Guiding Your Leader: Parenting a Projector
What if you knew exactly what your child needed in every moment. How would you parent differently? How would you respond to their behaviors, their initiations, their questions, their requests. What if you had a road map or even better yet a handbook for how to parent based on your child’s very differentiated, unique make up? Human Design can give you exactly that. Based on their unique type, as a parent, you can know how to set them up for success and how to seize upon their strengths. You’ll have strategies to know how to see their natural abilities and be able to encourage them. By knowing their human design type, you can also know your child’s specific strategy and authority that can be used to help them make decisions that are individually correct for them. Strategy and authority for all types will be discussed later in this blog.
Knowing your child’s energetic signature can open all kinds of avenues for different parenting techniques. With awareness of their strategy and authority, the way they operate in relationships, their natural abilities, and ways to set them up for success, you will be armed with an array of different approaches to revolutionize your parenting style.
The first important thing to know about your projector child is that they do not possess access to a consistent source of energy. Unless you are also a projector, manifestor or reflector, as a generator or manifesting generator, your energetic allowance for each day is automatically available to you for use in whatever way aligns best. Your child however, as a projector, is meant to connect with and be invited into different situations that will then give them energy to use to guide others. This means two things – that they are going to be susceptible to feeling tired more easily than others and that this means that you will want to encourage a culture of restfulness and recovery. Your child’s day might want to include more pockets for them to just decompress and not be required to do anything, even including mental activities such as watching TV or engaging in screen time. Your child will also need time at the end of a day to really give to releasing all of the generator and manifesting generator energy they take in throughout the day. Helping them to utilize a grounding cord to release energy into the Earth or some other technique to help them release energy will be beneficial for their energetic maintenance at the end of each day. The fact that they do not produce energy on their own is not meant to signify anything negative however. It’s just the way projectors are. And they are very capable of doing good work with access to energetically nourishing situations.
Projector energy is quite literally penetrative. The aura of a projector pierces through the auras of the other types in a way that gives the projector a lot of sharp insights and intuition about the other person. Because of this, projectors end up taking in a lot of information into their energetic bodies. That’s why it’s important for them to have an energy maintenance tool with which to clear out outside energies at the end of each day. As a child for me it looked like in bed at night before falling asleep, reviewing every interaction I had that day and making some meaning about it and then letting it go. An actual real tool to help your child to release this energy is called a grounding cord and I lead workshops and sessions to help people learn this skill.
Because the projector child takes on so much energy, they can see the other very deeply and with this information, become a natural guide. Your child will likely very naturally stand out amongst their peers as a leader. When they are young, ways to encourage this are to be supportive of them taking part in daily routines, tasks in the kitchen, and giving them lots of choice about what types of play and learning they want to be engaging in – anything you can do to encourage them taking control of their environment and doing what they see their grownups doing. This might look like giving them the task of washing produce one by one and putting the food in a bowl. Or giving them the choice of how they would like their hair done with different accessories. And giving them choices about what toys to play with from a few options. As a young child, in providing these opportunities, you give them the confidence they need to be aware of their surroundings and competency in growing leadership skills.
You’ll also want to help your child grow competency in navigating relationships at this early age as well. Ways to do that are numerous. Giving them the chance to simply lead their friends in the line of scooters down the block, having them serve snacks to friends, or gently point out how a younger child might need help on the playground all go towards building lasting leadership skills in which your child notices the way that groups function and how they can stand out as a leader in them.
As children enter school age, much of their time is spent in the classroom and out of your hands. A good teacher will notice when a student is confident and aware of other students and will naturally want to give them small but important roles in the classroom to help the classroom function. Things like line leader, paper-passer-outer, or door holder. You may even want to mention to your child’s teacher that your child thrives when given opportunities in the classroom that promote their leadership skills.
A good teacher will also do something that projectors need very much which is to be recognized. Projectors not only crave and thrive with this attention but they are actually mechanically designed to draw out this type recognition from others. This is a projector specific quality. Being recognized helps a projector to then transition to using their skills to be invited in groups and guide those who recognize them and their strengths. It opens a door for them to say, “thank you and this is what I see.” With positively thinking teachers and adults in their lives, there are ample opportunities to point out all of the good that your child is doing. Take time each day to intentionally recognize their unique strengths and qualities, be they little or big. This will help them to feel seen, honored, and empowered.
Another very projector specific quality is that they will want to wait for invitations. As a child, this is what we hope for our child, to be seen and invited into a group. It can be devastating when this is something a child is lacking in their social life, especially when your child is a projector. Something parents can do about this is to find groups, be they little or big, for children to be a part of surrounding a certain interest that your child may have an affinity for. If you’re wanting a child to connect with more children their age, teams or classes are a great place for them to naturally do what they love and in that state of enjoyment, be invited further into smaller social groups that break out from the whole. The key to being invited is that it’s very energetically sensitive and if a child is doing something to solely be recognized versus for the simple joy of doing it, others will sense this and actually be repelled by it. If you can, encourage your child to do things for the sake of doing them, just because. This will help your child to energetically be prepared to receive recognition and subsequent invitations with the catch that they weren’t trying to at all. When your child knows their inherent worth and is confident in that fact, they are able to know that their gifts are important and worthy of being recognized.
Part of life that involves receiving invitations is that there is waiting involved in receiving them. Waiting can be sometimes lonely, painful, or sad if the child feels there is nothing they can do about it. When you empower your child to get creative and find things that they can do that they love, this puts your child in a more positive state from which to receive invitations. Creations and learning that comes from doing what they love can then lend themselves to values and skills that your child can develop over time. Waiting is inevitable but it doesn’t have to be painful.
There are several different things you can do to set your child up for success in being a projector. You first want to help them find communities that are full of energetically healthy people who acknowledge their skills. This can be done by looking into the quality of the child care center or school they’re attending and noticing if the staff and students are happy and thriving and not chaotic or bored. Read more about ways to critique a child care center in my blog post here. Other avenues for community building are in park district camps or small businesses that provide Mommy and Me or children’s programing. Depending on the age of the child, they may be more or less inclined to make connections at the classes. It will help if the classes are regular for a period of months so that they can have a chance to get to know the children in the class or team and establish a group dynamic.
School is also a place where children will be making lots of friendships and connections. There are many children in one class usually and they are with each other for 8 months of the year so their personalities and quirks will be on full display for each other by the end of the year. One skill for your child to practice as projectors in a big class full of kids is to help them be discerning about who they are around. This is important across your child’s childhood and into teen and young adulthood. Who they are around is important because your projector child takes on the energy of those they interact with very keenly. Being discerning is just one tool in the toolbox that will help give them strategies for knowing who to befriend and get close to.
What types of friendships should they look to cultivate? Well, they will do well to have people who recognize and see their unique gifts and talents so individuals who are kind, compassionate, and thoughtful. This inner circle can very well help them to stay aligned with their very unique and special purpose. Having that affirmed by the people in their lives is so helpful because of the amount of energy that is not them that they take in throughout the day. Without these reminders of who they are, sometimes their purpose can become clouded by others information. These connections are also important because they will very literally become the energy resources your child has to work with. When they are around others energy that is energy aligned with each individual’s purpose, your child will see examples of how to have that alignment as well. This begins with being self-aware of one’s own energetic differentiation and then choosing to be accountable to what works for you and not the standards or norms that can be out of alignment for you.
Some natural abilities that you can encourage in your projector child are seeing the big picture – because they have so much detailed information from individuals about all of the parts. Another is diplomacy because they naturally are able to see which communication techniques work for different types of people. With this, you’ll want to encourage them to be observant and reflective of conflict, group dynamics, and family dynamics and conversations about these interactions will help to strengthen their reflective abilities. Another ability you’ll want to encourage is how to ask the right questions. Questions are a way for projectors to insight conversation that then improves the chances of them being seen and recognized and then invited into something so they can guide. And finally, you’ll want to help your child to think about different systems such as sociology, astrology, psychology, Human Design, and other philosophies that help them to understand individuals, groups, and the ways people work together more efficiently and effectively.
Your projector child is unlike any other. Given the characteristics unique to projectors, we know something about how to best empower your child, however there are myriad of other components to their Human Design like profile, strategy and authority, the definition of their centers, and their incarnation cross. Soon, this blog will be full of information to continue to help you get the differentiated picture of your child and how to best navigate your parenting journey with them. Thank you for reading and as always, feel free to reach out to me here in the comments!
