HD is Changing the Rule Book for Good Parenting - Part 5
Teaching Boundaries for Your Reflector Child
Human Design offers parents an instruction manual on how to raise their kids that isn’t one-size-fits-all. It is specific to your child and can help you guide them to be who they were born to be, free from conditioning!
Raising your child according to their auric nature is only one step. This first step is about their boundaries and how they connect with others and teaches how to respect others.
If this is your first time reading my publication, you may want to read Part One of this series which conceptualizes the four auric types.
You would also need to understand their inner authority—how they make decisions. This is also crucial to their development as it teaches them how to trust and respect themselves, which builds their confidence and self-love. This could not be more important than for the Reflector child, as they have the most uncommon decision-making process.
I cannot tell you how you SHOULD parent! I cannot say how YOU should be with your child because your aura interacts with and influences your child’s aura. It is equally important that you understand your auric nature and your HD and how you impact your child without doing anything at all - it’s all in your energy field.
My intentions here are to expose you to a different way of viewing boundaries, how to respect your child’s boundaries, and thereby teach your child about their boundaries.
The Reflector - Birth of the Bohemian
As a newborn, the Reflector baby will be welcomed into the world and initially met with wonder. They will be, in some ways, the easiest and the most difficult child to raise.
With their unimposing aura and because most of us are not living according to our HD, as our authentic selves, they will pass through their environment unseen which is their greatest fear.
From the point of view of the parents though, they will be undemanding and unobtrusive and make for easy babies.
They present a completely unfamiliar situation for any parent as they become more autonomous, each day their child behaves differently from the day before. They truly are a mystery to their parents.
All their energy centers are open and undefined, which is why they are ever-changing. They sample everything. They sample their environment and everything in it. They become attuned to their environment and reflect its state. Their well-being is dependent on the well-being of their environment. Environment is the single most important factor when raising a Reflector child.
Give them their own space. Allow them the room to move and freedom to be carefree, to experience life with wonder and the joy of surprise. Allow them the freedom to express themselves in whatever form that takes. Allow them to be airy. Allowing them to be carefree means letting go of your structures and rules and refraining from imposing your beliefs. All of those things condition your unique child and leave them feeling deeply disappointed and invisible.
Understanding your child’s auric nature is step one. Understanding their inner authority is usually step two. This is where it gets really challenging as a parent with a Reflector child - they don’t have an inner authority!
They have a divine connection with the cosmos and most especially with the moon. When it comes to making important life decisions they need to go through an entire lunar cycle, sometimes more than one, to reach a decision. Having this extremely rare and extended decision process, your patience with them is key. Keep in mind this is about making life decisions not what they want to eat otherwise they would go hungry.
Can you imagine what it would feel like to live in a world that expects so much of you? That expects you to know yourself. That expects you to be able to make quick decisions. When they don’t know themselves. How unsettling it would feel to have this heightened awareness of others but not know who you are going to be today? Under these conditions, I would think it would be nearly impossible to feel secure in themselves, especially in a world that seeks validation through comparison to others. It’d be like comparing a grain of sand to a star. Reflectors represent about 1% of the world's population.
This is where you as a parent can help them.
By understanding their auric nature and those of everyone in your household.
By providing them with a healthy and safe environment to explore life and express themselves.
By not demanding them to conform to what is perceived as normal.
By not demanding they make important decisions quickly.
Beyond all those things, it will also help to understand their profile - the role they are here to reflect. For example, are they a Role Model / Hermit? There are 12 different profile possibilities. Knowing their profile will at least help you as a parent know what costume they are meant to wear.
Take for instance this example of Role Model / Hermit. This child will do well to be left to do their own thing in their own space without the expectation of being a Role Model until much, much later in life.
They need to become grounded in themselves by experiencing the natural cycle of life and to be pleasantly surprised by life. Every lunar cycle repeats itself and from that repeating pattern, they get to know themselves from the outside-inwards. The first seven years are the most critical to developing their confidence and ability to trust in themselves.
By the way, H. G. Wells's profile was that of an Investigator / Martyr and his life’s work demonstrates how he reflected his environment from his time and beyond. His work, “The Time Machine”, depicts the rise and fall of countless civilizations as if by the patterns in the stars.
Understanding that their ever-changing nature is connected to the movement of the moon will also help you to truly see their uniqueness and potential. The moon, being the closest celestial object to Earth, goes through 64 transits every lunar cycle. This is a consistent cycle. It’s not random. If you follow the daily lunar transit along with your child’s HD body graph, you’ll see the pattern and how they reflect it in their personality. They momentarily become defined by the neutrino field.
If you have no knowledge of Human Design, you cannot know what you don’t know, and in this case, I would recommend seeking out either a professional Human Design coach or better yet, a Reflector Human Design coach.
Remember they reflect their environment, all of it. They sample everything and it is internalized, weighed, and judged, and then what they reflect is what isn’t working. Allow them to be airy. When they become the focal point, you’ll know they have found the right environment and the right people to be around.
The hardest piece of advice for a parent with a Reflector child is this next bit. Parents cannot help but feel an attachment to their children. Their children are still their children even long after they have become adults. For a Reflector child, they need complete freedom to find their place in the cosmos. They cannot become anchored to their parents. Attachment is normal. Over-attachment though isn’t healthy for anyone, especially for the Reflector.
With the birth of the Reflector, we truly have the birth of the genuine bohemian. Can you imagine what it would be like for logical and rule-grounded parents to have this kind of child who is airy, unpredictable from day to day, and impossibly slow at making a decision? Please note when I use the word airy, I do not mean it as an insult, like “airhead”. Instead, I mean it in the sense that they are constantly in the flow of life and are a barometer of the environment they are exposed to. As a parent, it would be difficult not to become worried or critically judgmental of their child if they compare their child to other children.
But now consider how detrimental this potential conditioning away from their nature would be on the Reflector child to feel so alien compared to everyone else.
When raising a Reflector, respecting their bio-rhythm is vital to their well-being. Some parents take great comfort in sleeping with their babies, letting them nap on their bodies. Skin-to-skin contact is a natural and normal way to form a bond between parent and child but when it comes to the Reflector child it will serve them better to put them to bed early to allow their nervous systems to calm from being in everyone else’s energy field. I’m not saying not to have any skin-to-skin contact for they still have the same needs to bond and feel safe as any child does. However, at the end of the day, give them their space.
Sleeping alone as an infant is what they need and technically speaking, what they will need even as adults.
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You’ll also find Human Design Resources with all the links you’ll need to start exploring your HD. I have recently updated this resource page. There is now a list of available books through Amazon related to the subjects I have covered. This list is sure to grow!