Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Visual sensitivity and perfectionism

This actually triggers another memory of my DD10 when she was younger (although it's not quite the same)... she was VERY VERY VERY insistent that her stuffed toys had feelings, and it went well beyond the age when she should have known they were toys. I'm certain that on some level she knew they weren't real, but she insisted they were and that they had awareness and likes and dislikes. She would become quite upset and emotional if you contradicted her. I want to say this continued until she was 7 or 8, but I can't quite remember. My suspicion is that she was just taking some of her intense sensitivity and displacing it somewhere (sharing it, maybe... with her stuffed toys... so that it was easier to handle? I don't know).

You might consider looking at Elaine Aron's work on highly sensitive children: http://www.hsperson.com/pages/child.htm. My boy has some of these issues, particularly with baths. We've tried the visor, to no avail (didn't like the way it felt on his head, etc). He's now mostly dirty...

My DS6 is a perfectionist. He had a hard time with free writing in class. He had so many great ideas, but when the teacher cued more and more, he hesitated to a halt. But when he brought the work home, with no one interrupting him, he would finish the story writing swiftly.

FWIW, the broken banana thing is age-appropriate for toddlers and a typical developmental thing. I read an explanation of it once, though it sounded a bit Freudian. Anyway, lots of kids do this. I think it is sometimes worth it to just let them cope with the broken banana.

At that age with my explosive toddler (my older son)...I used to eat the last banana at night if we only had one left. If we only had one left and he asked for it and the damn thing broke then there wasn't another one to try...he expected me to drop everything and go to the store for another bunch of bananas. If I ate the single left banana before he could ask for it, we were not in that position. I even stopped getting bananas for a while and switched to different fruit until his flexibility on bananas was better...and for a while I told him he could only have them sliced up with a dollop of whipped cream or yogurt (thus avoiding the whole "it broke so now it is no good" problem).

We had the bath issue with DD as well. Since she's always had long hair, it wasn't something we could just let go. She was HORRIFIED at the feeling of water trickling anywhere down her face.

What finally worked (but it was still a fight) was to have her stand, lean slightly towards the wall with both hands holding the wall for support, then tip her head all the way back so that her forehead was horizontal with the ceiling. Then I'd use a cup (not the shower head - it scared her too much) and slowly pour the water on her hair so that it would run down her back, talking her through it the entire time. I'm not sure why she had to stand - maybe she felt further from the water and not as likely to get her face wet? I don't know. All I know is I couldn't get her to stay calm when she was sitting.