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 he is forcibly prevented from doing what he wants 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 his parent will no doubt worry about his rash and brash attack on life — stock up on the hair dye, as you’ll no doubt go grey early due to his exploits.
Affectionate, buoyant, and the bubbling center of the social swirl, your Horse child becomes neighborhood legend for his 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 him — nuances in his environment that go undetected by natives of other signs will not escape his notice. Trust your Horse child’s intuitive antenna on situations — he will go by the feel of things, and his hunches about people and situations are uncannily astute.
The Horse possesses a streak of optimism a furlong wide and his innate confidence and faith in the universe to deliver a positive end result outfit him to easily identify appropriate goals to pursue. Something of a trailblazer, the Horse has a companion charisma with which he charms others into doing his bidding. Your Horse child does best if given free rein — learn to trust in his positivism just as much as he does; even when life dishes up a defeat, your Horse child’s spirits remain unsinkable. He’ll just come up with an even more clever idea next time!
Making Friends
As allergic as he is to constraints of any kind, the cheerful, quick-witted, and spunky Horse has no trouble winning a coterie of adoring chums. His joie de vivre and act-now-don’t-bother-asking-for-forgiveness-later MO make him a devilishly attractive playmate, but he tends 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 his teacher’s lesson plan fail to provide adequate mental challenges and interest, his 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. He is performance-oriented and success-driven, and if channeled and challenged adequately there is nothing he 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 his parents to act with politesse and curb a tendency to be inconsiderate or too dismissive of others in his 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 his mental or physical level!
My way or the highway: The Horse personality bears hallmarks of impulsiveness and stubbornness. He can give vent to a very explosive temper when he feels thwarted — while his pique is quickly defused, others may be less immediate to recover from the devastating assault of his 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 him avoid such pitfalls. As demanding as he is of others, the Horse is singularly incapable of relinquishing or compromising his own independent agenda — this is a good thing to point out early so he gains self-awareness around how he operates.
Wild horses can’t be broken: From your first sleep-deprived night of parenting the Horse child, well into his teen years, you will be challenged to strike a balance between your agenda and his ever-changing one. Constitutionally oppositional to any routine or schedule not of his 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 his independent action is the quickest way to get him 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 of life a sequence of grand adventures.
Help him see things through: The Horse lacks stick-to-itiveness, and as his parent, you will need to help him identify certain commitments he has made and make sure he sees them through. Perpetually entranced by the next grand scheme or new idea, he is quick to rise to a challenge with gusto, but his interest can flag all too quickly. A habit of breezily making and then dropping obligations learned young may be hard to break when he is older and the stakes are higher.
