The Child is card number 13 of the Petit Lenormand, the thirty-six card deck read in the nineteenth-century French cartomantic tradition that took its name, after her death in 1843, from the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand.
Image, meaning and playing card
The card shows a young child. In the tradition its core sense is a new beginning, innocence, something small or young; beside another card it can shrink or soften that card's meaning.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Jack of Spades, a survival of the ordinary piquet pack over which the pictorial Lenormand was laid. Lenormand cards are read less as standing symbols than in combination, each modifying the cards to either side, so that the child takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Das Kind. As House 13 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on new beginnings and small scale, whatever the surrounding cards' subject happens to be. In combination, Child followed by Ship reads as a new journey just beginning, while Child preceding Tree reads as something newly planted that will take time to mature. Because the card marks smallness and newness generically rather than only literal childhood, readers apply it to a new job, a new relationship or a small version of whatever the neighbouring cards describe, not only to questions about children.