I, er-- was that LOUD kid. blush

I grew out of it. I was just so-- EXCITED sometimes, you know? It was hard to regulate my vocal range.

I got lucky in that I understand certain things about my DD because I lived some of it as a child, as well. On the other hand, knowing that you're on train tracks doesn't necessarily allow you to avoid being run down by the train if you lack alternatives.

Some things that my daughter did that required way outside-the-box parenting:

  • oppositional behavior that was WELL into "teen" territory. When she was 3-7yo. Take comfort-- she's been a pretty rational and well-tempered teen, however. Our investment in maintaining parental authority/credibility during those (admittedly hard) years has paid off.
  • Manipulative tendencies that would do Machiavelli proud. Book recommendation there which has allowed me to simply, calmly put my foot DOWN early, and put a stop to it-- because I recognize it-- The Manipulative Child. Which isn't about fixing the child, btw-- it's about fixing parental responses so that we can be better parents to kids with those tendencies... and WHOAHHHH, does a highly gifted child ever have the right cocktail of traits to run circles around the adults in their lives if they're unwary.
  • Resistance to punishment/discipline-- think Cool Hand Luke. This tendency is still utterly amazing to me. We've had to learn to be creative and a little bit unpredictable in our natural consequences with DD, and to allow her to see us as HUMAN early on-- which is totally counter to parenting advice, by and large. The thing is, we're her social laboratory for learning adult skills, and her abilities are already at formidable adult levels long before she has the other maturity to regulate them well. It's an odd situation. So she needed to know that people are unpredictable, and that if she calculates WRONG-- and she will, if she dances too close to the edge-- then she will occasionally have a completely disproportionate and harsh reaction from others.
  • Behavior that tempts adults to expect far too much from her. Fostering an understanding that they are NOT "little adults" and that in spite of seeming mature, they are still young children, with all that their age entails. We never placed external developmental expectations on our DD-- because she doesn't use that particular play book at all. We've instead learned to study HER history for clues as to how her developmental arc tends to look. That gives us some predictive power that we otherwise lack, and we know what signs to look for-- both good and bad.




Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.