Welcome to the Chinese zodiac for kids and parents!
About the Horse child
The mercurial and lovable Horse is a happy-go-lucky daredevil who requires and demands plenty of room to move. Cheerful, popular and quick-witted, the Horse loves nature, animals, sports and, most of all, adventure. The Horse prefers to be unbridled (ha!) and tends to be disobedient when forcibly prevented from doing what they want to do.
In fact, discipline of any variety will likely be resisted by this freedom- and escapade-loving creature. Even if you are not a “strict” parent by anyone else’s standards, your headstrong Horse child will occasionally find you an irredeemable Frau or Herr Bummer.
Ah, but what a joy this frank and funny little entertainer is! Early to talk and walk, the Horse child functions at high mental and physical acceleration. You as their parent will no doubt worry about their rash and brash attack on life — stock up on the hair dye, as you’ll no doubt go gray early due to their exploits.
Affectionate, buoyant and the bubbling center of the social swirl, your Horse child becomes neighborhood legend for their daring, agility and animated intelligence.
Personality traits
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Natural gifts
The Horse not only has a gift of the gab but a stunning knack for creative problem-solving. Knotty challenges magically unwind into solutions and devices of gorgeous simplicity and clever practicality. Your Horse child has an agile mind attuned to the subtle frequencies around them — nuances in their environment that go undetected by natives of other signs will not escape their notice. Trust your Horse child’s intuitive antenna on situations — they will go by the feel of things, and their hunches about people and situations are uncannily astute.
The Horse possesses a streak of optimism a furlong wide, and their innate confidence and faith in the universe to deliver a positive end result outfit them to easily identify appropriate goals to pursue. Something of a trailblazer, the Horse has a companion charisma with which they charm others into doing their bidding. Your Horse child does best if given free rein — learn to trust in their positivism just as much as they do; even when life dishes up a defeat, your Horse child’s spirits remain unsinkable. They’ll just come up with an even more clever idea next time!
Making friends
As allergic as they are to constraints of any kind, the cheerful, quick-witted and spunky Horse has no trouble winning a coterie of adoring chums. Their joie de vivre and act-now-don’t-bother-asking-for-forgiveness-later MO make them a devilishly attractive playmate, but they tend to form and maintain friendship bonds lightly.
Best boon companions: The action-oriented and similarly impulsive Tiger and Dog will have no trouble keeping pace mentally and physically with the dynamic Horse; these three high-affinity zodiac signs share an idealistic and occasionally unorthodox perspective on life and will tend to see eye to eye more often than not. Less fabulous a match for the Horse is the Rat, who finds the Horse far too fickle for his committed style of friendship; and the Horse butts heads with the convention-loving Ox, who disapproves of his freelance, cavalier manner.
Learning
Your Horse child requires varied and near-constant stimulation in order to perform competently in academic settings. Should their teacher’s lesson plan fail to provide adequate mental challenges and interest, their boisterous comportment can become an issue in the classroom. On the other hand, the Horse is extremely mentally agile, learning with remarkable speed and gaining quick and confident command of difficult subjects. They are performance-oriented and success-driven, and if channeled and challenged adequately, there is nothing they can’t master. A perceptive wonder of intuitive intelligence, the Horse child responds with lightning quickness and makes snap decisions, more often dead-accurate than not.
Parenting the Horse child
Patience is the (key) virtue: The Horse child needs to be nudged by their parents to act with politesse and curb a tendency to be inconsiderate or too dismissive of others in their headstrong pursuit of objectives. A difficult lesson for children of all signs, but of imperative importance for the Horse, is the adequate cultivation of patience — not everyone can perform at their mental or physical level!
My way or the highway: The Horse personality bears hallmarks of impulsiveness and stubbornness. They can give vent to a very explosive temper when they feel thwarted — while their pique is quickly defused, others may be less immediate to recover from the devastating assault of their temper and friendships can suffer irreparable damage. Preaching the benefits of discretion and self-control will go a long way to outfitting your Horse child with skills that will help them avoid such pitfalls. As demanding as they are of others, the Horse is singularly incapable of relinquishing or compromising their own independent agenda — this is a good thing to point out early so they gain self-awareness around how they operate.
Wild horses can’t be broken: From your first sleep-deprived night of parenting the Horse child, well into their teen years, you will be challenged to strike a balance between your agenda and their ever-changing one. Constitutionally oppositional to any routine or schedule not of their own devising, the Horse follows a rather nonconformist personal mode of operation that will occasionally run counter to your established procedures and management of the family. And woe betides the parent who attempts to censure the Horse child with too many rules — placing limits on their independent action is the quickest way to get them to bolt. As the Horse is restless by nature, you will learn early that the best method of keeping peace and good humor will be to create in life a sequence of grand adventures.
Help them see things through: The Horse lacks stick-to-it-iveness, and as their parent, you will need to help them identify certain commitments they have made and make sure they see them through. Perpetually entranced by the next grand scheme or new idea, they are quick to rise to a challenge with gusto, but their interest can flag all too quickly. A habit of breezily making and then dropping obligations learned young may be hard to break when they are older and the stakes are higher.
