Uhhh... wow.
At my house "Sitting, no reading, no talking, no
nothing" was called a "time-out" and it was used to modulate inappropriate behavior.
Remember, these aren't "typical" kids. Shutting off their information/data collection mechanisms is... well, it's like shutting off their oxygen supply.
DD
definitely regards it as punitive.
"Quiet time" is different than sensory/information deprivation time. I personally do NOT believe that it is helpful to HG+ kids to deprive them of self-selected and otherwise completely appropriate quiet, personally absorbing activities.
I also want to reiterate the notion that this IS how some extravert HG+ children behave when inappropriately challenged in an academic setting.
I did many of the same things-- chattering to my classmates, being somewhat "creative" with my free time, etc. Talk-talk-talk-talk-talk, as my mother said. Well. What she
actually said was that
{Myname} learned to talk at about nine months old and hasn't shut up since. again.
I also recall teacher comments on report cards which said things like "{My name} speaks well. And often."
These were in my so-called "gifted" classes, which STILL weren't usually at the right level.
It's truly unfair to evaluate a child's behavior in the larger sense when they don't have an appropriate academic setting to 'be' in daily.
It's also possible that this is a child who is HG/+ and simply has motor/verbal over-excitabilities. My DD has a friend who is much like this. She "flits" and always has-- setting up perhaps 2-4 different activities during play dates, and cycling endlessly between them. It's funny to watch my poor DD (who is NOT like that) trailing along, increasingly exhausted by the sheer pace of the shifts in focus.
