Although
Sun and Venus are secondary factors in assessing the experience of one’s own parents, they and
Moon are the primary indicators of our experience of being parents ourselves.
Regarding children and parenting, we can address three main topics from the natal horoscope:
- Strength of desire to have children.
- How we approach the role of parent.
- Likely sex of children
As one’s birth chart describes
oneself only, our horoscopes do not describe our children. Rather, they describe our experience of creating and parenting them. How we approach the role of parent resembles the broader question of how we care about and relate to other people, although with unique twists.
How many children someone likely will have and their strength of desire to have and raise children varies against cultural trends of one’s time and place. Obviously, people usually want children: Survival of the species always has depended on it. Yet, how many a typical couple wants varies in different generations and places according to social expectations and the prevailing psychological tone. When the human species was busy initially populating the planet, our instinct to procreate was strong. Today, on an overpopulated planet, this has reduced in many places.
This commonsense consideration (and a little astrological research) reveals the silliness of many traditional astrological rules concerning the number of children. For example, only a few minutes of checking sample charts undercuts an oft-repeated aphorism that a woman will have as many children as she has planets in her 5th House. It simply is not so!
We can learn much, though, from the state of Sun, Venus, and Moon. Other planets, adding characteristic behaviors and themes, also touch on the subject of children. How strongly one desires children and how one parents them is shown by the entire horoscope,
i.e., the whole of someone’s character.
Sun
Sun signifies the vital spark in humankind that leaps the generations.
A powerful Sun signals a
need for immortality or posterity, a sense of
personal continuity. While almost nobody believes in actual physical immortality, most solar behaviors arise from the psychological equivalent, usually through striving to have impact or make a contribution that will survive, something one can “leave behind.”
One of the strongest forms this can take, well within reach of nearly everybody, is bearing and raising a child.
I wrote “child” in the singular because, in raw numbers, solar individuals have few children. Despite the powerful need for posterity, fewer people with angular Suns have children and, quite often, they have only one. Whereas Moon and Venus are biologically prolific planets, angular Sun or Leo luminaries are less fruitful in raw numbers. Often a single child is enough to fulfill the need for continuity and successorship. Where there is at least one heir, there may be no need felt for a spare.
Even a single heir receives the best that Sun can bring and grows to have a powerful sense of whatever legacy might be his or hers to nurture and pass on. Solar individuals are warm, friendly, and loyal, wanting to share their light, plant seeds, and have long-term impact, all of which they can do as a parent.
Among public figures, this
chain of continuity often includes elements of successorship or inheritance, familial and otherwise, that help show the forms solar impulses can take. From Appendix B, foreground Suns examples include numerous monarchs, the most U.S. presidents, and several First Ladies and royal consorts; truly dynastic figures with names Medici, Krupp, Hearst, and Bush; and scores of people who were
the next in line of a heritage, such as successive holders of public office, heavyweight champs, or late-night hosts. Famous children defined almost as much by their parentage as by their own lives include Peter Fonda, Carrie Fisher, Jeff Bridges, Lisa Marie Presley, Miley Cyrus, John Kennedy Jr., Rep. Liz Cheney, and Patty Hearst, while parents of entertainment lineages include the likes of Martin Sheen and Naomi Judd. Others in the list lived lives substantially shaped by their having been direct successors to legacies.
During the 1950s, motivation researchers developing advertising approaches for life insurance companies found that breadwinning husbands and fathers have an unconscious hope for
effective immortality, to continue controlling and contributing to their families’ standard of living after their own death. One famous insurance ad showed a happy family gathered around a feast-laden dinner table with a glowing transparent (ghost-like) image of the beaming father presiding from the head of the table as provider and hero, governing his family and its well-being even after his own death.
Sun signifies the need for posterity if not immortality and the vital spark that leaps the generations.
Sun’s Constellation: Style of Parenting
As the will to procreate is solar, Sun’s constellation and aspects describe what we bring to parenting, regardless of Sun’s strength by angularity.
Perhaps surprisingly, Moon’s sign has little to say about this. If you peruse the Sun and Moon constellation interpretations in Appendix A, you will find descriptions of parenting behavior in nearly all Sun sign interpretation and none of their lunar counterparts.
We do not need to repeat these interpretations here. I encourage you to find them on your own by studying the Sun sign notes. I will, however, mention a few salient points that speak to the larger picture.
Four constellations, Taurus through Leo, have an unusual orientation to children and love of the young. Each has a distinctive twist.
Taurus, the constellation most likely to have the most children, is especially known for loving the young and being at ease with them. I have met many authors of children’s books, schoolteachers of the early grades, and others committed to the care, education, and encouragement of young children who have Sun in Taurus.
Geminis, in contrast, are themselves most like children especially in their great love of play and need for playmates and other companions. Often it seems more important for a Gemini to continue being a child than to have one.
Leo and
Aries have the strongest solar influence in their basic temperament and usually are the most expressive of solar traits discussed above. Both tend to have few children, though it usually is quite important to them to have at least one. The idea of grooming and nurturing a royal heir usually gives the most accurate idea about how they parent.
Sagittarius, the third imperial constellation, is deeply committed to family as community and especially matters of heritage, tradition, and legacy.
The other constellations are more complicated and less suited to quick thumbnails. Even the signs just summarized have more depth and detail than listed here. See the full interpretations for a better-rounded idea of the patterns.
Venus
Giving and receiving love is the heart of Venus’ function within us. Both biologically and psychologically, Venus is every bit as maternal as Moon, corresponding to pregnancy, gestation, birthing, and nurturing. Nor is the association entirely maternal: Men with Venus strong have the same desires and loving behaviors as women other than the obvious exception of the purely biological aspects of maternity. Venus-dominant men and women become deeply loving, affectionate, giving, connecting parents fiercely protecting those they love.
Unlike Sun, Venus is the
most prolific, fruitful planet. While both Sun and Venus are warm, attentive, and giving, Sun’s child-bearing motives center on the future and posterity while those of Venus are more in the moment, to have someone to love and pamper. Garth Allen wrote wonderfully on this side of Venus in his 1956 “Kid Gloves” installment on the love planet, including insights from those 1950s advertising researchers that, this time, targeted those most maternal of symbols: milk and eggs.
Garth Allen wrote:As proved by the statistics of parturition, child-bearing is primarily a Venus matter… “babying” in the everyday sense of doting is equally of and through Venusian influence. Oohing tenderly over an infant is hardly different from awing fondly over a puppy… It is no accident that the commonest word in America for children is “kids,” and that affectionate nicknames for love partners draw habitually upon the same motif (kitten, lamb, chick, duckie, and just plain “baby”) …
It took the probings of advertising specialists… to unearth a remarkable parallel: A cake is the chief birthday symbol, and cake-baking the most pleasurable chore in the average woman’s homemaking existence, because they subconsciously represent what is called “pregnancy activity.” Women shoppers, it was found, instinctively spurned the cake mixes on the market which required only the adding of water, choosing the mixes to which they have to add eggs and milk and otherwise fuss over… [A]n extensive folklore had always associated female functions with the production of goodies in jokes, fairy tales and endless superstitions… The actual process of cake-making, from the original beating of the mixture of eggs (procreation symbols themselves), milk (maternal symbol), shortening and other ingredients, to the steady rise of the loaf in the oven (ovum chamber) until ready for removal, is a psychic enactment of the whole coitus-to-cradle saga. The decorating of the cake (its layette, figuratively) and then its proud presentation to the family are high points of the drama. “Sweet!” is no doubt the commonest adjective in people’s baby-admiring vocabularies, while the threat to eat it up is probably the most endearing thing a new mother can say to her darling creation.
Venus full cosmic state describes how we love, including how we baby our babies. Particularly her angularity strength and dynamic aspects (but also her natal constellation and all other considerations) are the best indicators of the desire for little ones to love (whether children or pets) and how we do it.
Moon
Broadly instinctual and the feminine complement of Sun’s archetypal masculinity, Moon obviously is maternal. Moon is not as connected to "mothering” as Venus in the sense of loving, doting, and caretaking, but is probably the central astrological and psychological factor in the wider idea of
nest building.
An exact line between Venus and Moon functions is not always obvious. Generally, though, Venus describes person-to-person sharing of affection. Moon signifies family and other immediate community intended when we speak of
one’s herd.
Accordingly, we see more preparing and populating the nest with strong lunar influences, especially luminaries in Cancer and Taurus. In contrast, Capricorn luminaries and Moon in her fall (Scorpio) often seem less likely to procreate or to have greater difficulties.
Other Planet Angularity
Besides Sun, Venus, and Moon, other planets, when angular, have the same meanings and styles we expect in other life areas. For the present purpose, think through how these familiar meanings apply to questions of children and parenting.
For example,
Mars has only indirect effect on being a parent through aggressive, often risky sexuality that leads to more pregnancies; or fathers may display their children as if they are medal’s memorializing and confirming their masculinity, something important to the male Mars temperament.
Similar touches are common to each of the other planets. These need not be explained separately: Their character emerges in the general delineation of the horoscope.