The Seven-Year-Old Shift: Mothering Cycles & Evolution with your Seven-Year-Old
Being a mom asks everything of us—our time, our attention, our bodies, and our hearts. It is an intense surrender of our bodies, our time and energy, and an upgrade in our empathic design. While we may have been able to “push through” in the past and been, able to tolerate and accomplish more for our world and for ourselves, motherhood changes that. As a mom, we respond from our identity as mother, and that role largely determines our lives. There are many things I have learned being a mother of three. One is that parenting follows its own unfolding course and no matter how often I try to 'push the river' in an attempt to reclaim some control over my body, my life, and my sense of self, I’ve come to understand—with time—that there are currents in life that simply cannot be forced. There is a natural rhythm to it all, and we just have to trust and “flow.”
When our babies are tiny, we spend a lot of time learning about “growth spurts” and developmental changes. What I didn’t learn in any of these books or online is that us moms have our own “growth spurts”. Further, these growth spurts and developmental changes occur over the lives of us and our children.
What I have found helpful– and true in my own life and practice, comes from the work of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf Education. Steiner wrote of the “seven-year change” that occurs when a child is about seven years old. The first seven years are considered “early childhood”-- extended infancy, essentially-- and turning seven coincides with a time when the child “takes hold” of their physical body and learns how to live within it. When this embodiment occurs, it allows the child to stop living off the mother’s energy and begin sourcing from their own bodies and self. (It’s a little bit like nursing your baby, but energetically. It’s delightful, and sweet, but also draining– and it is right and true that you need to be replenished). Until a child is seven, they are still drawing deeply from the mother’s reserves, not only physically, but energetically, as they develop their own bodies and senses of self. (So if you are exhausted, and the parent of a child under seven years old, you may truly look at their wild energy, growth, and development with pride–they really did get the power from you).
I have noticed this so strongly in my own life. From the birth of my first son until my youngest son turned seven, I felt porous. It felt like I was literally using my life force to nourish my children’s developing bodies and beings. I also felt like my body was an energetic dam, blocking anything unwanted to protect the lives and bodies of my children. Indeed, I created a goal for myself in 2016 to “seal the leaky vessel of myself” before I realized that this goal was pushing the river, not really attainable until a certain developmental shift for us as a family. During those years, I felt like I could not “get back to myself” and it was confusing, frustrating, scary, and exhausting. But when my youngest son turned seven something remarkable happened. One day, I realized that instead of feeling like I was holding my kids imaginatively in the womb of my arms out in front of me, all of a sudden I could see us as a family walking alongside each other, each on our own path. It was so striking that I wrote a blog about it called Parenting Alongside.
This morning, I placed my hands on a patient who is right at that stage with her almost seven-year-old daughter. I have treated this mama with chiropractic and cranial sacral therapy since she became pregnant. For the first time, I could feel her energy fully within her own body—not stretched, not leaking, not constantly being pulled outward. She was able to embody her next level of wholeness, her next recursion, alongside her daughter’s growing independence and establishment in selfhood.
This is such an important truth for mothers to remember: we cannot expect to “return to ourselves” at a certain level until our children reach this milestone. And even then, it is not about reclaiming an old version of who we were before motherhood. Motherhood transforms us like nothing else I have experienced because we live in the interwoven web of an empathic family. But we do need to remember ourselves as unique and essential, sovereign beings, and nurture ourselves as such. One of my children’s kindergarten teachers explained this to us at a parent meeting, telling us “if you want to take excellent care of your children, you must take excellent care of yourself.” Indeed, to nourish and raise a small person who is fueling their development with your own life-force and energy, this is a vital area to focus on in our motherly lives.
So, if you are in the thick of early motherhood, exhausted by the endless giving, your body not feeling your own, know this: it is not that you are doing something wrong, or that you have failed at “balance.” It is simply the design of life. Your child is living through you, with you, from you. And in time—around that magical age of seven—they begin to live more from themselves, and you get to grow into a whole new identity of your own self, so much richer and more complex because of your journey.
Until then, let trust in the natural timing of things be your anchor. Keep dreaming, imagining, and intentioning what you want to see in your own life and in the world, but be patient with the flow. Do what you can (take time to yourself, focus on self-care, be kind to yourself) and hold onto the quiet knowing that you are not lost, you are not ineffective—you are simply interwoven in a new and precious way.
And let me give you a preview of coming attractions! Now that my boys are 11, 14, and 16, we don’t need to read any more books to them or do bedtime. They can make their own food, clean the house, get themselves up and ready for school. They come to us with amazing deep thoughts, and our conversations are exciting and awe-inspiring. I get to work out at the gym at least three days a week– at nearly fifty years old, I feel better in my body than I have since 2009. Glorious!