The Leo baby

In the first year

The Sun rules Leo, and a Leo baby behaves like a small sun: everything in the room orients towards them, and they know it. They smile early and they smile often, and the smile is always aimed at a particular person rather than released into the air.

They tend to be sociable with a wide circle, happy to be passed around and admired, and they notice when the admiring stops. A Leo baby in a room of adults talking to each other will often produce a noise, a kick, a sudden loud delight, and then check whether it landed. This is not manipulation. It is a genuine need for contact that arrives fully formed and never really leaves.

Physically they are often big on affection: content on a chest, easy to settle with skin and voice together. And they are frequently loud, both in joy and in complaint, with very little in between.

The toddler years

The word most parents reach for is theatrical.

A Leo toddler’s feelings are performed, in the old sense of the word: expressed outward, fully, with an audience assumed. The outrage at bedtime comes with staging. The joy comes with a lap of the room. None of it is fake, which is the thing to hold on to when it looks like it might be.

They want to be in charge of games and they are genuinely good at it, organising other children with a confidence that can tip into bossiness. They are also, at this age, easily wounded by the group turning away, and the wound shows up as fury rather than tears more often than you would expect.

Sharing is complicated here in an interesting way. Leo children can be dazzlingly generous on their own initiative and completely immovable when told to hand something over, because the giving was the point and being made to give removes it.

Starting school

Leo children usually arrive at school ready to be known, and most of them manage it within a week.

They volunteer. They take the part in the play. They are frequently at the middle of a group, and they mind a great deal about their standing in it. Teachers tend to like them and occasionally find them hard to seat.

Two things to watch. The first is that a Leo child who is not getting positive attention will take negative attention without much hesitation, and the pattern can set in quickly. The second is that their confidence is more brittle than it looks. Public failure at this age, a wrong answer that got a laugh, a part they did not get, can knock them off something they were good at entirely, and they will usually say they did not want to do it anyway.

They are loyal, and they defend other children, sometimes noisily and in the wrong direction.

If you are their parent

You are the audience that matters most, and you cannot delegate it.

The central thing is that attention and praise are not the same. Praise is cheap and this sign can tell. Attention means noticing the specific thing: that they changed the ending, that they got further up the climbing frame than last week, that they let the small one go first. A Leo child who is genuinely seen by their own parent is remarkably easy to live with. One who is applauded absently is insatiable, and the insatiability gets blamed on the child.

Hold the line on behaviour anyway. Warmth does not mean giving in, and this sign copes perfectly well with a firm no from someone who clearly likes them. What they cope badly with is being diminished, which is a different thing and easy to do by accident when you are tired and they are being ridiculous at the supermarket.

And let them be ridiculous sometimes. A house with a Leo child in it has more singing in it than other houses, and that is not nothing.

The two levers

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

What settles them

• Undivided attention for a short, real stretch, with the phone somewhere else entirely.
• Being given a job with visible importance, especially one that involves helping someone smaller.
• Warm physical contact from someone who is pleased to see them, which is most of what this sign runs on.

What sets them off

• Being laughed at, even affectionately, at the moment they were being serious.
• Being corrected in front of other children.
• Watching someone else get the response they were expecting to get.

Three small things to try this week

1. Watch the performance, all of it

   When a Leo child says look, they mean it, and half-looking is worse than not looking. Ten genuinely attentive minutes, phone down, commenting on what they actually did, will buy you an afternoon. This is the cheapest and most effective intervention available with this sign and almost nobody does it properly.

2. Correct in private, praise in public

   Reverse the usual order. A Leo child will take a firm telling off without much damage if it happens quietly and between the two of you, and will carry a mild public correction for days. Their dignity is not vanity, it is structural, and protecting it costs you nothing and buys enormous cooperation.

3. Give the generosity somewhere to go

   This sign is genuinely, sometimes recklessly generous, and it is the quality most worth feeding. Let them give away the good biscuit, help the younger one, be in charge of the present. A Leo who is admired for being kind rather than for being impressive grows into something considerably better than a Leo who is only ever applauded.