The Aquarius baby

In the first year

Saturn gives Aquarius its structure and Uranus gives it the swerve. An Aquarius baby is sociable with everyone and attached in a way that is entirely their own.

Many of them are happy to be held by anybody, comfortable in a room full of people, and no more attached to one pair of arms than another. Parents who were expecting the classic clinging phase sometimes find it never quite arrives, or arrives briefly and departs. It can be faintly deflating, and it is not a comment on the relationship.

They are alert rather than cuddly: interested in objects, mechanisms, light, patterns, more likely to be captivated by the extractor fan than by a face. They tend to have strong preferences that make no sense, arriving suddenly, about which toy and which position and which room.

Routine can go either way with this sign. Some Aquarius babies thrive on one, and quite a few simply ignore whatever structure is imposed and settle into a pattern of their own that nobody planned.

The toddler years

The word no acquires a particular quality here, and it is worth distinguishing it from other kinds.

An Aquarius toddler who refuses is rarely refusing emotionally. They have assessed the instruction and found it unconvincing. Escalation does not help, because there is no rising emotion to meet; you are arguing with a small person who has taken a position and is perfectly calm about it. What does help is treating them as someone who can be persuaded, which they can.

This is also when the sideways thinking shows itself. Aquarius toddlers use objects for the wrong purpose with great success. They answer the question you did not ask. They notice the thing everyone else has stopped seeing. A lot of it looks like not paying attention and is the opposite.

They can be curiously unmoved by other children’s enthusiasms, and equally unmoved by other children’s disapproval, which is a considerable advantage in a life.

Starting school

Aquarius children are usually friendly with the whole class and not especially embedded in any of it.

They tend to have a wide, loose set of friendships rather than a close pair, and they are often the child who is kind to the one nobody else is talking to, not out of sentiment but because they cannot see why that child is being excluded. Fairness in the abstract matters intensely to this sign, and they will argue a principle with an adult at an age when most children are still arguing about biscuits.

Academically they do well with anything that lets them find their own route and poorly with anything that requires showing the expected working. A correct answer arrived at by an unauthorised method is a very Aquarius outcome and a recurring source of friction.

They can be genuinely eccentric about clothes, food and interests, and mostly do not notice that it is being noticed.

If you are their parent

You are raising somebody who will not be much influenced by you, and that is the deal.

The most useful adjustment is to move from instruction to explanation as the default mode, earlier than feels reasonable. It works, it costs a sentence, and it sets up a relationship in which this child brings you their reasoning rather than hiding it.

Do not take the independence as coldness. Aquarius affection is real and tends to be expressed through interest rather than physical warmth: showing you the thing, wanting your opinion on the thing, including you in the project. Recognising that as love is most of the work.

And protect the strangeness. Aquarius children often have one peculiar, absorbing, socially useless interest, and an adult who takes it seriously is remembered for it. Left alone, that interest is usually where they end up being remarkable.

The two levers

Most evenings with a Aquarius child come down to these. One list is what brings them back to you, the other is what sends them off.

What settles them

• A reason, given once, that actually holds up to inspection.
• Being left alone with a thing until they have worked it out themselves.
• A household where being the odd one is treated as ordinary rather than remarkable.

What sets them off

• Because I said so, in any of its disguises.
• Being told what they are feeling, particularly by an adult who is guessing.
• Being made to do something the usual way when their way was working.

Three small things to try this week

1. Give the reason first, once

   Not a negotiation, an explanation: we leave now because the bus goes at ten past and the next one is an hour. Aquarius children comply with logic far more readily than with authority, and the same sentence delivered as an order will be tested while the version with a reason attached is usually simply accepted.

2. Let the odd solution stand

   If they have decided to wear the coat backwards, eat the meal in a strange order or build it the wrong way round and it is working, leave it. This sign is genuinely inventive and the inventiveness is easily trained out by an adult correcting harmless deviations. Save your interventions for the ones that matter.

3. Do not chase the affection

   Aquarius children are often warm in bursts and cool in between, and the coolness is not a withdrawal or a problem to be fixed. Pursuing them for a cuddle at the wrong moment produces less closeness, not more. Be available, be interested in what they are interested in, and let them come, which they do, at their own peculiar intervals.