Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Sarcastic remarks about my son

Jealous behavior is NOT to be expected. It is unprofessional, rude and disrespectful. Yes, we all get the remarks, but it is NEVER an appropriate remark or to be EXPECTED.

That is like saying something to a mother of a child with a learning disorder "Well, teasing is to be expected"

It happens, yes, We should never expect it nor condone it.

My son attends a gifted preschool and still is head and shoulders above the other kids academically. No one has EVER treated him disrespectfully.

Please never settle for being lonely, there are people out There who will accept you and your son. I found moms with advanced little
Ones by contacting the lady who is the director of our schools district gifted Parent group. I figured if people had gifted school age kids ,they might have advanced little ones too. We all got together and started a play group.

i am a little confused about this and i am thinking some folks may be confusing day care/preschool with drop in community center care. i am going to state my assumptions please correct me.
This women who has offended is teaching classes at a community center and drops her kid into the same care group as your son when she is teaching a class, right?
She is not a day care teacher, right?
your interface is when your kids are in the same group, right?
so why not change the time you have your kid there to be opposite of her classes. or put you kid in a different group (older?)
why should you give up what seems like a great community center because of one woman.
and it seems like you are more affected by this woman than your son is.
It also seems some of the comments from folks here are based on the assumption that she is a professional day care or preschool worker and is being unprofessional based on that.
what kind of classes does she teach at the community center?
have you asked your son why he will not say hi to her? maybe it is a strange reason, she smells differnt or the pitch of her voice gives him a headache. His perceptions may not be the same as yours.
as far as expecting behavior that is unpleasant. I have found expecting it to be protective. I expect it to happen sometimes. I dont let it ruin my expeience of a place and i assign the problem to the one doing it, not to everyone else of that place. sometime i tolerate it. sometimes i call people on it. It depends on what the situation is worth and how it will affect my kid in the long run. sometimes i let it go because its just not worth the drama to confront it and doing so wont improve things for anyone involved. but sometimes it is important to empower my dd to stick up for herself. it varies.
but if you leave the community center, she wins, and you son may not even have any awareness of this lady since he ignores her. the teacher ignored the woman too. that should tell you something. what is your evidence that they are friends? would she ignore her friend when a 2 yo disses her? or would she intervene to help her save face.
I may be totally off here, but there could be a different interpretation to all this.

I agree that jealous behavior should not be tolerated. I have received quite a bit of this from other moms, not just this woman, so I am have accepted its just how some people are. I honestly am on the fence about whether to bring him back again. I don't feel comfortable. I notified the woman's supervisor in an email of her inappropriate behavior so I will see what she says back.

g2mom I will try to answer all of your questions here. Yes it is a community center that I take my son to once or twice a week in the summer. I have summers off because I work in schools. During the school year he attends full-time daycare elsewhere so he will be done there in a few weeks anyway.

The woman who has offended teaches parenting classes at the community center and drops her daughter before working. she also helps out with the daycare such as making meals, helping out in the classrooms at times etc. She is not his teacher but there are times he may be left alone with her if she is overlooking his class when the teacher steps out. It's all one big team effort there.

Her daughter is 4 and in the preschool room, my son is in the infant/toddler room. No matter what time I drop my son she is likely to be there. I may be more bothered by this woman than my son, but I have noticed a big difference in how he responds to her since she has began acting this way which concerns me. She use to be really nice and as soon as she saw him spelling words her behavior took a 180. If she is acting like that in front of me, making those sarcastic remarks and being rude, I wonder how she acts when I'm not around.

I asked my son why he does not say hi to her and he says "no" or that he doesn't like her. He talks to all of the other adults there so it seems he is picking up something he doesn't care for from her.

I don't want her behavior to ruin my experience of the place but I feel like I have ignored it long enough and by not saying anything I am allowing more of it. I don't appreciate her rudely cutting me off to talk down the school I was looking at for my son, or sarcastically saying "oh don't answer I bet you can spell the answer right" and things of that nature. It seems like she has a jealousy issue.

I couldn't imagine pressuring her 4 year old daughter to speak to me and then making a sarcastic remark like that when she didn't respond.

Truthfully I am very scared for my son and feel like he will be targeted for being mistreated. I never know how far people will take feelings of jealousy but he is so young and I find it unsettling that someone would even make remarks like that to a 2 year old especially with the tone she used. She obviously isn't happy about him spelling.

I spoke to his teacher and she told me that her and the woman are friends, and she does not think she would do anything to my son, but that feelings of jealousy are to be expected when a child is gifted. My son loves his teacher there so I really have mixed feelings about all of this.

FEELINGS of jealous may be something to be expected or at least frequently encountered when a child is gifted. I would contend that those feelings do not give permission for engaging in inappropriate or harmful BEHAVIOR towards a child or otherwisemake such behavior in any way excusable or tolerable.

I'll add a little explanation about my initial advice. Here is where I am coming from: at the age of 2, your child is not yet able to verbalize his observations about what the environment is like when you are not present. I've worked in both a daycare and a preschool, and I've seen professional caregivers lose it and yell and scream. Whether this is a community center, a private preschool or an in-home babysitter, I would not leave my young child unattended in a setting where it was not required by law with someone who concerned me enough to be weighing the options. It isn't worth it.

There will always be people who don't get your kid, who are intimidated or jealous by the apparent intelligence, but whether they are wildly enthusiastic about embracing your child's unique gifts isn't the concern here, it is that a woman in subtly and not so subtly undermining a child's value with her comments. That isn't acceptable in any setting, much less one that is established for an enriching experience for children.

I've worked with my kids to learn to cope with rude teachers who were unfair. But when they crossed the line to diminishing our child, we got involved - whether our child was 7 or 17.

I don't think this is something you need to be overly worried about happening in other situations. My son has never been treated the way you describe. When he was in preschool and was "cheating" by reading the answers to questions that no one else could read, the teachers were overjoyed about it, not jealous.

IMHO, jealousy from an adult is not a common reaction to exceptionally bright kids, nor is belittling or harassing toddler for being advanced. I actually find that quite baffling. I don't think it's "to be expected" because nearly everyone has more common sense than to be jealous of a toddler.

It sounds like the preschool teacher isn't willing to take a stand against her friend. That means you havea choice to either stop taking him there, since he won't have a protector from that woman, or talk to someone higher up. Since it seems like you use the class often, you should probably escalate to a higher-up.

I agree with syoblrig, this is not a common or normal reaction. My DS has always been similarly conspicuous, but we've never encountered any such reaction. (Clumsy reactions, yes; malicious, no.) Don't let this colour your expectations. I hope you never encounter anyone else who behaves like this!

Yep....I think what is more common is for adults who get annoyed that we are "bragging" about our kids' abilities - even if all we're doing is discussing an achievement the way a parent would say, "My son learned to ride a 2-wheeler today!".

I learned to keep my ds' precocious learning achievements to myself....which stinks, btw because I AM proud of him.

Anyway, not saying this is what happened in your case, just my own experience with an early reader /mathematician.

I guess I will be in a minority given all the other comments ... but I wouldn't be taking my child out. I wasn't there so don't know what kind of voice the woman used and all ... but to me it certainly doesn't sound malicious ... I take it as a JOKE. One that I could see myself making over a friend's child or even over my own. I was a gifted child and had to listen to a lot of stuff I wasn't happy with but this thing is not one that would make me hurt or upset in any way.

I WOULD however look more into WHY your son is ignoring her and what has been going on aside from this little incident because kids don't just shut out other people for no reason ... at least most of them don't. If I found out there was a reason to be worried then yes, I would be looking for other options, especially since you don't have to have your child in and this is just an enrichment activity.