is also the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.