My daughter, an almost 9-year-old Emotional Manifesting Generator, is an avid technology user. Despite my efforts to steer her away from YouTube marathons and Minecraft building, that is where she ends up spending most of her holidays. To try and counter this tendency, the two of us wrote a list of activities for the break and, since she loves cooking, one of the tasks was to bake a cake entirely on her own. After we found a simple recipe and gathered all the ingredients, I left her alone in the kitchen. That’s when the classic Manifesting Generator behavior showed up…
Instead of reading the recipe and following the steps one by one, my daughter just measured out the ingredients and dumped them all into the bowl. In that moment, she realized there were instructions she hadn’t followed and, faced with the chaos, a huge emotional wave hit her hard — one that struck deep into her mother’s Undefined Solar Plexus.
Manifesting Generators: skipping steps since labor
My daughter is my greatest teacher. My little 3/5 Emotional Manifesting Generator has taught me more about myself than the 28 years of life I lived before she was born.
Born early in the morning at 6:07, my daughter came fast. When the contractions got closer, I went to the hospital, but I was sent back home:
“This won’t happen until around dinnertime tomorrow,” they told me.
I went back home, but I didn’t last there very long. Three hours later I returned to the hospital and as I arrived at the maternity ward, a nurse walked by and heard me screaming with the contractions.
“We need a room NOW!” she shouted.
So much for my dream of a calm water birth. My daughter came out quickly, and after a pregnancy full of vomiting, pain and a lot of loneliness, I finally held her in my arms and loved her like I had never loved anyone before.
Nothing prepares us for a child. No matter how many plans we make or how many books we read during pregnancy, we only start to understand what to do once they are born. With my Open Crown and Ajna, I’m open to all possibilities, and my Defined Spleen likes to be prepared, so I’m always thinking about what could go wrong… Let me tell you, not even on my worst days could I have imagined what was about to happen.
On her fifth day of life, my daughter started crying uncontrollably. You know that sweet newborn cry that sounds like a tiny doll? That was NOT my daughter’s cry! Her cry sounded like a scream of pain straight out of an Alien movie with Sigourney Weaver.
Nothing I did helped. Nursing, cuddles, changing her diaper. Taking clothes off, putting clothes on. Holding her. Sleeping with her. I went from doctors to emergency rooms to specialists. My daughter was healthy, developing well. She just cried. A lot.
“It’s infant colic!” a renowned gastroenterologist told me at one of the most expensive private hospitals in London.
I had paid him £350 for a 15-minute consultation to hear that.
“So what do we do?” I asked through her piercing cries.
“Nothing. It will pass.”
And it did. At 22 weeks, my daughter managed to grab one of those toys hanging above the baby swings, and the crying stopped being constant. I am convinced that my daughter’s crying came from a deep frustration with the physical limits of her body. She had long wanted to grab toys, sit up, chew things, talk, crawl, but the normal developmental patterns just couldn’t keep up with the speed of her mind.
How to Raise a Manifesting Generator
At the time, I knew nothing about Human Design, but I knew everything about what it feels like not to be loved for who you are. I, in a different way, had also cried my frustrations inward. I was determined not to repeat my parents’ mistakes.
No. I would make my own mistakes (Defined Heart) and instead of trying to limit my daughter’s energy, I chose to nurture it. I would take her alone, on foot with her in the ergonomic baby carrier since I didn’t have a car, to baby sign language classes, yoga, dance and music. I took her to playgroups, even though my Line 2 was squirming the whole time, and to the park. While other babies her age were in bed by 7 p.m. and sleeping through the night, my daughter only started sleeping 6 hours straight at two and a half, and to this day, falling asleep takes serious negotiation.
Honestly. When this girl starts going to nightclubs, they’ll be playing the last song and she’ll still be dancing on top of the speakers.
My daughter talks a lot and needs constant attention (Defined Throat). Still, she always says either something funny or something meaningful. It’s fascinating to listen to her because when she speaks, she manages to draw attention, and that’s very helpful for someone like me with an Undefined Throat. She’s a bit misleading at school because her G center is undefined, so she ends up following the expected behavior. With me, she knows she doesn’t have to do that, and she ends up amplifying my defined G. She’s not the kind of child anyone would describe as misbehaved, but she surprises everyone by seeming to have more energy than all the other kids combined. In general, children adapt well to new circumstances, but my daughter has responded to life transitions — including a big one like moving to another country — with a lot of positivity. Her undefined G gives her that flexibility.
My parenting style has always fit within the conscious or positive parenting approach, where there is deep respect for the child as an individual being. As a person, my approach is always: when in doubt, give more love. That’s almost always my choice when things get harder with her.
I won’t say it’s easy to respect her pace. Thankfully, I’m a Generator and have a naturally full battery. Still, we are not meant to raise children alone, and that’s exactly what I’ve done. With little or no support, the exhaustion started to build, and by the time she was two, I was clinically diagnosed with burnout. I was the typical 5/2 Generator trying to give everything and be everything to everyone — caring for a child, trying to save a marriage, starting a nonprofit to support mothers in my neighborhood, training to be a breastfeeding counselor, and trying to build my career… Until my body said “No.” That was followed by a period where I let go of some of the things that were weighing me down, but I didn’t change the way I was raising my daughter. For that purpose, I would need to find strength, and I’m still looking for it. She is my most serious project.
My little Lioness (by sign, hair and roaring ability) has always liked to skip steps. She barely crawled and preferred to walk while holding on to things, until she finally started walking on her own. She was already speaking in full sentences in two languages before she turned one. Just recently, she spent months with a wobbly canine tooth, and then in a single day, both the premolar and the canine fell out. So when she dumps all the ingredients into the bowl at once, it doesn’t surprise me. When the cake goes in the oven and comes out delicious, that doesn’t surprise me either.
The Challenges I Feel Raising My Emotional Manifesting Generator
It’s not the fact that she’s a Manifesting Generator that I find the hardest. It’s the fact that she’s Emotional. I was raised in a house with Undefined Solar Plexuses, very calm, no one ever got angry. Sometimes I think I must have pulled definition into my own Solar Plexus from somewhere because I had emotional outbursts from time to time, which were quickly crushed by my parents. But my emotional bursts were NOTHING compared to my daughter’s emotional wave. When it hits her, you better get out of the way.
I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be the mother of an Emotional Manifestor. I try to give her space and support. If I leave her alone, it seems to get worse. If I try to contain it, it’s much worse. Trying to distract her has other harmful effects in terms of the conditioning she receives from those around her. I give hugs when she lets me, but my Solar Plexus still struggles to process all of that (and we’re talking about your own child on top of it). Sometimes she’s already moved on to doing something else, totally distracted, and her wave is still crashing into me. I feel her waves in a very internal way.
Decision-making is not easy for her either. If Manifesting Generators love to skip steps, how can they have the patience to wait for emotional clarity? On top of that, she’s a Line 3. How is she supposed to decide without trying things? And with an Undefined Spleen, G and Heart, she’s left unsure about what she’s afraid of, who she is, and what she wants. Knowing what you want at this age is already hard enough. This clashes with my instant and absolute Sacral. Her hesitation and potential change of mind can really frustrate me sometimes. Narrowing down the choices helps, but certainty is still slow to come.
“Do you want peach ice cream or tutti-frutti?” I ask after we’ve already filtered through 8 different flavors and narrowed it down to 2.
“I like peach but I also like tutti-frutti…” she tells me.
“Well, tutti-frutti has peach in it too…”
“Okay, but maybe I want peach.”
“Great. You can try the tutti-frutti another time.”
“I could pick the tutti-frutti…”
We both have Line 5 in common, and while that brings harmony in terms of Profile, it also creates conflict. Line 5’s capacity for projection means we can easily disappoint each other. If I, for whatever reason, raise my voice, she immediately tells me that I don’t usually speak to her like that. And when I see her being less empathetic with a friend, I call her out on it because I’ve taught her to be better than that. This means we give each other very little margin for error because we have high expectations of one another. That can be dangerous in parenting. We already tend to expect our children to become everything we never managed to be, so we end up projecting onto them. With Line 5, that tendency is intensified. My advantage is that we’re different enough for me to recognize that she will always be her own person, with her own path and unique goals.
With her Root defined and mine completely open, my daughter ends up calling the shots. All she has to do is say “I’m hungry,” and I unconsciously get up right away to prepare something for her. Any request from her puts a lot of pressure on me, no matter how small, unnecessary or unfounded it may be. For now, I think she hasn’t yet realized she has this power over me. That, and the fact that I’m a Generator with a Left Angle Cross of Planning: it’s natural for me to serve her.
However, when we’re together, our partnership closes all centers. We work very well just the two of us, and since that’s how things are most of the time, our relationship is relatively peaceful and self-sufficient. Like everything that has light, there’s also shadow here: there’s little room for others to enter. Our life story has also brought us very close, wrapped in a theme of “Just the two of us against the world.” Which makes us do very well on our own.
There are some connections that haven’t yet manifested, but I have no doubt they’ll start emerging in adolescence, especially when her Line 3 begins to seek more experiences.
The Blessing of Having a Manifesting Generator
All children need understanding and acceptance from their parents. I, the daughter of a Generator and a Projector, didn’t get that — which had nothing to do with our energy compatibility and everything to do with my parents’ own conditioning. However, when the energy types are at odds, the situation can get worse. My brother, a Manifesting Generator, experienced even more conditioning than I did because a (Generator) Manifesting child is quickly labeled disobedient or hyperactive. What matters is accepting the child’s personality while offering appropriate boundaries and options that allow them to retain some control over the situation. Knowing their energy type helps us make that adjustment in the right way.
Ra Uru Hu, who first conceptualized Human Design, said that the Human Design system is most useful for children. Our children don’t come with an instruction manual, but what if they came with their Chart? Today we already understand the importance of the first seven years of life in a child’s development and the impact this stage has on the rest of their life. After all, our personal beliefs are rooted there. But when we don’t know what’s right or wrong for our children, who are different from us, how can we support them in the way they need? It would have been so much easier to embrace my daughter’s early childhood if I had had access to this knowledge. Now, everything I know about her through Human Design helps me be the kind of mother who truly accepts her for who she is and gives her unconditional love.
Non‑sacral parents of Manifesting Generators may particularly struggle with so much energy. It is essential that they prioritize their own rest and seek out activities they genuinely enjoy doing with their Manifesting Generator children. Even sacral parents, despite having greater energy reserves, need to understand that no one can fill someone else’s cup if their own pitcher is empty.
I know no mother would trade her child for an “easier” one. Still, I truly feel I have gained so much from the daughter I have. She pulls me out of my comfort zone, calls me out of my little hermit shell, and makes me a better person. Plus, she is a fun and insightful little person who enriches my life every single day. Her Emotional Authority and the waves that come from that defined Solar Plexus force me to face conflict—the one thing I spent my entire life avoiding. I wouldn’t give her a different energy type or Authority even if I could.
