I have two arguments for you as to why children should not undergo personality assessments or be subjected to almost any other psychometric measurement. The first is that personality constructs developed by adults often do not apply to children; and the second is that while we are all susceptible to self-fulfilling prophecies, children are far more likely to become exactly what you tell them they are.
Unless you are witnessing a child’s severe emotional or mental collapse with a relatively clear cause (grief, trauma, loss, guilt, etc.), many forms of counseling or psychological assessment focused on self-discovery that vastly benefit adults could be detrimental to normal childhood development.
Many researchers, employers or other groups, and individuals benefit greatly from understanding core personality elements, relative intelligence (IQ), behavioral attributes or inclinations, emotional and social intelligence levels (EQ), work aptitudes, and other abilities that help people understand their core strengths and weaknesses, special abilities, talents, and so forth. Knowing yourself objectively is a key ingredient to living an entirely volitional, willful, and purpose-driven, satisfying life.
Here’s a couple of problems regarding one of our foundational understandings of personality – The Five Factor Model: one of the most positive elements largely cannot be applied to kids, and the most negative element applies equally to almost all kids (right about the time you start to think something’s wrong with them).
The first dimension I’m referring to is Openness to Experience. In adults, this is highly correlated to Conscientiousness and Agreeableness – two other traits that are powerfully related to career success and overall life satisfaction. As an adult, if you’re sitting alone with nothing to do and 10 people invite you to participate in some unfamiliar activity, listen to their new point of view, go on an unplanned adventure with them, take a chance on a new job or new opportunity, or otherwise experience something that you haven’t much considered, it’s easy to see how saying yes more often gives you far more opportunities to learn, to succeed, to discover your hidden abilities, to improve your performance, to find love, to create a more appropriately nuanced view of the world, to gain a wider perspective, etc. Those who say no more than they say yes often suffer the reverse of all of those common measures of a life well-lived. But as a child, how often did you have any real options to decide what you wanted to do with no insistence from parents, fear of punishment, fear of being left behind, or with simply no other options available except whichever one was being presented in any instance?
The greatest indicator of what will eventually figure into Openness to Experience in kids is Conscientiousness. Openness to Experience (OE) develops through adolescence as kids gain more freedom to make their own decisions. The problem here is that if you tell an impressionable kid that he is not open to experience, then guess what – he won’t be. It’s good to let them know how important new experiences are to develop their brains, or how much difference this trait will make later in life, but you don’t want to tell someone who wouldn’t have developed such traits yet that they simply don’t have them. For kids, pay attention to their level of conscientiousness – whether they get good grades, their ability to persist, keep trying, keep learning, etc. – as an indicator of their ability to consider new ideas and try different options.
The second measure I referred to that most kids have, or develop in their teens at least, is one marked by anxiety, moodiness, fluctuations in emotional stability, and low self-concept clarity: Neuroticism. This is probably more important than OE in that it looks like a problem and is very easily read by any psychometric measure. However, when you were a hormonal teenager, how sure were you about who you are, or what people thought of you, or how you felt? Were you an emotional rock of stability that always knew what to do, how to feel, and what to say? Of course not. If a kid talks about killing himself all day long, that’s one thing, but if a kid is testing his or her limits, and yours, or happy one minute and crying or screaming the next, that doesn’t mean the kid’s crazy, and you’re not going to do anyone any favors by telling anyone that they probably are crazy when they’re just going through normal developmental stages.
People most often do what is expected of them. This is why you act like a serious professional at work, like a jackass out with the fellas, like a kid when you’re with your kids, and so on. It’s also why people who are constantly expected to cheat usually will, and why people who are expected to win usually do. It’s why you make jokes around people who say you’re funny, and why you use big words around people who say you’re smart. These are self-fulfilling prophecies. And when you’re not quite sure who you are yet, you’re extremely susceptible to them. If you tell someone every day (even adults) that they don’t like trying new things, or that they’re neurotic or bipolar, or otherwise crazy, that’s exactly what you’re going to get.
By the same token, when you tell someone authentically what his or her good qualities are and how you’ve come to expect those good things from them, those are exactly the things you’re going to get from them.
the Volitient blog 