And even if many of the lagging skills are actually above age level, just asking everyone else to do it for him all the time has to end at some point, and when he's frustrated he wants help with the stuff he donsn't need help with, too.
But when you don't help him do all the difficult stuff, he just kinda collapses and wants to do nothing but nurse and get increasingly despondent and bossy and negative.
Ah Sweetie, i totally remember what you are going through. In retrospect, I trace some of my son's poor fine motor skills to me 'going along' with 'his lead' to high a percentage of the time. I think perfectionism gets in really young and prevents certain normally developments from going along normally.
The good news is that this gets better and better with time. It helped me to have a phrase to say to try and give him words for what he was experiencing - I wish I could remember, sort of like: That bag of potato chips was designed to be opened by
grown up hands, sorry. You give 3 tries and then I'll open it.
And that part about 'despondent, bossy and negative' sure rings a bell. I'm not sure that there is a known answer. At least you know what you are seeing and that is it a 'personality + gifted' thing. I had no idea.
You can try a few things -
1) Self care. If you have to hire a 'mother's helper' an hour a day to get yourself some relief - do it! Nobody gets how much work these kids are. If that isn't possible, regular excersize,social time, balanced diet, sleep and daily time for prayer or meditation.
2) Expect him to need to learn to handle King-sized frustration and expect lots of tears as the visible sign that he is growing on the inside. Hand in Hand Parenting
Parent resources for helping crying infants sleep, managing toddlers tantrums, fostering adolescent success, building emotionally intelligent lifelong ...
www.handinhandparenting.org/or
3) Try Nurtured heart approach/Transforming the Difficult child - Lots of 'I see you are handling your strong feelings well, you could be screaming or kicking right now, but you aren't" Paise the smallest bit of self-control and patience.
4)
http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Think...mp;ie=UTF8&qid=1293480475&sr=1-2 you can try working to help identify emotions and teach problem solving with any of the 'I can problem solve books'
5) Work with breathing and meditation to move energy to handle emotions - I don't have a book recommendation for this yet, and am in the process of figuring this out, but I invite you to learn Heart Rhythm Meditation for yourself and then get creative with it. Please keep me posted about what works.
Huggs
Grinity
