My daughter, an Emotional Manifesting Generator who is nearly 9 years old, is an avid user of technology. Despite my efforts to steer her away from YouTube marathons and Minecraft builds, that is still where she ends up spending a large part of her holidays. To try to counter this tendency, the two of us wrote a list of activities for the holidays and, since she enjoys cooking, one of the tasks was to make a cake completely on her own. After finding a simple recipe and gathering all the ingredients, I left her alone in the kitchen. That was when the typical Manifesting Generator behaviour showed up…
Instead of reading the recipe and following the instructions step by step, my daughter started measuring the ingredients and poured them all into the bowl. At that moment, she realised there were instructions she had not followed and, faced with the chaos, a huge wave of emotion followed, hitting deeply into her mother’s Undefined Solar Plexus.
Manifesting Generators: skipping steps since labour
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 before she was born.
Born at 6:07 in the early morning, my daughter came into the world through a fast labour. When the contractions became closer together, I went to the hospital, but I was sent home:
“This will only be happening sometime tomorrow around dinner time,” they told me.
I went back home, but I did not stay there for long. Three hours later, I returned to the hospital and, when I arrived at the maternity ward, a nurse walked by and heard me screaming through the contractions.
“We need a room NOW!” she shouted.
There went my dream of a calm water birth. My daughter was born in no time and, after a pregnancy filled with vomiting, pain, and a great deal of loneliness, I finally held her in my arms and loved her as I had never loved anyone before.
Nothing prepares us for a child. No matter how many plans we make and how many books accompany us during pregnancy, we only understand what to do when they are born. With my undefined Head and Ajna, I am open to every possibility, and my Defined Spleen likes to be prepared, so I am always thinking about what could go wrong… Let me tell you, not even on my worst days would I have imagined what came next…
On her fifth day of life, my daughter began crying inconsolably. You know that sweet baby cry that makes them sound like little dolls? That was NOT my daughter’s cry! My daughter’s cry sounded like a scream of pain worthy of an Alien from the film with Sigourney Weaver.
Nothing I did helped. Feeding, cuddles, changing her nappy. Taking clothes off, putting clothes on. Holding her. Sleeping with her. I ran from doctor to doctor, to emergency rooms, to specialists. My daughter was healthy, developing well, she just cried… A lot!
“It’s infant colic!” a prestigious gastroenterologist told me in one of the most expensive private hospitals in London.
I had given him £350 for a 15 minute consultation just to hear that.
“So what do we do?” I asked between her piercing cries.
“Nothing. It will pass.”
And it did. At 22 weeks, my daughter managed to grab one of those toys that hang above baby bouncers, and the crying stopped being constant. I cannot shake the feeling that my daughter’s crying came from an immense frustration with the physical limits of her body. For a long time, she had wanted to grab toys, sit up, bite things, speak, crawl, but the normal patterns of development could not keep up with the pace of her mind.
How to Raise a Manifesting Generator
At that time, I knew nothing about Human Design, but I knew everything about what it felt like not to be loved for who you are. In a different way, I too cried my frustrations inwardly. I was determined not to repeat my parents’ mistakes.
No. I was going to make my own mistakes instead, Defined Heart and all, and rather than trying to limit my daughter’s energy, I chose to feed it. I used to take her everywhere on foot, alone, with her in the baby carrier because I did not have a car, to baby sign language classes, yoga, dance, and music. I took her to playgroups even though my Line 2 twisted itself into knots, and to the park as well. While other babies her age were going to bed at 7 in the evening and sleeping through the night, my daughter only started sleeping six hours straight at around two and a half years old, and even today falling asleep is still something that requires a great deal of persuasion.
Honestly, when this girl starts going to nightclubs, they will be playing the last song of the night and she will still be dancing on top of the speakers.
My daughter talks a lot and needs constant attention, Defined Throat. Even so, she always says things that are either funny or relevant. She is fascinating to listen to because, when she speaks, she naturally draws attention, and that is very useful for someone like me with an undefined Throat. She can be a little misleading at school because her G is undefined, so she tends to follow the expected behaviour. With me, she knows she does not need to do that, and she ends up amplifying my defined G. She is not a child anyone would describe as badly behaved, but she surprises everyone because she seems to have more energy than all the other children put together. In general, children are very good at adapting to new circumstances, but my daughter, up to now, has responded very positively to life transitions, some of them particularly demanding, such as moving to another country. Her undefined G gives her that flexibility.
My parenting style has always fit within conscious or positive parenting, where there is deep respect for the child as an individual being. As a person, my method is always this: when in doubt, give more love. That is almost always the choice I make when things become more difficult with her.
I cannot say it is not often hard for me to respect her rhythm. What helps is that I am a Generator and my battery is naturally charged. Even so, we are not meant to raise a child alone, and that is what I have always done. With little or no support, the exhaustion began to build, and close to her second birthday I received a clinical diagnosis of burnout. Me, a typical 5/2 Generator trying to give everything and be everything for everyone: caring for a daughter, trying to save a marriage, creating a non profit organisation to support mothers in my neighbourhood, training as a breastfeeding counsellor, and trying to make my career happen. Until my body said, “No.” What followed was a period in which I let go of some of the things that were weighing on me, but I did not change the way I was raising my daughter. For that, I would have had to find strength, and I am still searching for it. She is my most serious project.
My little Lioness, in her sign, her hair, and her ability to roar, has always liked to skip steps. She barely crawled and already preferred walking upright while holding on to things, until she managed to walk on her own. She was already speaking short phrases in two languages before turning one. Quite recently, she spent months with a loose canine tooth, only for both her premolar and canine to fall out on the same day. So when she throws all the ingredients into the bowl at once, I am not surprised. And when the cake goes into the oven and turns out delicious in the end, I am not surprised by that either.
The Challenges I Feel in Raising My Emotional Manifesting Generator
It is not the fact that she is a Manifesting Generator that I find most difficult. It is the fact that she is Emotional. I was raised in a house full of undefined Solar Plexuses, very calm, nobody got angry. Sometimes I think I must have picked up definition for my Solar Plexus from somewhere because I used to have occasional bursts of emotion that were quickly crushed by my parents. My emotional outbursts were NOTHING compared to my daughter’s emotional wave. When it hits her, it is best to step aside!
I do not even want to imagine what it is like to be the mother of an Emotional Manifestor. I try to give her space and support her. If I leave her alone, it seems worse. If I try to contain it, it is far worse. Distracting her brings other harmful effects in the conditioning she absorbs from around her. I give her hugs when she lets me, but my Solar Plexus still struggles to let all of that pass through, especially because this is my child. Sometimes she is already off doing something else, distracted, and her wave is still crashing inside me. I feel her waves in a very internal way.
Decision making is not simple for her either. If Manifesting Generators like to skip steps, how are they supposed to have the patience to wait for emotional clarity? And on top of that, she is a Line 3, so how is she meant to decide without experimenting? And then there is the undefined Spleen, G, and Heart, leaving her uncertain about what she fears, who she is, and what she wants. Knowing what you want at this age is already difficult in itself. This clashes with my instant and absolute Sacral response. Her hesitation and potential change of mind frustrate me sometimes. Limiting the choices helps, but even so, certainty is slow to arrive.
“Do you want peach ice cream or tutti frutti?” I ask after we have filtered eight different flavours down to two.
“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 tutti frutti another time.”
“I could choose tutti frutti…”
We share Line 5 and, although that brings us harmony in terms of Profile, it is still a point of conflict. Line 5’s capacity for projection means that we can easily end up disappointing one another. If, for any reason, I raise my voice, she immediately tells me that I do not usually speak to her like that. If I see her being less empathetic with a friend, I call her back to herself because I taught her to be better than that. This means that we both give each other very little margin for error because we have high expectations of one another. In terms of motherhood, this is dangerous. We already have a strong tendency to expect our children to be everything we could not be ourselves, so we project ourselves onto them. With Line 5, this becomes even more pronounced. My advantage is that we are both different enough for me to recognise that she will always be her own person, with her own unique path and her own unique goals.
With her Root defined and mine completely open, my daughter rules me. All it takes is for her to say, “I’m hungry!” and I immediately, almost unconsciously, get up and go prepare something for her to eat. Any request from her creates enormous pressure in me, no matter how small, unnecessary, or unfounded it may be. For now, I do not think she has yet realised that she has this power over me. That, and the fact that I am a Generator with a Left Angle Cross of Service, makes it natural for me to serve her.
However, when we are together, our partnership closes all the centers. We function very well together, just the two of us and, because this is what happens most of the time, our life together is relatively calm and self sufficient. Like everything that has light, there is also shadow here: there is very little space for other people to enter. Our life story has also made us become very bonded, almost in a theme of “the two of us against the world.” This means that we do very well on our own.
We still have some compromises that have not yet shown themselves, but I have no doubt they will begin to appear in adolescence, especially when her Line 3 starts wanting to experiment more.
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, did not have that, which had nothing to do with our energetic compatibility and everything to do with my parents’ own conditioning. However, when the energy type is antagonistic, the situation can become even worse. My brother, a Manifesting Generator, experienced even greater conditioning than I did because a Manifesting Generator child is quickly labelled as disobedient or hyperactive. What matters is accepting the child’s personality while offering them acceptable limits and options that allow them to retain some sense of control over the situation. Knowing their energy type helps us make that adjustment in the right way.
Ra Uru Hu himself, the founder of Human Design, said that the Human Design system was most useful for children. Our children do not come with an instruction manual, but what if they came with their chart? Today we already know the importance of the first seven years of life in child development and the impact those years carry for the rest of a person’s life. After all, that is where our personal beliefs become rooted. But when we do not know what is right or wrong for our children, who are different from us, how can we support them in the way they actually need? It would have been so much easier to accept my daughter’s early childhood if I had had access to this knowledge. Today, everything I know about her in Human Design terms, I use so that I can be a mother who truly accepts her as she is and gives her unconditional love.
Non-sacral parents of Manifesting Generators may struggle in particular with so much energy. It is essential that they prioritise their rest and try to find activities they genuinely enjoy doing with their Manifesting Generator children. Even sacrals, although they have greater energy reserves, need to understand that no one can fill another person’s cup if their own jug is empty.
I know that no mother would swap her child for an “easier” one. Even so, I truly feel that I have gained so much from the daughter I have. She takes me out of my comfort zone, calls me out of my little hermit shell, and makes me a better person. On top of that, she is a very funny little person, full of insight, who enriches my life every single day. Her Emotional Authority and the waves that come from that defined Solar Plexus force me to deal with the conflict I spent my whole life avoiding. I would not give her any other Energy Type or Authority, even if I could.
