If you need help determining why your kid’s fever is so high, a doctor can diagnose that ear infection. If you need to know why your perfectly healthy child gets upset every time daddy compliments mommy, well, who can say? Is she a.) Spoiled? b.) Hungry? c.) Tired? Or d.) an Aries?
I’m inclined to tell you after a couple years in the trenches that the answer might just as well be d.) Aries. Because after naps, food and rigorous selflessness training, a child still acts like how they act, because children are people and that’s what people do. Look around: Everyone you know is just a person being pathologically themselves. No amount of years on earth changed their personness, did it? And if you went back, you’d see it from day one.
And yet, I’ve read so many parenting books that treat kids like totally malleable lab experiments, blank slates to impart your values onto with a series of time-tested behaviors and correctives. They mean well, but they make it hard as hell to remember something pretty simple but essential: Your kid is a person. The personality is already there. You can’t change it. Better to work with it than against it. You got the kid you got. Deal.
It’s like my own kid, who, at 4 years old, is often eerily more mature than I am, said to me — a lesson she said her soccer coach taught her — “You get what you get and you don’t get upset, mommy.”
Touché. No to mention classic Aries leadership. I’m only half kidding, at least, now that I’ve read this new book Momstrology: The AstroTwins’ Guide to Parenting Your Little One by the Stars. Written by famous identical twins and astrology advice-givers Ophira and Tali Edut, it’s a book that guides mothers through parenting based not on a newfangled study that shows kids need 68 percent more discipline and 13 percent less fun, but something far more simple yet complex: Their horoscope sign.
They say kids don’t come with a set of instructions — the ASTROTWINS beg to differ! the back cover trumpets. Inside, you learn the sort of mother you are based on your sign, the sort of child you have, the kind of caregiver best for your kid, and a million other little tidbits about how to tackle parenting at different phases under these considerations. It’s basically a roadmap to navigating all your strengths and weaknesses based on you and your child’s unique way of relating, cosmically speaking.
So, I, for instance, as a Gemini, can join Angelina Jolie and Heidi Klum in knowing that my parenting strengths are my versatility, curiosity and open-mindedness (totally!), while my challenges will be impatience, lack of boundaries, and a tendency to contradict myself (er, guilty).
My Aries child, I learn, is actually super easy to spoil and loooooves attention. On the one hand: Pshaw, aren’t all children? On the other hand: no. I’ve seen kids who can be dropped at a new preschool day one like they own the place, who can play quietly in a corner for hours. Mine? It was a series of increased distances over weeks to work up to being totally cool to let go for school, and she loves nothing more than basking in the attention of her parents, or really, anyone.
For the record, I hold astrology in a kind of half-jokey/half-admiring regard. Like so many woo-woo things that aren’t supposed to do jack-shit yet have millions of swear-by advocates, it’s somehow simultaneously nonsensical and dead-on, and in a way that weirdly contradictory aspect of it earns my respect.
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