I'm the mom of a 9.5 year old daughter. Never had her formally tested. She goes to small, private school that we love, and all of her teachers have referred to her as "gifted" over the years, and every checklist or criteria for giftedness I have seen is a fit for her...the good, bad and the ugly
Essentially, I come to you now because I am at my wit's end parenting her. She exhausts me. She wears me down. I'm a special education teacher,with two masters' degrees, so I am not without skills and strategies, but I am often finding myself at the end of my rope in dealing with her. Her language and reasoning is sophisticated beyond her years, she is relentless when she wants something (or doesn't want something) bordering on obsessive. Her "smart" remarks, or way of "beating us at our own game" when we try to reason and negotiate with her are unnerving. You can't even punish the child, or take away privileges, because she reasons and rationalizes about why it doesn't matter.
At this point, I am fearful for my relationship with her as she approaches her teen years. As I said to my husband, at this age she stomps upstairs and locks herself in her room when furious; in 6 or 8 years she could be stomping out of the house and jumping into a boyfriends car. I worry that if I can't manage her effectively now, things are only going to get worse as we enter the teens.
I also worry for her, because she often just doesn't seem happy
I wonder if it's too much negativity from us at home (she does classic things like know exactly how to complete the entire unit in math with the teacher barely covering it, but forgetting to bring her math book home to complete her homework 3 days a week; her room is a disaster area and we can never get her to keep it remotely neat, but then she loses everything; she is so absorbed in what she is reading or playing or watching or imagining that she doesn't do half of what she's supposed to, and doesn't hear us trying to gain her attention). She has had issues with serious anxiety in the past, though that seems to be in check lately. She is seeming to have more trouble fitting in with her peers (classic, again) though her teacher's don't seem to see it. She is very hard on herself with perfectionist tendancies, but at the same time careless bordering on lazy about her assignments and tasks at home.
I love her dearly and just want her to be happy and confident and feel comfortable in her own skin. My husband and I have always said life is going to be hard on her, smart as she is, because she analyzes things so deeply, thinks so hard about everything, and can never just "roll with it".
How can we help her? What can help us help and parent her productively???
