Thanks for your contributions Indigo. I think the potential to pathologize giftedness is a very important issue.
When DS was very young, he would get very engrossed in his own activities which were mainly centred on studying the cause & effects of things. At age 3-4, he attended a child care centre where he would often ignore their activities to continue his own. The staff at the centre strongly urged us to have him assessed for ADHD, hearing deficits etc (even to the point of suggesting we were neglectful parents), but DH and I knew from our much broader experience of him that it was his giftedness driving his behaviour and not any deficits preventing him from ‘normal’ interactions. Eventually, the psychologist who assessed his IQ at 4 described his non verbal reasoning as ‘a-ma-zing’ (he ceilinged on the SBV) and when he started school, he emerged as a social leader.
