by Dawn Billings, founder of RelationshipHelp.com
Children with Strong Blue Personality Tendencies:
Children with strong blue personality tendencies are slow-paced, precise and excellence oriented. This sounds great until you realize that they need to do everything at their own pace. When others dictate their pace, it can cause anxiety for them, and you. They enjoy their alone time and will often be found amusing themselves alone in their rooms. They can spend hours reading, building with legos, drawing and perfecting.
The standards that they set for themselves can often be extreme and unrealistic causing them a great deal of frustration and anxiety in maintaining them. An example of this might be a sixth grade boy whose lowest grade in any class is a 98 percent who comes to his mother anxious about using the computer she is working on to research an extra credit project in a class that he has a 102 percent average. Yep, that was my youngest very blue child. Get prepared to teach them to breathe deeply and slowly because they can go into panic mode any time they feel their drive for perfection is being impeded.
As the example above shows, children with strong blue personality tendencies may not know when enough is enough when it comes to homework and projects. They are in danger of becoming caught in the trap of perfectionism. These children need parents to use humor to teach them to not take themselves too seriously, however that will not be as easy as it sounds. For example, a parent of a child with strong blue personality tendencies that is obsessed with straight A’s should consider telling the child that they are planning a huge and wonderful party when the child gets his/her first B. This will absolutely stun and horrify the blue child. It certainly did mine. My youngest son Corbin top color tendency is his color blend is blue. He asked “Why in the world would you say something horrible like that Mom?” He was stressed and perplexed. He truly thought that me making a statement like that bordered on the verge of child abuse.
My reply to his stressed reaction was, “Because we will need to celebrate you being released from “perfection” prison. There is no such thing as perfection. Your intelligence and worth are not determined by a charcoal mark on a piece of paper by a teacher, and when you get your first B, you will be set free to understand that being great and being perfect are two completely different things. Being great is a choice you make every day and has nothing to do with what someone else thinks of you or how they grade you. Being great is only about how you grade yourself. While attempting to be perfect is an impossibility that only steals what is great about you.”
If your child has blue as their first color in their primary Colors personality color blend they will not understand how any parent could want less than perfection from and for their child. However it will sit in the back of their very intelligent minds and bake until it makes sense to them and hopefully be one of the greatest lessons you will ever teach them. Being ruled by a "perfection" imperative is a truly horrible way to live and will cause them a great deal of stress in the long run.
How to Effectively Parent a Child with strong Blue Personality Tendencies:
Be sincere and supportive in your communication with them, but don’t crowd them. Give them space to be alone and regroup, especially when they really seem to need it.
Negotiate with them for more detailed sharing about what is going on with them. When you want them to talk more and have more interaction with you, agree that if they will share more in depth information with you, you will make sure that they also have alone time that they can count on. This is a prize they value greatly. However, allow me to warn you, once they begin to share they share in great detail so don't ask for more information, unless you have the time to hear what they have to say in detail.
You don’t need to push them, they are very busy pushing themselves. If anything, attempt to help them find ways to laugh, relax and play. Children with blue as their first color personality tendency can be very serious children and they take on the weight of the worlds problems.
Suggested reading: Dr. Foster Cline and Jim Fay’s Parenting With Love and Logic books, and I highly recommend that you order Greatness and Children: Learn the Rules.
A great resource for helping children learn and understand emotional intelligence are the many books by Daniel Goleman that focus on Emotional Intelligence and my book, Entitled to Fail, Endowed to Succeed: America’s Journey Back to Greatness, and What Have You Got to Give, written by my son Corbin when he was thirteen. Both of which you can order off my website www.DawnBillings.com.
Reward your child for their hard working tendencies but do not reward their perfectionistic tendencies. Instead as I stated above, attempt to encourage them to learn the distinction between perfection and excellence and encourage them toward striving for excellence and living the greatness within them.
Try to understand when their perfectionistic tendencies make them behave a bit like chicken-little. Minor things might cause them to feel as though the sky is really falling. Not completing an assignment on time, or getting less than a perfect score might cause a child with strong blue color tendencies to feel extremely stressed.
Be firm, but empathetic, fair, and respectful when disciplining them. Make sure that the discipline accurately fits the behavior for which they are being punished. Details matter greatly to these children. They can argue over details all day.
Don’t fall apart and get very emotional when you are attempting to communicate your feelings. They like children with strong purple color personality tendencies can become overwhelmed by too much emotion and withdraw. Beware if your child has blue and purple color tendencies at the top of their color blend. We call these children 'blurple' and they are sticklers for the rules. Once a rule is set, no one should break it ever. Don't even think about getting into your car without putting your seat belt on. You will never hear the end of it.
Remain strong, but loving. Children with strong blue personality tendencies depend greatly on your consistency and logic. Have your own identity, and allow them to develop theirs. Follow through will every promised disciplinary action. They will remember and catalog every time you don’t. Be your word. Do what you promise to do. Integrity means a great deal to these children and they struggle to trust without it.
Continue to admire their methodical, curious, inventive natures, without allowing them to become rigid and/or superior. They learn early how bright they are, this is where they also much learn something about humility. Give them room to explore and investigate. Whatever they get fixated on, whether it be fish, the planets, dinosaurs, birds, it doesn't matter, they will go into a subject that they are interested in until you are almost sick of hearing about it.
Dawn Billings is the inventor of the patented parenting tool for toddlers called Capables. Dawn is the executive director of the RelationshipHelpResort.com in Arizona where she hosts private couples therapy retreats to help strengthen and heal broken relationships. Dawn is the founder of RelationshipHelp.com and creator of the comprehensive ONLINE RelationshipHelpAtHome.com Dawn is also the author and architect of the Primary Colors Relationship Personality Tests and Insight Tools licensed and used widely by relationship experts around the nation.