Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Behavioral Quirks

Oh yes, I can relate to the need to know about every conversation happening around her. Knowing isn't enough - she needs to be involved in them. We are working on it...

Also the loud noises although probably not as bad as some others are experiencing.

Other "quirks":

- a need to spin. Whether she is dancing, swimming, on a tire swing - she spins and spins and spins. I get dizzy just watching her.

- a need to "dress for the occasion". Whether we are going to school art night, a theater performance, lunch for mother's day - whatever it is. She gets all decked out in a "southern belle" type of hat, feather boa, frilly/lacey anything, gloves, high heels, make up and jewelry. Did I mention she is 7? Until last year she usually added a crown to the ensemble but now the big hat usually suffices.

- totally throwing herself into her dramatic or imaginative play. The imaginary friends are gone but a recent one involved deciding she was going to open a restaurant and asking every day if we could PLEASE go shopping for the furniture, decorations, cookware, etc. She found an empty restaurant and was ready to sign a lease and start serving customers. Again, did I mention that she is 7?

- she has to have several books going at once but since she is significantly LD it means audio books in the car and DH and I reading at night. We are in the middle of the 4th Harry Potter book in the car. At one point something happened and a character jumped up, pulled their wand and said a spell. DD said it along with her. "Have you listened to this before?" "No, don't you remember in the first book they were taught that spell in one of their first classes. " "Have they used it since then?" "No. I just remember it."

- a need to perform - sing, dance, act - at every opportunity. It doesn't matter if she has an audience or not.

- she gets TOTALLY absorbed in every performance she watches. Cheering in the political rally for Teddy Roosevelt while watching "Teddy and Alice", leaving the theater crying if a favorite character is killed, jumping to her feet and yelling "Bravo" when a particular performance really thrills her, etc.

- a fascination with historical times and figures. We already went through the Pilgrims and American Revolution. Now we are reading biography after biography of Teddy Roosevelt and Sakagawea. She recently explained to a waitress at a restaurant, who turned out to be a moonlighting 4th grade teacher, that President Hoover wasn't a bad guy - people blamed him for the Great Depression but it really wasn't his fault.

- a total fear of disappointing a teacher or getting into any sort of trouble at school. She is totally freaked out by color charts and other public shaming systems even though she doesn't get in trouble.

- a true, deep appreciation for aesthetics. A beautiful flower, painting or piece of music totally captivates her.

At least for me, I hear everything, including conversations I do not want/need to hear.

Once I hear them, I have a burning desire to know every details about them.

I just _need_ to know!

My son (8) spins! It's not as frequent as it was because he's gotten himself in trouble (crashing into other kids in line ups when he was younger). He still adores our tire swing though. Spin spin spin.

My daughter (9) skips in one place when she talks - it's like she can't contain her energy.

They (we) have so many others. I don't know where to start, lol.

This was my daughter at 6. She's better now (9). She learns at the speed of light, but at 6 if it was something just a little above her level, then she would be instantly angry. She had intense perfectionism - her grade 2 teacher commented several times that you could see it physically manifesting itself in the way she gripped her pencil and hunched over her desk... she'd take 15 minutes to do something that the other kids would scrawl out in 5, and it was because she kept erasing it and doing it again....

Both my kids have an extreme intolerance to repetition. Once they've mastered something, they can only do it 2 or 3 times before they become stressed with boredom.

Here's a boredom story: my daughter, then 8, had just started grade 4 and had homework. It was to print the good copy of a one page story she'd written at school. All she had to do was copy a neater version of her draft. It was JUST COPYING. It took about 3 hours, complete with crying, shouting (all her, lol) and much chair and table kicking. I was desperate to figure out why she was so upset: "do your hands hurt? are you ok?" "here, put a ruler under each line so that it's easy to follow." etc etc. I finally got it out of her: "mommy it's SO BORING!! I just can't do it!!" (OMG). I finally had to walk her through it word by word: "this word! GO! print it! Excellent! Next word! Just do it! Awesome! Next word!" etc etc etc.

It's interesting because if I look back over the year (she just finished grade 4), she's no longer plagued by perfectionism but her work is much sloppier. She's very "all or nothing." It's either perfect with angst or sloppy and substandard with a smile. It's like there's an on/off switch. So in reality, she hasn't really learned to cope with perfectionism - she's simply stopped caring. Ah, the underachiever...

LOL! I had an extremely similar situation last year, when my DD was 8 and in 4th grade. I think for us, it was a "write one sentence using each spelling word" task. I was amazed that yelling, "Your word is [word]. Write!" actually worked as a motivating technique.

Oh yeah. We have this too. It's weird. DD has absolutely gorgeous, perfect handwriting. She recently decided to make it horrible. Like, semi-legible. I rarely get really mad at her about stuff like this, but it was driving me NUTS, especially her "whatever" attitude about it. We actually did put our foot down and made her start rewriting things. All we could get out of her was that she wanted to write faster and that a girl in her class who she admired wrote "like that." I man, a minor drop in quality would have been fine, but this was A+ handwriting to C-. Weird.

Ugh... sounds a bit like "Mom's Carnival Funhouse of Math."


I had her go and get things from her room to 'buy' as prizes for correct answers.

Initially, this "game" began somewhat coercively because Little Ghandi simply refused to bother writing out double digit subtraction problems as a 6yo... because, see, she didn't care. A 42% on a 4th grade unit exam made ME care, though. LOL!!

But DD was unfazed. So, with the understanding that I needed to know whether or not the problem was one of a lack of mastery... or of, umm... motivation... I assured her that any toys "unpurchased" at the end of her problem set would be donated to a local children's charity. (Cruel? Maybe. Still-- I strongly suspected that the problem was motivational in nature, and I certainly wasn't going to actually follow through if it wasn't. The problems were challenging-- more so than what had been on her exam... because I had to make them hard enough to motivate her to write out her work, and I needed to SEE where she was making errors, if that is what the problem was... ) I gave her 42 problems, and she needed to get 30 of them correct within 40 minutes in order to 'buy back' everything in the living room.

After the first round, her percentage of correct answers for the entire problem set topped 98% and she went to her room to collect more "prizes" so that we could keep playing...


(Aughhhhhhh....)

Boy, did her teacher laugh when I explained this one. I was mostly just relieved that there wasn't an underlying problem with her understanding, but WOW... I'm pretty sure that most kids don't respond like that to pressure. :sigh: Perfectionism + ennui = baaaaad output in schoolwork. Truly.

My son was required to arrange the spelling words in alphabetical order and copy them three times. Usually he knew all or almost all the words when they were first assigned. Why not pre-test students so they are only practicing words they don't know? When my son is required to do a pointless assignment, I wonder how much I should push him.

Exactly, Bostonian. DD had spelling as part of her language arts curriculum each year until 7th grade as a virtual school student, but it was ungraded.

We never did any of the 'spelling' other than as a reward.

That probably requires some explanation.

I'd pretest her. Using a "word-sentence-word" format. She liked my sentences.

"Sluggish. While a three-toed sloth may appear to be sluggish, it was not a good idea to assume that a sloth's impressive claws cannot be used with terrifying rapidity when it chooses to do so. Sluggish."

"Obfuscate. It was unwise for Johnny to obfuscate so obviously while under oath, because the judge threw him into jail for perjury. Obfuscate."

She found this so vastly entertaining that we'd sometimes do three or four units this way. As a reward for completing an assignment (often writing) that she didn't wish to do, I'd keep going until she missed a word or until we'd done four units.

(I think that she missed five spelling words in that four years, so...)

My 14 year old son has to read the latest news before he can get out of bed--even on vacation. He always has interesting things to talk about. We stay with his sister in Dallas for a week every year and she says she always gets an education when we visit.

He sees humor or irony and visual puns everywhere and is quick to point them out. He is such a good comedian that when we are arguing about something and he is really mad at us he uses humor to diffuse the situation and we all end up laughing so hard that tears come to our eyes.

He gets anxiety when he takes tests and we were told when he was nine that it looked like he had a problem with visual memory but this was at the same time he was able to learn the spelling of thousands of words while practicing for a spelling bee. He could remember them, even the hardest words, without ever seeing them again. If he was going to make a mistake it would be on an easy word, but that was rare too. He could spell as well as read when he was two. Now he is learning to read Japanese and seems to be learning that quickly. He remembers logos and he always does well on tests of visual memory on the computer--but then he doesn't do the online tests when he has a migraine. This is one reason I don't always believe test results. I have to look at test results in combination with everything else I see.

He is very picky about what he will watch on television. He can't sit through most movies without his mind wandering but he enjoyed watching The Artist and he can watch anime for hours. He reads on his iPhone while watching television. He loves video games but he gets bored with those too and would never spend hours and hours just playing video games. He has to take breaks to find out if anything new is going on in the news and to talk to us about whatever is happening. He has always loved to talk--mostly to adults because he didn't fit in with kids his age or his friends who were usually three or four years older. Now that he is 14 and his friends have jobs and cars and girlfriends, etc. he doesn't get to talk to them so he socializes online. Most of his online friends are college age and assume he is too.

He can't see why anyone would choose to live in a small town. He can't see the beauty in wide open spaces and lots of cows and horses and wheat fields. To him, beauty is cities with tall buildings and lots of lights and restaurants and lots of people doing interesting things, talking about interesting things instead of gossiping and judging others and then shunning people that don't think exactly the way they think. My daughter was the same way.

Is not being able to tolerate mediocrity a quirk? My kids don't get people who tell them "make do with what you've got." My daughter is telling her brother that he should never settle for less and to keep working for what he wants even if it means working more than one job for a while when he is older. She left home as soon as she could and worked so that she could drive a better car and wear nicer clothes than I do.