Locking Horns: Your Taurus Child And You

Your Taurus child is sweet, funny, lovable, kind, generous and affectionate. In fact, he wants to kiss you all the time. When he's not kissing you, he's holding your hand or wrapping himself around your body, cephalopod-style (just arms and a head, very sticky). He's athletic and solidly built, and he loves to eat. And he'll eat anything--but he especially loves sweets.

Your Taurus child is usually a little disheveled, sporting mismatched clothes and a smear of dirt just across the bridge of his nose. He has dirt and play-doh under his fingernails, from days spent sculpting and digging for playground treasure. He often trips over his own feet while walking, only to display a shocking amount of grace when climbing to the top of the monkey bars or riding his Razor scooter.

That's the good.

Your Taurus child is also whiny, stubborn and absurdly concerned with fairness and justice. His little lizard brain works over time to calculate who got what, when they got it, and how many they received. "It's not faaaaaiiiiirrrr!" he will scream, whine, whimper or state. He will say this so often and with such conviction that you will threaten to have it engraved on his tombstone.

He does things so slowly that sometimes you suspect he's actually going backward.

He is quietly rebellious. Unlike his older Aries brother, your Taurus child will not unexpectedly explode like Vesuvius. Instead, he will smolder for a good long while before bursting into a hearty inferno--usually over his homework.

"It's time to do your homework!" you say.

"I don't WANT to," he replies. "It's BOR-ing."

"The sooner you start, the sooner you'll be finished," you tell him. Then you head for the kitchen to start dinner, mistakenly assuming that your son will get right on it.

You novice.

He does not "get right on it." Instead, he starts to draw pictures. After he draws for a while, he asks for a snack.

"Have you finished your homework?" you ask, thinking (novice!) that he must be close to halfway done by now. After all, it was just some spelling words and subtraction, all things he knows how to do.

"No." Under the right circumstances, the look that accompanies this particular "no" would be scathing. Of course, you being YOU means that YOU are impervious to this level of scorn--after all, your approval ratings among your pint-sized constituents are generally low. You are a Buzz Kill.

Just like that, your Taurus child will dig in his heels ... and it's on. World War Three has just broken out in your dining room while you were peacefully minding your own business. Forget dinner--your Taurus child will now try to find out what you're made of.

He will moan and whine and squirm, and when that fails to move you, he will try to convince you he's still hungry. Hungry people can't concentrate! Then he will burst into tears and pretend he doesn't know the answer to six minus five. He will try various methods of asking the same question, just to see if you'll give him the answer. Then he will spend fifteen minutes sharpening his pencil, and another fifteen after that trying to convince you he has never heard of a number line so he can't possibly draw one.

Your Taurus child will spend such a long time trying to get out of 30 minutes worth of homework that he will miss story time and have to go to bed right after his bath. He will point out that this arrangement is unfair.

"Too bad, so sad!" you'll say, in a sing-song voice. (No you won't, because it's mean. But your eyes might roll so far back into your skull that you see your brain.)

That's the bad.