Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Feedback/advice needed

Catherine, I am curious if your son has synesthesia. If so, he'd have specific colors and possibly textures assigned to each number. For example, the number two would be blue. Even if it's black text, it'd be blue for him. A lot of 'numbers' people have this, and it gives them great joy to examine numbers because of this.

Echoing others, 25 % sounds fine to me. If I were you I'd pursue his passions right alongside him, as you are, then he is certainly being social

Hi Catherine,
First of all, don't worry about posting - your son is only two! You will get a lot of knowledge along the way and but for now, it's ok to 'take.' Of course if you remember anything from your own childhood - that's always welcome!

BTW - ask for stories about you and DH while growing up, and all the sibling - usually you'll get a few that outdo your own kid. My son was a champion nurser, so I got flack for 'spoiling him' and was sure relieved to hear that DH had a open sore on his thumb until way past age of 7 because he was such an avid thumbsucker.

I sure do relate to having a child who has a difficult time 'gearing down' when it's bed time.
Have you read this book http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Your-Spirited-Child-Perceptive/dp/0060923288

(If you decide to buy it, then go to hoagiegifted.org first and navigate from there.)

I encourage you not to worry about the social stuff at this young age, that is, unless you can find him some number obcessed 3 -5 year olds who share his passion for counting. If his school has the ability to let him spend some of his day with older children, I think this might be a help.

Best Wishes,
Grinity (who's son's favorite gift for his 2nd birthday was a stuffed letter 'W' - a letter not in his name.

Gee -your child sounds much like mine was and still is :-) My DS5 is addicted to anything math and numbers - you described some of the exact same things my little guy was in love with doing. He used to flip through paperbacks that i was reading and get excited about finding out how many pages long the book was. Same thing with the phone book - he would figure out the various patterns (different colored pages meant different info found...) and would ask me to tell him something to look up and would then go to find it and tell me different phone numbers we could call to get info. I haven't seen any of this lead to an issue other than one time when he was playing drive through window with his scooter (he would drive around our kitchen on his scooter and would stop at the "window" and we would give him a math problem that he had to solve and then he would get his "order of pretend food" and would do this over and over - he played the game for almost 2 hours and then when we told him it was time to get ready for bed you would think the world was ending). We weren't too worried about it - he also loved many other things as well but numbers/patterns/math have always been a love of his. We lead him into other activities as well and would find creative methods to introduce a new concept or bring an activity to a new level. He has trouble relating to others at his school and always has - he is the oldest child now in his Montessori preschool and while he wants to explore much higher up concepts, the others all want to run around playing Pokemon....so we have found that he relates very well to kids that are between 7-8 years old and we try to find different activities that allow him to be around older children outside of school....have you seen your child around older children - you might be surprised how he reacts...

Catherine, my DS3y6m has just recently (within the last six months) become more social with other children. Before, he would engage in "parallel play," much as you've indicated that Graham has. I believe that it's normal, and in a few months, he may wish to play with others. As for the obsession, while my DS hasn't been obsessed to the same degree, he has gone through phases where he wants to learn everything about bees, dinasours, etc. He LOVES trains and knows each Thomas character intimately. When he plays with his trains, they have to be in a certain order. If you change it up, he will glance over and "correct" the change to his preconceived notion of the correct order. I would give a strong second to Kriston's advice.

My DS6 was obsessed with letters as an infant. His first vocalizations were letters! His favorite toy was a wooden ABC puzzle. At around 18 months, he became particularly fond of the letter 'H' for some reason. DS would carry around the yellow wooden 'H' from the puzzle all day and we had to bring it everywhere we went. He would ask for it as soon as he woke up in the morning. We still have that ABC puzzle, and all of the letters look bright and new except for a dingy, dinged up 'H'. It sounds so cute now but, honestly, I was worried he was "on the spectrum" because he was attached to a wooden letter! He is quite the renaissance man now though, and is social and athletic in addition to still loving letters!

My husband and I took Graham on a road trip for a family event this weekend...about a 4 hour car trip each way. Graham sat in the back seat with his calculator and his books and our chapter books and read or looked at his numbers. He watched all the numbers on the display in the front showing the disc and track numbers of the CD that was playing. For 4 hours. He was an angel. Maybe the numbers thing is a good thing!

Seriously though, thank you all so much for your thoughtful responses. I forwarded this thread on to my husband and asked him to read. We talked about your thoughts on this matter over the weekend and remarked to each other that the sense of community that exists now because of technology is truly amazing. An issue that would have kept me up at night (I'm a bit of an over thinker)doesn't, because of the ability to hear from those of you who have been here before. So thanks so much! I'm really going to get Graham around some older kids and I think I will try and think of ways to turn the counting/math into an aspect of a larger game...loved the "drive through window" story!

By the way, we had a wonderful weekend of family and swimming in the pool and picnicking and only a wee little bit of numbers. All in all a wonderful time.