From my window I can see our neighbors’ entire backyard. When the weather is good enough, their two boys are playing and running around often till I’m almost ready to go to sleep. My son, in contrast, is asleep a full two hours before these kids stop running around, yet he’s not much younger than them.
When Liam was born, I hadn’t encountered Human Design yet. That happened when he was little more than a year old, but it became obvious he wasn’t like those other boys very soon. When babies and toddlers won’t sleep even though they ‘should,’ the general advice is to “tire them out.” The summer I encountered Human Design but didn’t yet understand the difference between my son and our neighbor kids, I had a problem with my child that brought me to the brink of insanity almost every night — I couldn’t get him to sleep.
I would do the bedtime rituals. I would read to him, expecting him to fall asleep while I was reading; that’s what kids do, right? He didn’t sleep. At some point I would be so exasperated and just exhausted from the day that, choking down tears re: my inadequacy as a single parent, I would stick him in the stroller and more or less violently begin to walk him up and down the street, singing the same song again and again. I’d do this for half an hour straight and he would just lay there, looking up at the sky and the trees, and I would think, “this is it, now it’s happening,” only to check to see if his eyes were closed and seeing him smiling up at me.
So he’s just not tired yet, I would think. But he has to be, he’s been awake for so long! And it was true, he was absolutely overdue for sleep every single night.
Look, I handled this badly. To be fair, I was exhausted. I was his only caregiver, there was no childcare available to me at the time. It was (the opposite of a virtuous cycle) in that I would hardly sleep because he was still waking up all the time at night, then he would wake me at 5am, I would be exhausted and irritable and that would be the way we’d start the day. I would kinda get my grip around midmorning or so, but midday was usually when I would collapse emotionally, and in the evening, when my kid was to sleep, the frustration would feel insuromountale. All I wanted was for him to sleep so I could finally breathe.
Yet he wouldn’t. “making” him sleep would take more than two hours at times. I was wrecked before, during, and after.
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Liam is a Projector. I am a Generator. The way we go to sleep could hardly be more different. Like the neighbor kids, when I’ve had a satisfying day of work, play, movement, I just bonk out at some point. I get tired, I go to bed, I sleep.
Liam on the other hand gets more fidgety and less able to sleep the more the day wears on without him having had a chance to rest. What I wasn’t aware of (and also had no real power over, to be fair to past me) when I was trying to “tire him out” those nights was that my frustration, accumulated over the course of the day due to having no space and time to myself, also accumulated in his system, becoming louder and literally not letting his system calm down enough to sleep.
I needed to let my frustration go. A huge chunk of it was purely perceptual. I had expectations around how things were supposed to go, and when they then (as was to be expected) didn’t happen the way they were supposed to, I was frustrated. And since I didn’t think I was allowed to be frustrated, I built up even more frustration due simply to being frustrated about being frustrated. I was supposed to love taking care of my child day in, day out. I wasn’t supposed to need long breaks for myself. I wasn’t supposed to resent my child or constantly cleaning up his messes or having barely an hour or less to myself at the end of each day. I was supposed to love having him around at all times.
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For one, I had nonexistent boundaries around what I would do for my child, what he was allowed, and when, and how much. On the other hand, I had no idea that taking time for myself or simply doing things in a way that would have been fun for me would be good for us both.
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The irony of trying to write this while frustrated that my child has been clinging to me like moss to stone is not lost on me at all. The irony of trying to articulate the difference between a sacral requiring DOING WHAT IT NEEDS, what gives it life, to sustain any kind of energy, and an undefined sacral that has no consistent way of generating that same energy, that requires being around people to feel any kind of electric charge to go... is staggering. My kid is constantly coming to me asking what he could possibly do. And my answer is constantly, you have plenty of things in your room. But the problem with that is that this thinking is based in my own system’s ability to respond to its environment, and do stuff that satisfies it based on whatever is around. His system just doesn’t work like that.
I still don’t know the answer to all the questions this predicament poses. But knowing I don’t know can make all the difference. Maybe I have been putting too much blame on screens when they may be exactly what he needs. Thinking he should function the way I did — sitting down, doing homework and maybe struggling through it a bit but ultimately being satisfied by my work. He doesn’t get that satisfaction.
Last revised May 21, 2026.