Have you heard of Human Design? It’s like if a personality test and horoscope had a baby… but a really interesting and insightful baby!
Recently I’ve heard a few podcast episodes and seen some posts talking in-depth about how to use your Human Design to live up to your full potential and then take it a step further and find out your kids’ Human Design so that you can parent accordingly, which sounds cool on the surface. But it also feels flawed and not something I’d do.
First, let’s back up. What is human design? Well, I’m not entirely sure yet. I resisted diving into it for a long time – it seemed a bit too woo, even for me. And then I heard a friend talking about it on her podcast (check out this episode and tell me what you think!– content warning: she curses a lot), and my obsession started to grow.
I started following a Human Design expert, went to a virtual webinar she hosted, and paid for a detailed analysis. I’m usually a “done for you” kind of girl – there is tons of information and nuance in your chart, so having this kind of analysis was helpful for me. But you can get a free chart and then do your research to see what it all means.
Like all other assessments, personality tests, or anything that tries to tell you “who you are,” take this with a grain of salt. Take what fits, think about what doesn’t, and leave what feels off. There’s also an accessibility issue that contributed to me feeling a bit of resistance about this since not everyone has access to the time of their birth. The guest on the podcast linked above talks about this briefly in the episode.
When I first received the 60-page blueprint that laid out all of the information about my Human Design (I’m a Generator, in case you were wondering), I read my overview and practically burst into tears.
I wrote a book, and when I was reading this overview, it was about six weeks before it was released, and the words I was reading could have been the synopsis. Nearly all of the words appear in the book I’d just written.
I also finished writing my weekly newsletter when the email popped up with my blueprint. One of the things mentioned at length in my overview and a few other sections was exactly what I had just finished writing about in the newsletter. It felt spot on. It felt like whoever wrote these words were peering into my soul (or doing a keyword search of my laptop) and knew all of the things that I was thinking – mind blown. I was a believer.
The next morning I read it to my husband. An unenthused “Eh, ya think?” was his response. WHAT?! I then went line by line relating each sentence I read to my actual life. In the end, his tone changed a bit, and it resonated with how accurate this was. And at that moment, I realized why parenting to your child’s Human Design felt off. To do that, I would have to interpret my child’s Human Design based on how I perceive those words, how I believe those traits and qualities might manifest, what aspects felt most relatable and engaging to ME.
And what if I got it all wrong? My husband, who knows me very very well, heard the words of my Human Design and he interpreted them entirely different than how they felt to me. He interpreted them as HIM, which is entirely normal, and actually the point with these things.
What if the way I was interpreting something about my child was completely different from the spirit in which they might embody it? What if something in their design felt REALLY important to me, but ended up being something that wasn’t a huge part of their personality? There’s so much room for disconnect here, so much space for misinterpretation, and so many spots where assumptions might make us less observant to reality.
What if instead of parenting according to our kids’ Human Design we paid attention to our kids and to the quirky things they do and think and how they process the world? What if we viewed each child as the individual they are and recognized that they probably saw and interpreted things differently than we do, differently than those around them? What if we assumed they needed something we might not see or understand and followed their lead? What if we assumed we were parenting to their unique Human Design, but rather than reading and interpreting their results, we observed to see how it unfolded and asked lots of questions?
Last year I wrote about parenting without ego, and that feels a lot like the missing piece here. It’s about asking our kids what they need in each situation and understanding that it will likely (possibly) be different than what we might need. I love the idea that instead of making assumptions, I can stay curious about my kids – curiosity without judgment.
