Parenting A Manifestor
Are you a parent to a Manifestor? Do you have the joy (and the challenge, let’s be honest) of sharing an intimate family bond with someone who falls underthe Manifestor energy type?
Whether you are a non-Manifestor who is parenting a Manifestor, or whether you are a Manifestor yourself and you are also parenting another Manifestor, this post is for you. In this post I’ll cover tips for how to navigate this relationship peacefully, while also offering you guidance and a framework for understanding the ways to get the best out of the Manifestor in your life.
While I will look at this from a few different angles it is important to clarify from the outset that I certainly cannot cover everything to do with a Manifestor child in one episode. Manifestor energy, even in children, certainly cannot be contained into a box as small as a simple blog post.
What are the tips that we can give parents to really help them get on board and be really supportive of their Manifestor children? That is such an important question. With more Manifestors being born into the world, particularly with the expectation that from 2025 to 2027 it will be exclusively Manifestors being born (this is referenced in the original Human Design teachings from Ra Uru Hu), it is becoming increasingly important to not only understand our young Manifestors, but to support them to grow up to be unwounded in their power. This is ultimately the greatest gift you can give your Manifestor child regardless of their age.
I am a Splenic Manifestor, but I also come from a very consistent and long familial line of Manifestors, which is very, very rare. My father is a 1/3 Splenic Manifestor. My son is a 4/6 Emotional Manifestor. I have grandmothers who were Manifestors.
As a Manifestor parent, I now have an opportunity to grow, facilitate and support the unleashing and unlocking of another Manifestor into the world. Whether you are finding it challenging or enlightening, I encourage you to feel the sacredness of your role as parent to a Manifestor.
To help you out, here are the top 7 tips for building a healthy Manifestor, and maintaining a peaceful relationship with them:
1. RECOGNIZE THE RARITY
The first thing to remember when parenting a Manifestor is that we need to recognize that this is rare. This is incredibly rare. Manifestors only account for 9% of the population. So having a Manifestor child that has come into your life (especially if you are a Manifestor yourself), means that you are part of a very, very small percentage of people in the population who are experiencing the dynamics of these energies together. You are bestowed with a unique privilege, and a unique set of challenges.
it is highly likely that you have never learned how to understand and operate with a Manifestor. Have you ever known a Manifestor before? Have you seen how they are different from the rest of society? Since their birth, you likely have treated them with an automatic viewpoint – yours. You see the world a certain way (based on your type), and you naturally expect a Manifestor child to be the same. You will find out very quickly that even as babies, a Manifestor child will not be told what to do. They want to go at their own pace and are born with an innate way of feeling themselves and the world around them. This may be very, very different to your experience.
This is a conscious shift in your perspective as a parent. It requires a shift in your mindset to recognize that as mothers or fathers, if we have the ability to parent a Manifestor, we’ve been given a privilege. If we have the ability to raise a Manifestor, we are co-collaborators in their journey of impacting the world.
As a Manifestor who also parents a Manifestor? Not only are you impacting the world, but you are also part of this journey of unlocking another Manifestor who is going to do significant things in the world. The rare of the rare. Try to remember that on the tough days.
I have three children. A Generator, a Projector, and my Manifestor. My husband is also a Projector. We place significant effort as a family, into celebrating and being grateful for the energy of my Manifestor child. We also put a great deal of effort into celebrating my energy as a Manifestor. So whenever I, or my little Manifestor have initiated something, or whenever we have Informed, or whenever we are just feeling that our energy is impacting people around us, we have learned in our family to communicate that and expect celebration in return.
2. THEIR ENERGY IS POLARIZING
I know that parenting a Manifestor can feel very tiring. It can feel very frustrating. We need to understand that Manifestor children are going to be unleashed Manifestors. Manifestor children are going to fully embody all of that Manifestor energy without limitation, fully embodying their big aura, before they’ve experienced any of the social conditioning that tells them that they should shrink away.
If you have a Manifestor younger than the age of seven, they are living in the time developmentally before they have started to take on social conditioning.
What you are experiencing as their parent is the full brunt of their big, unfiltered, unrefined Manifestor energy. If you are a non Manifestor parent who is parenting a Manifestor, you are going to be uniquely experiencing their Manifestor energy like an intensified turn up dial.
Remember that Manifestors have the biggest aura of all of the energy types, and if you need to go back to those basics, remember that our aura is simply the projection of energy. It is simply how our energy is expressed and pushed out into the world, allowing other people to receive it.
People will energetically notice a Manifestor before they have even done anything. The big aura walks into a room before the body does. So people will notice your Manifestor child and pay attention to them before they have even uttered a word. This creates an unconscious energetic response of polarising.
People (adults and children alike) will respond to your Manifestor one of two ways – they will either be magnetised, inspired and find them adorable. Or they will be repelled, annoyed, unsettled and find them inexplicably “bad”.
There is no way of changing this. You cannot control how others react to your Manifestor kid, because it is their energetic experience, not yours or your childs. Over time, your child will come to notice this and likely struggle with the feeling of repelling people. Help them understand this isn’t their fault, or their responsibility.
Consider this too – as a parent, you will also be polarised by your child’s energy. My little Manifestor has such significant energy. He has a lot of defined motor energy (physical energy), and he holds a large, imposing energetic footprint. We can feel him, even when he is at the opposite end of our house. Even if he’s not making any noise.
This is really important to understand as a parent. You are still an energetic being interacting with the energetic being of your child. It can trigger you, too.
You will be experiencing that aura all up in your space, all the time, because you are a parent. So as parents, we don’t get reprieve from the energy of our children, and if you have a Manifestor child, you are experiencing volatile energy all the time, which is going to have an impact on you based on your specific design.
If you are a Manifestor parenting a Manifestor? We need to understand that we are going to be experiencing that Manifestor aura from the other side. While we are normally behind that closed aura and it’s quiet, calm, comfortable and free, when we are parenting a Manifestor we’re on the receiving end of that. It presses into our closed aura. Their big aura pushes into your big aura and we can experience an energetic and physical fatigue just from having that consistent pressure.
Your role as a parent is to support them in that, to celebrate that instead of dimming. Your role as a parent is to nurture and bring understanding to that, it’s to show love and compassion to your Manifestor instead of brushing that off, instead of throwing that aside and of casting it aside and believing that it’s minuscule or that it’s nothing.
3. LEARN THE NUANCES
No two people are ever the same. We are each uniquely designed. But like most things, we see this uniqueness show up intensely between Manifestors. No two Manifestors are ever the same, each being its own special creature. Your Manifestor child will likely be very different to any other.
My little Manifestor, we call him the ‘Minifestor’, is eight years old and has a 4/6 Profile and Emotional authority. So he operates quite differently to me. We see things differently. We operate fundamentally differently to everyone that we know. We are different, even to each other.
Where we also need to start drilling down into, as parents of Manifestors, is to look at how they are specifically unique. Start to understand all of the unique aspects of their chart. In particular, you are going to want to look at their authority, profile and motor energy centers.
The authority is their inner decision making center. Their inner authority is the way your child is aligned to make decisions. This significantly changes how a Manifestor shows up and experiences the world. As a Splenic Manifestor myself, I experience the world and I make decisions intuitively. It’s very much an internalized process. I feel it. I sense it physically. It’s quiet. I need to be still, so I can feel those sensations in the moment.
My Manifestor child is an Emotional Manifestor, which means for him to make decisions, he needs to ride an Emotional Wave. Granted the emotional wave is a bit erratic in children and can also go very, very fast (it slows down a little bit in adulthood) My Manifestor child is not able to make decisions in the moment like I am. And he certainly does not require quiet. He requires space to express that emotion, allowing acceptance. It needs to come out of his throat and be placed out in the world as he is present in experiencing all of those emotions. He will eventually reach that place of clarity again, where he feels he can make a decision.
So in his childhood, I need to accept that even though I desire him to make quick decisions, it won’t happen. I need to provide a supportive environment for him to just feel those emotional extremes as he feels them.
If you have an Ego Manifestor child, they are going to need to talk out all of the things that they want, and they don’t need your advice or your guidance. They actually just need to hear their own voice. So you’re going to have a child that is actually very, very chatty. And as they are talking, they are making decisions and they are making sense of the world.
What about profiles though, right?. We have 12 different profile archetypes in Human Design. The profile always changes you, regardless of what energy type you are, but as with most things, we do see significant changes in Manifestors between profile types. Understanding exactly how your Manifestor profile operates is going to be a game changer for your parenting.
For example, I’m a 4/6 Manifestor, the 4 being the Opportunist, the 6 being the Role Model.
This means I am very, very social. I am very, very relational. I connect to people easily and deeply. People see me as a leader, people see me as somebody who has wisdom and as someone has my shit together. And that’s how I Initiate. It is how I use my Creative Urge and how I Initiate things into the world. I do it for relationships. I do it for the community. I do it for the network. I do it because I know from my heart that this is going to help people.
But what if your Manifestor child hasn’t got a 4 or a 6 in their profile?
The line 1s are the deepest introverts, with a strong thirst for knowledge. They’re going to want to experience and learn knowledge before they feel secure in trying new things. So the way that they Initiate and create will be slower.
If they are a 2 line Manifestor, they are going to be deeply introverted and deeply creative. They will want more time on their own. The things that they Initiate and create are more likely going to be conceptual creativity, like craft. They will likely build things with their hands or enjoy photography.
The line 3s are the risk takers. They will be the little Manifestors that are jumping off the roof of the house, just because they want to experience what it feels like to fall off all the way to the ground. They need to learn life by throwing themselves into it.
The line 5s? Anticipate their opinions. They will be deeply opinionated at an early age. They will also likely be very, very vocal, telling you everything that they see that’s wrong and everything that they see that needs to be fixed.
The profile makes a big difference to the behavior of your Manifestor. Understanding your child’s profile is going to shift the way that you parent them.
Now finally, look at the motor centers in their Human Design bodygraph. Four of the energy centers are motor centers, these being the ones that provide physical energy. These are fuel for the physical energy in the body.
The motor centers are the Ego center, the Emotional center, the Root center, and also the Sacral center. However, as Manifestors, none of us have that Sacral defined. We are non Sacral beings.
Your child will never have a defined Sacral as a Manifestor, but if your child has a Root, an Emotional and an Ego Center defined, they are going to be a very, very high energy Manifestor. They’re going to have a lot of physical energy that they need to use up.
My Manifestor has an Emotional and a Root center defined. I only have an Ego center defined. So he has 10 times the energy that I’ve ever had. He is out on the trampoline jumping at eight o’clock at night, because he has energy that he needs to use up before bed. Allowing him to do that has been integral in understanding how I parent him. When he says, ‘I feel like I have lots of energy’, it is probably because he does. Simply because I’m a Manifestor and he’s a Manifestor doesn’t mean that we experience the same level of physical energy. I have a lot less than him. I’m not jumping on the trampoline, but he needs to.
Understanding the level of physical energy that your Manifestor child has, can really help you in creating those more harmonious environments where you’re not telling them no all the time. And you’re not trying to force them into a box, but you are really nurturing that somatic relationship for them to be in communication and connection with what is happening in their body.
4. YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO NATURALLY UNDERSTAND THEM
While 4 of the 5 energy types have varying types of open auras, Manifestors are the only type with a fully closed aura. This means 91% of the population are able to read each other quite naturally. But the 9% of Manifestors are energetically unreadable.
Manifestors naturally have a very big aura. I’ve heard some people refer to it as a bowling ball aura. I personally refer to it as the brick wall aura or the great wall of China, because our aura is not only big, it is also closed. People can’t see through it. They can’t sense a Manifestor. They can’t naturally understand a Manifestor. They can’t get a gauge on what a Manifestor is feeling, thinking, what their personality is, what they want, what they are doing there, what they want from an exchange, how they are going to communicate, etc. These are interactions that are easy and unconscious with 91% of the population.
Cue: Frustration.
Often people don’t know how to respond to this closure in children. We see this in an unleashed capacity in Manifestor children because they are also developmentally working on their communication skills.
As a parent, you are not exempt from this energetic operation. You also cannot see through your child’s aura. This may make it seem that your other children are easy to understand, connect with or communicate with, while your Manifestor kid feels like a closed book. They are.
The key here is to teach them how to inform, as informing opens up that aura temporarily and allows you to get a glimpse inside their world.
5. TEACH THEM TO INFORM AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE
Informing sounds very simple, and is going to be very unnatural for your Manifestor child. They will not be born with the ability to do it, but rather, will need to learn how to inform consistently as a habit.
Informing is essentially keeping people (and the Universe) in the loop. Your Manifestor needs to speak out loud to let you know what is going on for them. This includes their decisions, desires, feelings, thoughts, struggles, expectations, etc. it is taking their internal monolog and making it an outer dialogue.
There are some traditional Human Design texts that encourage you to teach your Manifestor child to ask permission before teaching them to inform. I strongly disagree. While permission asking is an important skill (and certainly one they should learn), the skill of informing is much more pivotal and will yield very different results for your parenting relationship with them. You cannot make your Manifestor do anything they do not want to do, so asking permission is an illusion. Teaching them to inform you will open the opportunity for conversations about things you perhaps need to enforce a ‘no’ onto.
When my Manifestor child says to me, ‘I’m really tired’ or ‘I don’t wanna talk to you right now’, that is amazing. I say ‘Thank you so much for informing me. I’m gonna support you in doing that’. When my little Manifestor is in an upcycle of his Emotional Wave and he’s really stoked and he’s really revved and he’s really manic, I laugh and I giggle and I play with him and I say, ‘What do you feel like now?’ so he can experience informing about his emotions.
His greatest line at the moment is “I just wanna have fun”. “I just wanna have fun”. So I say, ‘Great. Let’s facilitate that and have fun’. My other children and my husband, we laugh along with him. We smile at him. We give him high fives. We celebrate the bigness of his Manifestor energy because home and family are meant to be the environments in which we experience safety. This is no more important for anyone else than it is for a Manifestor.
6. DON’T PUNISH THEIR ANGER
Anger is the Not Self Theme for Manifestors. Which means it is the emotion they will experience when they are out of alignment. Childhood is really one long experience of misalignment. Which means, your child will be angry. Often. Your Manifestor child is going to be really, really angry, when they don’t like what’s going on. Remember that children do not have emotional maturity yet. So you’re going to experience a lot of anger from your Manifestor child, especially when you tell them they don’t like being told no.
We experience a lot of anger lashing out from our Manifestor. I have a lot of anger myself. And it is not bad for either of us. It is simply our ‘check engine’ light, letting us know to shift gears because this place is not correct anymore.
It is common for children to be punished for expressing anger, particularly if it is aggressive or physical. But the opposite is needed for your Manifestor child. They don’t need you to punish them for their anger because it isn’t incorrect or naughty. In fact, teaching them to stop being angry will end up with them suppressing that anger and struggling to connect with it in adulthood.
As a family, learn how to respond to the Manifestor anger without squashing it. If you need to, take turns to step out of that energy while your Manifestor navigates through it. Ensure there is always somebody there to be supportive of them, but understand that you do not have to be sacrificing yourselves to do it. You might go out for a coffee, or go for a walk. Facilitate the environment for your Manifestor, where they understand and know that even though their energy is big, and even though their energy is different to other people, and even though that anger may feel red hot as it comes out, they are still accepted and still loved. Allow them all the time in the world they need to journey through that.
Your Manifestor needs to have space to understand who they are. And this is a long term process because their energy is so volatile and it’s so intense. They are not going to come to grips with that until they are into adulthood.
As parents of Manifestors this can seem relentless, trying to understand their energy and create the environment that they need. It can feel like it is an uphill journey that just never stops. Give yourself time to rest when you need to. This is not always easy.
7. KNOW WHEN THEY ARE JUST BEING A MANIFESTOR
There are going to be some generalisations to your Manifestor child that all Manifestors experience. While Manifestors are nuanced and different, there are a few key behaviours that will always be present for them as you parent them.
There will be times of peace and happiness with your Manifestor child, and times of anger. You will experience their energy cycles, where they will move from being particularly creative, initiating a lot of things, being very playful and fun, before going into cycles of rest. Those cycles do move faster in children than they do in adults. You might see that move through that cycle over the course of one day, whereas adult Manifestors might move through that over the course of several weeks.
Your Manifestor child does not like to inform. They will struggle to communicate with you. You will need to provide frameworks for them to become more familiar with informing.
(Extra help: There’s a great podcast episode that I did on the strategy of informing. You can have a listen, and that will help you support your child in doing this).
If they tell you that they have energy to use up, or they tell you that they have no energy, just be understanding. This helps them to really start trusting these messages that they receive from their body and really build that relationship together.
Manifestors always feel different. We always feel separate. We always feel misunderstood. And that is exactly what your Manifestor child is experiencing. Help them to love themselves through that.
And finally, you will see that your Manifestor child, regardless of all their specifics, will use their Throat. Your Manifestor child is going to magnify that bowling ball energy that they have by being really loud when they are using their throat. They are going to make big noises. They are going to make a big impact. They are going to talk a lot and it will always be on their terms, at their chosen time.
Tell me, did you learn anything about your Manifestor child through this post? How can you change your parenting to support them better? Let us know!
