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So I got frustrated when DD(4) said she missed an entire page of multiplication today. Why? Because she loves it & always gets it right. So I asked, "what happened?". She didn't know and is going to re-do it tomorrow but wasn't allowed to go to do the next page like she wanted to and usually does. I threw out some easy ones to see if she was getting the concept. She got them right (she figures them out by counting rather than memorization).
It literally just dawned on me tonight that I am frustrated with my 4yo for missing multiplication problems. That's crazy right?! I'm just so used to her doing one thing that when she doesn't do it I'm compairing her to herself rather than thinking "she's 4". Now I'm just frustrated with myself. We don't do math at home so I just know what she's up to from what she tells me. Anyone else ever get frustrated for things like this that you realize later are insane?!

My mother still tells a story of going backpacking with us kids for a week when my brother was 5 (and I was 6). The weather was glorious, so we never set up the tents - just slept under the stars. Until the last night, when it started raining in the small hours of the morning. There was no way to make a fire or have warm food for breakfast with the rain pouring down. They just woke us up at 5 in the morning, threw some cereal at us while they loaded everything haphazardly into packs, and set off down the mountain. We docilely complied for a while, and then my brother sat down in the trail and refused to move. They tried for a while to get him going again, and eventually my father carried him and his pack out. (In addition to a 70-pound pack - they hadn't been trying to balance things in packing to get out, and dad ended up overloaded.)

My mother was outraged. Furious. She looks back at it now and wonders how on earth she ever thought it was a good idea to even go on a long hike with kids that young, let alone take them backpacking for a week and expect them to hike down the mountain in the rain with no breakfast.

Try not to be too hard on yourself. With these children, our reality is skewed. It's totally insane that when my son is reading, I feel frustrated if he's tired and having trouble, I actually internally scream, "This is so frustrating and you don't even need to be reading, but you insist that we do this!" He gets so upset at the exceptions to the rules. And it's exhausting arguing about the english language with an emotional three year old.
It's just essentially what parents of 1st graders go through with their daily homework routine that for most parents is incredibly frustrating, we are just experiencing it earlier.

Yes-- and ONLY parents of other highly asynchronous children can truly identify with this. You're parenting a single child with (seeming) multiple identities all competing for executive control in any one moment.

Like the 5th grade math test that my DD completely blew off-- earning herself a whopping 42%-- not because she didn't know the material inside and out, but because she (being barely 7yo) wasn't in the mood that morning.



THEN, we had to backtrack and make sure that the teacher knew that no, she really DID TOO know all of that stuff, and it was really not the case that she was moving "too quickly" through the material... during her year of compacting 4th and 5th grade (which the school had been ambivalent about).

Adult sized issues created by pint-sized people with out-sized ability for age. {sigh}

It DOES get better as they gain metacognitive skills during their tweens and teens, by the way.

can definitely relate (see my up coming thread!) take it easy on yourself we are only human after all.

Thank you for the replies! We just had her fall conference and socially & academically her grade skip seems to be going so well. I am most relieved of that . You always wonder if your doing the right things for your kids. She seems to be in the right school because with the skip she can still work above at her level if she needs to and they have the materials for that. And most importantly, they say she is happy . I am really hoping the rest of the year will continue like this!!!

I think we all catch ourselves being frustrated like this sometimes. My DD should have rocked the Explore test Maths section (and in fact did for her age just not her grade as she has been skipped a year) but instead having been told to use a calculator by the proctor she struggled to make negative numbers on it to do simple calculations that she could have done mentally just fine.


All of the Maths on that test was well within her capabilities but she just lacked the 'exam technique' to just guess and move on after a certain interval per question had been exceeded and then circle back at the end. So she left half of the questions unanswered. I was actually quite upset at the time because I thought that she had let herself down.

Looking back on it, she had never taken a test like it before and had not been taught exam taking skills so it was an education in its own right. I had been fooled by her precocious intelligence and abilities into over estimating her executive functioning - duh. It is clear now in hindsight but it was absolutely not so clear in the moment.

My DS3.5 loves to do 2 digital addition mentally when he was just 3, now he didn't want to use the mental effort to do additions, and like to guess (e.g. 56+35 he said should be 8x or 9x). I am so want to ask him to think rather than guess, but d guessing is also a math skill :P
Sometimes i don know if it is time to let him take a rest or time for learning sth new as when he finished memorizing the multiplication table (he also understand it), he is so excited and said, "yeah, I can start learning division now!

Anyways, i think it is really normal for a kid as this young age to "not in a good mood" to do their work in school, especially test.

I remember that when I was in elementary school, I am really good at Chinese writing, but I did fail in one exam. It is bc i want to correct a word using the eraser but end up making a big hole on the paper that I cannot write anymore, and too nervous to ask for another paper :P. When we grow up, we can't remember how well we did the exams in the childhood but certainly remember the time we fail,and it is not a bad memory hum:P