Parenting by Human Design Type is a series where we poke a little fun at ourselves based on our Human Design Energy Type. We’ll explore what parenting looks like in real life, as far as how we interact with our children. First up: Manifestor Moms!
Raising Kids as a Human Design Manifestor
Manifestors hate being interrupted. We prefer solitude. We’re driven to create–feverishly, sometimes. And we don’t ‘need’ other people around us.
So why in the heck did we become parents?!
Because Manifestors make amazing moms, okay?
I know, it sounds counterintuitive. But hear me out. Manifestors get a bad rap for being totally self-involved and even a little bit mean. But that’s not true–err, not entirely.
We’re also creative. Inspired. Natural leaders. We encourage others to believe in themselves and go after their dreams. And we’re ace at getting people on board with whatever we think is a cool idea.
All that makes us excellent at raising kids — as long as we keep a few important things in mind along the journey.
Full disclosure: I am a Manifestor Mom so I can speak from experience. My daughter, age 10, is a Generator. My son, who’s 9, is a Projector.
When we’re cognizant of our own Human Design Energy Type, and we begin to understand what it all means, we can begin to step into the “highest expression” of each element of our chart.
And we can ultimately nail this thing called motherhood! (We can also nail other things in our life, like our career, friendships, marriage and pretty much everything else!)
Even better, when we recognize that our Type is likely different from our kids’ and our partner’s Type, we understand that what they need is very different from what we needed when we were kids (and it’s certainly very different from we thought they needed before we learned about Human Design!).
Once we embrace and appreciate our differences, it becomes possible to give our loved ones what they uniquely need. Which means we can create peace in our homes and enjoy fruitful, cooperative, fun-loving relationships with those around us; most importantly, with our kiddos.
The Upside to Manifestor Motherhood
We Manifestor Moms get that parents don’t always need to be hands-on and hovering over their children. We understand that creativity is a blessing that adds color and flare to a household. And that boundary-setting (“Mommy needs quiet time!”) is a good thing for our kids to observe.
Despite our reclusive, stubborn ways, we Manifestor Moms may be a handful at home, but we teach our kids a whole bunch of wonderful lessons about life, how to cope, and how to embrace their own unique brilliance.
Better still, we have the unique capacity to establish nourishing, flourishing connections with them. Here are just a few of the ways we do that!
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Creative Play
While Manifestor Moms may not always be up for a day of intense 1:1 play (we do need our naps), we love to invent new games and launch new projects with our kids.
We might spend a few minutes on a Saturday morning gathering random odds and ends — zip ties, bouncy balls, pipe cleaners and glitter glue, for instance — to prep our kids for a rainy crafternoon.
And we’ll wind up inspiring them to slap together a wild and whacky masterpiece they’ll be crazy proud of.
They’ll have gotten messy. Worked with their hands. Felt our enthusiasm and creative energy surging, absorbing it as their own and boosting our signal (if they have any open Centers). All excellent experiences for young minds and hearts, right?
Their masterpiece might be the most hideous thing in the world to us, but they’ll have had a blast creating it. Which is the way a rainy Saturday ought to be spent, the way I see it.
The only trouble is, that hideous masterpiece will be on display in our living room for the next eight months. But we understand the inner peace and sense of accomplishment that comes with birthing something the world has never seen before. So, on the mantel it goes!
Self-Entertainment
After all that crafting, we Manifestor Moms are going to need a lie-down. Even if we can’t sleep (because we’re buzzing with caffeine, addicted to coffee, minimum 3 cups to survive in today’s world), we’re spent, need to recharge, and need our solitude in order to do it.
Which is fine. Don’t call Children & Family Services. We’re not neglecting our kids. We’re simply teaching them that they’ll need to figure out how to entertain themselves for a little while so mommy can function the rest of the day.
So we make some simple rules our kids can follow while we rest:
- Don’t go near the stove.
- Don’t play with matches or knives.
- Don’t leave the house.
- And for the love of all things, don’t barge into our room. Capische?
And who knows what they’ll get up to while we meditate, read, visualize world peace or get some shut-eye! When left to their own devices (sometimes the actual kind, with screens, even though I freakin’ hate them), my kids will play restaurant, make themselves a lavish snack of crackers, cheese, blueberries and baby carrots (seriously). They might sketch their dream house or some futuristic airport, decorate a wall with stickers, dress up the dog or whip out a deck of cards and start playing War.
Heck, they might even sort some laundry! (It’s happened, I swear.)
I really don’t care what they do, frankly! Because I know for sure they’re doing it independently and without needing me to greenlight or moderate every move they make.
It’s wonderful for children to build the skills to self-entertain. And it’s great for us, too, to be able to let go of control once in a while, especially in the name of self-care.
So, Manifestor Mom, go ahead and take that nap. 20 minutes of solitude can only do everyone in the home a world of good.
Healthy Boundaries
Kids learn boundaries directly from us. If we’re always up in their business, nosing into their privacy, and not respecting their need to explore the world in a way that makes sense to them, they risk developing blurred boundaries.
Later in life, that may mean they’re prone to allowing others to step into their safety zone when they’re not welcome. To violate their privacy. To trample on their own needs. And we don’t want that.
As Manifestors, we are all-too-familiar with how irritating it can be to have someone disrupt our focus or step too close into our dense and repelling energy field. We understand how important it is to keep people at a safe distance, so as not to knock us off our creating path.
So it makes sense that we should only honor our kids’ need for solo time, too.
Conversely, as parents, we teach our kids unhealthy boundaries when we don’t ask them to honor ours. Raise your hand if you’re guilty of letting your kids encroach upon your need for privacy. Rather, don’t. We all do it.
As moms, we’re constantly faced with the decision of whether or not to cater to our child’s every whim–even when we’re a thousand percent depleted. And, too often, we give in to them, and give so much that we’ve got nothing left for ourselves. Which does no one any good.
When we take good care of ourselves, our bodies, our minds and our spirits, we demonstrate self-love and self-worth for our children. And that’s worth gold.
When my kids were babies, I routinely disregarded my boundaries. Truly, I didn’t have any. I thought, “I’m a Mom now. I guess that means I have no personal space anymore and that I’ll have zero time to myself for the next 20 years. Suck it up, soldier. What’s mine is theirs and that’s that.”
It was awful. I was depressed, exhausted, anxious and pretty much a hot mess all the time.
It took me a lot of years (and the gentle nudging from my super-evolved husband) to start stealing back bits of my privacy and my me-time, a few minutes at a time.
To actually shut the bathroom door and tell the kids they really gotta knock before barging right in, and it better be something serious if it can’t wait ’til after I wipe.
When I learned I’m a Manifestor, I realized that not everyone is like me, and that made a big difference in the way I operated my day-to-day life.
As I looked into my chart, it dawned on me that not everyone gets these big downloads of creative inspiration. Whoa, lightbulb moment: I’m unique! See, I used to think everybody else just managed their creativity time better than me, and that they somehow figured out how to function in life better than I could.
I always believed there was just something wrong with me because I always felt tired and withdrawn and so ‘in my head.’ I grew up being told I was incredibly selfish for that, and that I ought to stop navel-gazing and do something already. So following my urges, and honoring my need to create and recuperate in private, was conditioned right the heck out of me.
Nowadays, as I embrace my Manifestorhood and practice following my Strategy and Authority, I’m demonstrating healthy boundaries for my kids.
They know when I’m in my office not to bother me because I’m working. (Okay, I’ll admit that occasionally they “accidentally” make a cameo while I’m on a Zoom call because they love pretending they hate getting caught on camera.)
And they know that I respect their boundaries, too. If they need to…do whatever it is they do in their rooms for hours on end, so be it. They’re learning that I honor that need, which means they’re learning to respect their own healthy boundaries.
Using ‘Strategy’ to Establish Boundaries
I find that kids are extremely responsive to things like 5-minute warnings to announce that a transition to a new activity is coming. After all, as Manifestors, it’s best for us to INFORM (that’s our Strategy) others about all that stuff swirling in our heads, especially if it involves them. Remember: they can’t read our minds (usually).
It causes chaos when we suddenly change gears and announce, “Get in the car, kids! we’re going to Grandma’s,” without any kind of heads up.
They also need lots of reminders; for example, even though I let them know they’re free to decompress after school or camp in whatever way they need, that they still need to empty the dishwasher before 6pm. You can set alarms at regular intervals leading up to that time so they don’t get too sucked into the world of YouTube Shorts.
Children also do extremely well with expectation-setting in advance of an activity or outing taking place. And this works as a great tool for developing healthy boundaries. “It’s gonna be chilly at the park,” for instance, “so you’ll want to prepare to take care of your body’s needs by bringing a sweatshirt, just in case…”
When we teach our kids that they have sovereignty over their bodies and that they have the power to do something proactive that can prevent any potential discomfort, then we’ve done a killer job at Momming.
Good Stewardship
We Manifestors get idea-bombed by Source energy. Oftentimes we have no clue why a particular urge hits us, but it does, sometimes like a firehose. For me it’s like a teleprompter appears before my face and I have to just start reading from the screen in real time, learning what She’s calling upon me to initiate.
“What is it this time, God?”
I find it’s frequently the case that our urges are meant to transform the world at large — especially if we have a lot of Collective energy in our charts — or, at the very least, it’s meant to transform, in a good way, the people in our immediate families or communities.
Which is great news for Manifestor Moms! As long as we don’t think of our children as puppets who’ll do our bidding, we can incite radical change in our world. We can literally create the kind of world we want to live in, for the benefit of all, when we share our inspirations with our kids and get them on board with that idea.
Even cooler, if we have a brilliant idea that would be great for the environment or for people in need, we can watch it come to fruition even faster if we’re raising little Generators!
A few years ago, I got it in my mind that my kids could earn a little cash, build responsibility over managing money, cultivate a little independence AND learn about becoming good stewards of the environment: by collecting aluminum cans from their neighbors for recycling.
So they headed out every Tuesday before dinner to pick up a bucket here, a bag there, on our neighbors’ front porches. It wasn’t long before I could trust them to do it independently, without an adult chaperone around. Then, about once a month, we’d haul the cans to the scrap metal yard to sell it back into the market.
It was a disgusting mess of a job, and it didn’t yield a ton of cash (half a penny per can here in Pennsylvania in the midst of the Covid epidemic). But it did yield all those good things I mentioned above — PLUS, it inspired a whole bunch of people to follow suit. Because a reporter caught wind of their little project, and it hit the big time.
I am one proud mama!
After that aired, I got loads of emails from parents around the country saying they’d been inspired by what these kids could accomplish, and that they would try something similar with their own kids in their own communities.
See? What might start off sounding like a knuckleheaded idea can turn into a revolution! And that weird little idea that won’t leave you alone? It could potentially change the world for the better.
So be proud, Manifestor Mama! Trust those urges, honor your boundaries, take those naps and love those babies! You got this:)
Next up in the Parenting by Human Design Type series, we dive into Generator Moms!
If you want more stories like these and guidance on embracing your Human Design, join my mailing list! And if you’re ready to get the full readout of your unique HD Owner’s Manual or want to book a live reading with me, hop on over to my Products page and put in your order now. I can’t wait to geek out on Human Design with you!
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