Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school 4-year-old with thoughts too big

I am trying to figure out what is up with my DD who just turned four. For the most part she is a very happy girl. Above all else, she is compliant. She has never thrown a tantrum in her entire life. She is very reasonable and will do as she is told, but I think discontent is stewing in her bones. I think am starting to see some of it boiling over.

I guess her biggest complaint is that life is boring. Everything we do is boring. I hear this every single day. She has big problems with time going too fast. She is always complaining that an activity was too short. Every evening she starts to get twitchy about the impending night. Every night she laments about how the day is already over. She has always wished to be a baby again. She says life only gets harder as you grow up.

She used to be heavily into wishing for things. But, in the past few months she says she doesn't care. For a few weeks she was making wishes that she was dead. This was very unsettling and seemingly out of the blue. I caught her whispering to God saying, "dear God, I wish I was dead," multiple times. Now, she has said that she has no wishes which actually seems even more hopeless. "I don't wish to live. I don't wish to die. I don't wish anything." And, many variances of that. "I don't care about living. I don't care about dying. I don't care if you die or live." etc.

She has also told me out of the blue that she does not believe in God. She asked why she should believe in something she has not seen. She asked if she should believe in monsters she has not seen. She asked why God does not give her what she asks for. (I should clarify that we are not that religious at all.)

She is very concerned about lying. She thinks I lie to her all the time. She has told me that whenever I say "one minute" it is always a different amount of time and therefore I am lying. She is also constantly wanting to know if I lied to my mom when I was little and why lying is so bad.

I am a pragmatist and she is wearing me out. I do not really care to explain the meaning of life. I want her to believe whatever she needs to be happy and whatever she needs to get as much out of life as she can. I keep telling her that you get out of life what you put into it. How do I make that sentiment understandable to a four-year-old who thinks like I described above?

She always wants to know the big ideas. Her thoughts are always of the bigger picture. She knows that we live in a city, that is in a state, that is a country, on a continent, in the world, and the world is round. She knows the sun is a star and there are many many stars out there. She knows about past, present, and future. She is obsessed with history. She knows what happens when you grow up. She knows about college. She knows that when she has a baby, I will be a grandma. And, she has known all this for a while.

Is this what is causing her sadness? Is this too much for a four-year-old?

I am worried about her emotional well-being especially as we go forward. How do I parent the well-behaved child who feels compelled to do as she is told in public but is brooding feelings of despair and angst in private? Should I be concerned? Is this normal? I do not even know where to begin. Is this depression in a four-year-old? Are there resources for this? Anyone go through something similar?

I think there is a risk for young gifted kids to become depressed because they have a broader understanding about the complexities of our world WITHOUT an ability to control very much of it OR have the emotional/cognitive maturity to truly see future benefits of current struggles, understand that life waxes and wanes, and the ability to suppress the negatives.

Things to look for with depression would be the negative talk, hopelessness, and helplessness you are hearing plus changes in appetite and sleep, frequent tearfulness, irritability or anger, and often a loss of interest in things the used to bring pleasure.

I would start with your pediatrician to rule out vitamin deficiencies, thyroid, or other metabolic causes of her worsening mood. I would also suggest finding a counselor/psychologist that can help her (along with you) cope with such heavy thoughts.

It might be she neeeds a new passion or even to do some research of her own on spirituality and religion (with help). We (as humans) believe in things we can't see all the time; faith is a difficult concept to understand for a child.

I'd ask her what she'd be interested in, and then let her get her fill of it, including staying up late at night to work on it. This isn't good for the sleep schedule, but might help to fill her seeming void in the short term.

These sorts of statements are troubling. Yes, four year olds can be depressed; if I recall correctly, young highly gifted children can even engage in self-harm or suicide in serious cases. She also might be an easy target for abuse with those feelings. (I don't want to raise this specter unnecessarily, but such feelings might also be prompted by abuse.)

Those questions all seem very common-sensical to me. I wouldn't worry about them specifically, even if the part of you that is somewhat religious worries that she won't be able to partake in the benefits of religion later. Many (or at least a decent small fraction of) skeptics, agnostics and atheists come to have religious leanings at some point. Also, if her rationality excludes the possibility of religion, that might just be the way she is. Hard-core atheism finds its highest proportion of adherents among very highly educated, intelligent people, such as members of the National Academy of Sciences. I personally don't think atheists go to hell-- either God does not exist, or she shows understandable mercy to those who can't bring themselves to believe, with so many different religious and non-religious cosmologies to choose from.

That sounds like normal nitpicky, lawyerly HG+ kid stuff.

This might sound like a lot of work, but you could undertake a study of world religions and/or philosophy with her. You could also buy her some decent beginning philosophy books-- there are some written for children, some written with an encyclopedic overview, and some written as short biographical studies of famous philosophers. Maybe that or similar materials would interest her and answer some questions-- not about what life means, but about the types of questions others have asked along the way on the topic, so she wouldn't feel so alone in her journey.

My barely-informed, unprofessional guess is that your DD is experiencing some pretty significant trust issues. I've experienced this with my own DD7, when she thought DW and I were responsible for her placement in an age-level school grade, instead of an appropriate ability-level one. She went into meltdown mode on a regular basis, wished she was dead, hit herself (not too hard, thankfully), etc. It was only when we'd convinced her that we'd been vigorously opposed to the placement from the beginning that we saw improvement (in her behavior... nothing has improved at school, but that's another topic).

Like your child, my DD believes that good behavior is very important, and the conflict came from trying to behave for people she seriously doubted had her best interests in mind. As a child she's powerless, and without someone she can trust looking out for her, she also felt quite hopeless.

My determination of trust issues in your case are based on these signals:

- She is wishing/praying for things and they're never coming true. She's testing information she has received in this way, and the result is false.

- The "one minute" comment, which says she is catching you saying things you don't literally mean.

- The comment that you don't care to explain "the meaning of life" to her satisfaction. Apparently that's pretty important to her at the moment, and by ignoring it you're inadvertently telling her that she's not important.

In this case, the solution is to earn her trust back, which can be a difficult proposition... trust is easily lost but not easily won. For "one minute," I'd try to avoid that statement in the future, but rather explain, "After I've finished doing X." I'd also explain how it's a figure of speech, and not to be interpreted literally, for those situations where you slip and use it again.

As for the big questions of God and the meaning of life... it sounds like you don't spend a lot of time thinking about this subject too much, but it's very important to your DD right now. Your DD is raising some very good points, and she needs someone to answer them in a way that makes sense for her. If that's not you, maybe you can bring her to someone else who can.

A few other comments:

- Wishing she was a baby again is a perfectly natural behavior at that age. In our DD's case, we dealt with this mostly by reminding her of all the cool stuff she can do now that she couldn't do as a baby. And... every once in a while, we regress to playing baby again. She loves it.

- The feeling of being rushed may mean that she's over-scheduled. My DD started doing that when she over-scheduled herself, with a different extra-curricular activity Monday - Saturday. We enforced a cut-back and made more time for free play, which is what she really wanted. Nowadays, as long as she gets some play time at the end of the day, whatever else happened during the day, she's cool. Free play is extremely important in child development.

- Another possibility for that sense of being rushed is that she feels like she has no control. The solution here is to provide an array of choices, rather than choosing for her.

Thank you for the responses.

Behaviorally, she is a dream. Her eating and sleeping habits have not changed. Like I said, she has never had a tantrum. She is very compliant--always does what we say. She is also very reasonable. We have just grown accustomed to explaining everything to her until she becomes agreeable. She is a dream in preschool. This is the second year in a row where we are getting comments about cloning her. She has no behavioral problems except for the negativity and pessimism she shares with DH and I in private. She saves it ALL for us.

Throughout the day she is just a happy little girl. It looks like she is having heaps of fun. I have actually gotten comments on how happy she is. It is only sitting in the car or getting ready for bed that she comes out with these dark thoughts. If I ever ask her how her day was it is boring and too short. For the past few months nothing has been fun. Everything has been boring. This is according to her. I feel like I have been trying to convince her to want to live. Whenever I see her do something fun I'm like, "see? Isn't this fun?"

I will ask for her levels to be tested at her four-year-old well checkup. She has been anemic in the past. I will let the doctor know she has been kind of down.

Trust. That is interesting. You may be on to something. She has been having strong feelings about me not being fair.

As far as over scheduling, I have pretty much made it my mission to keep our days under scheduled. She goes to preschool three morning a week and swim lessons on another weekday. That is it. She is given plenty of time for unstructured free play. And, she uses it. She loves playing around the house. She uses the entire house in her imaginary play and has a few very close imaginary friends. She plays like this at least two hours a day, but some days a lot more.

I'd say if anything her beef with me is that she does not have more activities. She has asked to stay at preschool longer and participate in the school's dance program. That is just not going to happen. I do take her to the zoo and museums almost weekly. She loves them, but at the end of the day she rattles off everything she did and it is never enough. Could she just be spoiled?

As far as the God thing. I just asked her before she went to bed if she believed in God. She was adamant that she did not. This actually does not bother me as much as it probably should. I was raised Catholic and feel like it took many many years to come to terms with what I needed to believe. I told her to talk to her teacher at preschool. It is a private christian school. She begged me not to tell anyone about her not believing. I'm just going to let this go for now.

What bothers me most is the talk of death. I wish I had an idea why she would say things like this. She just won't talk to me about this at all.

I feel for you. We are going through very similar issues here at the moment with DS 4.10 PG. Speaking with the people that did the testing on him, it is a very complicated place to be for these little people. The mental ability being SO far off compared to their emotional development. I have come to realize it is almost like a train wreck between the mind and their emotions. Such big, deep, complicated thoughts, but completely underdeveloped emotional skills to process it.

We get the "I wish I would have never been born", but DS also had one incident where he scratched his face so it left red marks and bit his arm because "I hate myself". Extremely disturbing to say the least and I will bring it up to the doctor when we go in for our appt. in about a month...

He is also in a phase where he is scared of shadows in his room saying "there is an intruder here". We are not talking about monsters, which I guess is a common fear with kids this age. He is afraid of a real person that broke into our home.

He is also scared to fall asleep because he doesn't want to dream. He says he will be "separated from my stuffed dog because the dream takes me to a different place".

Anyway, I really have no solutions for you. Just bringing this up so that you know you are not alone. I try to get him to talk to me about his fears and concerns. For him to open up to me so we can have a discussion about it. I also keep the responses very light and upbeat. Not so that I make him feel what he is experiencing is irrelevant, but just because he is SO serious and I want to lighten it up a bit.

Rough for sure.

This is what I did with my junior philosopher at this age. It was very helpful to her. She does not seem to have a spiritual sense of need for a deity, however, and this has troubled her somewhat throughout her life. She can see how fulfilled/comforted religious observance makes her friends and some extended family... but she doesn't seem to have what the Catholics refer to as "the gift of faith." It was quite painful to her that more devout family members clearly wanted her to lie to them for social reasons on this particular score. That kind of existential conflict is quite difficult for someone who truly feels NOTHING spiritually. Just noting that this may be the case here, since you mention that her educational environment is a religious one. This might explain her preoccupation with social lies (or inaccuracies, really).
She did develop a fascination with world faiths, mythos, and world history as a result of that early exposure, so it was good in any case.
Indicentally, my DD is still deeply philosophical and empathetic, but she has grown to be a hard-nosed pragmatist with a blazing sense of social justice, too.

Does your 4yo feel that you are "sheltering" her, or that others are treating her as a child too much for her tastes?

How does she handle what we tend to think of as "adult" topics? That is, some of the more distressing aspects of human history? My daughter was very much like yours at 3 and 4. She was hungry for... well, reality. She was very much ready to deal with the complexities, even though we have had to remind ourselves that she was a child who lacked a certain amount of life experience necessary for understanding those things the way that adults do/did. Her sophistication and natural understanding was and is a little freakish. Honestly, I used to think that the stories about the Dalai Lama were hogwash, but having lived with my DD... I have seen that eerie kind of "knowing" vibe, and it does feel very supernatural sometimes.

It's also possible that she is (at least somewhat) manipulating you, if claims of boredom (or expressing these admittedly very dark thoughts) get you to respond in a more overtly engaged and alert manner. Frankly, a PG child who is loquacious can be an e-ticket and by the end of the day, parental fatigue is a real problem. My DD went through a phase of saying-- well, pretty much ANYTHING outrageous enough to elicit an animated or interesting response from us. That might explain why she claims "boredom" when as far as you can tell, nothing could be further from the truth. It's particularly true that if she's LOOKING to convince you to let her expand her activity schedule, claims of boredom would seem like a great lever to use.

Some of it, as others note, may be asynchrony, pure and simple. It's a frustrating thing to feel like you're imprisoned in the body and life of a preschooler when you can see the world with the intellectual sophistication of a much older person. Without the emotional maturity (or natural inclination) to process that frustration well, or to temper it with the knowledge that childhood is relatively short, and will be over soon, or that adulthood has many benefits to balance the responsibilities... well, that's not a good mixture. Train wreck is right.

Ellemenope,wow. Sorry this is happening.

I am new at this, DS just got tested gifted less than a few weeks ago, but I do understand to a certain extent how you feel about the profound thoughts. DS now almost 6 but used to ask the following at 4 also:

"Mama, Lola (grandma) said that god is the most powerful being on earth, then who are god's parents? Who made god? Wouldn't god's parents be more powerful than god?" or "Why are we here on earth? What is the point?"

But the part where your DD talks about death and wishing to be dead strikes me as seriously disconcerting. My apologies I have no specific experience to draw from, DS has not uttered similar words. But if I were to place myself in your shoes, I would immediately contact a children's health professional to evaluate, consult, test extensively, provide support, etc. I hope I am not being an alarmist for nothing, but it seems like a red flag that needs to be addressed now.

Its strikes me that it's an odd combination for something to be boring and too short? I have no amazing insight, but boring usually drags on and on, not ends too soon?

I want to send you some empathy. My DD, while older, and while not behaviorally a dream, is prone to saying some strange and sometimes disturbing things, and to being seriously distraught about large philosophical questions that I can't always even fully understand. That is, they are vaguely nonsensical, rather like what you describe here, but to her, they are clearly distressing.

She also has spoken of death and wishing to be dead. This took us to a team of psychiatrists. She was diagnosed with depression. However, they were less freaked out by this behavior than I expected, because she eats fine, sleeps fine, plays happily, and so on. They did not suggest medication and felt the situation was relatively mild.