A reflection for parents who want to do it differently
If you’re like most parents I’ve met, you want to raise your children differently than you were raised. Better. More consciously. More lovingly. You want to fix what went wrong in your upbringing and give your child what you didn’t get.
And that’s beautiful. Truly.
But there’s something you may not have considered: the desire to “parent differently” often turns into strategy. And strategy can easily become its trap.
Why? Because your child isn’t an idea. Your child isn’t a concept to manage. They are a living, breathing, emotionally alive being—raw, unpredictable, and wired for connection. And no amount of strategy will ever replace presence.
When a parent approaches a child with a plan for how to “do it right,” the parent is often stuck in their mind, trying to control, fix, avoid, or repeat what they think works or doesn’t work. But children don’t need to be managed. They need to be met, felt, and seen; no checklist or parenting method can give them that.
The moment-to-moment experience of parenting rarely follows the rules. One minute you’re calm, the next you’re triggered. One moment your child is playing, the next they’re falling apart. It’s not a straight line. And the more tightly we cling to our strategy, the more likely we will miss the living child in front of us.
That doesn’t mean understanding doesn’t help. It does. But it must be the kind of understanding that opens the heart, not tightens the grip.
That’s why I wrote The Enneagram World of the Child. Not to give you a better strategy—but to offer you a way of seeing. To illuminate how personality forms in early life, how your presence shapes your child’s experience of themselves, and how even our best intentions often fall short in ways we don’t realize.
The Enneagram is a way of understanding personality—nine distinct types shaped by early emotional experience. The book offers a gentle introduction to those types, not as labels but as living patterns that children adapt to survive, feel loved, and make sense of their world.
Why does this matter?
Because how you show up creates the environment in which your child comes to know themselves. Not just intellectually, but emotionally and energetically. They internalize your responses and build their identity around them. And no matter how loving you are, that identity will always be smaller than who they really are.
From the perspective of essence—of the mysterious, divine nature within every child—they are infinite. But they can’t live in that infinity without help. Without presence. Without someone willing to meet them beyond strategy, beyond control, beyond “doing it right.”
And that someone is you.
You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to heal everything. But you can become curious. You can begin to notice when you’re parenting from fear, your past, or an idealized version of yourself. And you can start to meet your child as they are, where they are—not as who you wish they’d be, or fear they might become.
This isn’t about perfection. It’s about awareness. And the more aware you become of your patterns, the more freedom your child will have to grow into someone who is not just “raised well,” but is fully alive.
John Harper is a longtime teacher, guide, and human development student whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life, available on Amazon.