Thank you again to everyone who has responded. I think that this is a real set of problems that is both about asynchrony
and about being statistically rare, as aquinas has noted.
It's just difficult to know when/how to intervene as a parent.
Some of this is about trying to get a handle on which child I'm parenting when, if that makes sense. Am I parenting the
emotional side of my child, who is about 14 in her reasoning, and about 17 in her needs, and some variable/unknown age in her responses to input? Or is it the cognitive side of her? Or is it the physical one?
The answers change situationally and occasionally even involve some strange and ill-defined cocktail of things. It's easy enough to say to a 13yo "You're too young for _____." But at the same time, if it's a genuine
need based on a true area of precosity (obviously I'm not talking about physical/sensual aspects here, but emotional/social ones and certainly cognitive ones), that's an overly simplistic answer that ignores a real set of needs.
I'm so glad that I have this forum to bounce this stuff off of.
Thank you.
