Are you curious about what’s happening in your child’s inner world?
Discover how to nurture their resilience and emotional health while understanding your patterns.
Your Patterns Shape Their World
Your child is not just growing—they are absorbing, not just learning, but adapting to the world you create. The Enneagram reveals that our deepest patterns—fears, desires, and automatic reactions—form the environment where children develop their sense of self.
This book is not about typing children but about understanding ourselves as parents. It invites exploring how our patterns shape the conditions that foster our children’s personality, resilience, and self-compassion.
- What if parenting isn’t about fixing but witnessing?
- What if the key to supporting our children’s development is loosening our patterns?
Understanding your child’s inner world.
Every moment, your child’s personality is forming—shaped by the emotional environment you create, your responses, and the patterns you bring into your parenting.
The Enneagram World of the Child is a guide to understanding the powerful forces influencing your child’s inner world. By exploring the connection between personality development and your emotional history, this book offers profound insights into:
- How anger, fear, and shame shape both parent and child.
- What’s happening in your child’s inner world as they develop?
In a world overflowing with to-do lists, screen time battles, households to manage, and businesses to run, this powerful resource is a much-needed invitation to parent with presence, heart, and self-awareness. After all, our children aren’t just passing through our homes—they are being formed by the everyday moments we often overlook. We are leaving imprints that shape how they relate to themselves and others—and they, in turn, are building the future of our shared humanity.
This book belongs in every parent’s hands. Change begins here. One person. One family. One transformational moment at a time. — Michelle Joy, MFT
The Enneagram World of the Child isn’t merely a book for parents — it is essential reading for any adult seeking to understand the profound impact of the early holding environment on a child’s psychological and emotional development. Whether you’re a parent, caregiver, educator, therapist, or simply someone curious about how early life shapes who we become, this book offers an insightful, moving, and transformative lens.
What truly sets The Enneagram World of the Child apart is its refusal to be a quick-fix parenting manual. This is a book for the courageous adult willing to look inward, who longs to break generational patterns and raise children with more presence, less projection, and deeper love. It is psychologically sound, spiritually resonant, and profoundly human. – The Practical Enneagram
A Journey Through the Sacred Territory of Early Development
Each chapter explores a foundational aspect of personality formation through the lens of the Enneagram and early childhood psychology:
- The Primal Need for Acceptance – How our children first learn who they are through what we welcome or reject.
- The Web of Connection – How attachment forms and how our patterns shape the way children experience relationship.
- The Primary Emotions – How anger, fear, and shame emerge as organizing forces in personality development.
- Anger: Life Force in Action – Why anger is not something to suppress but to understand.
- Fear: The Foundation of Protection – How children develop personal “fear ecologies” and what parents can do to support resilience.
- Shame: The Shape of Self – How early experiences of shame shape identity and how parents can help children move through it.
- The Superego: When Emotions Turn Against the Self – How inner voices form and how parents can create space for self-kindness.
- Curiosity: The Flame of Being – How to nurture a child’s sense of wonder and openness in a world that often shuts it down.
- The Sacred Dance of Development – Recognizing growth as an unfolding rather than a linear process.
- The Sacred Art of Seeing – How to truly see our children beyond our projections, expectations, and unconscious patterns.
Chapters integrate real-life examples, contemplative practices, and practical applications to help parents bring awareness into daily interactions.
This book summarises succinctly different parenting styles and their impact on the child explained through the lens of the enneagram. I found it informative and comprehensive. It gave me some very useful insights into my parenting. – Australian Beach Dweller
It has been the longing within the enneagram community to embrace the comparison and fusion of childhood development, attachment psychology, trauma, depth psychology, and spiritual perspectives with an eye for developing spiritual practices that one can work with to reclaim our natural inner resilience. John Harper’s work The Enneagram World of the Child is a bold and spangled work that both simplifies a sometimes complicated map of consciousness, as well as provides for the reader a reflection-rich sanctuary of a book, that can fill the heart with gold. For the tender and injured inner child in all of us, John’s book is an oasis for soul work. – Greg Ondera, Diamond Approach Student, Enneagram Enthusiast, Parent and Grandparent
- Parents who want to understand how their patterns impact their child’s early development.
- Enneagram students looking for a deeper, applied approach to personality formation.
- Anyone raising a child who desires to create a space of resilience, self-compassion, and presence.
Our children do not need perfect parents. They need parents willing to see them, to see themselves, and to stay present in the unfolding mystery of who they are becoming. The Enneagram is not a system of control but a path of freedom.