Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Needing some moral support

Hi! I'm new. I hesitated to post because my son is only 16 months old. We are, unfortunately, having some issues and after reading through many threads I know many of you dealt with similar things and probably have good advice. I have no one IRL that I can to since the other Moms look at me like I'm raising an alien. I don't know what the future holds for my son but I can't worry about that yet. I have to survive right now first.

We are a dual-PhD home and our son is the first and only child (and is making a good case for himself to stay that way). I am MG and my husband is PG so we are not shocked by his development.

Problem #1: My son talks. About 50% of his intelligible speech is in small phrases or sentences and the rest is single words. This is fantastic when he is interacting with an adult or older child but when he is in our play group (8 other kids all born about the same time he was) he tries to talk to the other toddlers. He will ask them for their toys by verbalizing and signing and of course they do not understand him. It goes something like this: Ball? Please? This ball please? Blue ball? Please? This! Thiiiiis! Waaaaaaaah!!!!! ~cue meltdown~

Should I be looking for 3 or 4 yo children for play dates? Physically he is like a normal 16 month old so he cannot keep up with the older kids. He is really frustrated. I don't know how to help him.

Problem #2: We are blowing through toys. Since he didn't walk until 14.5 months he had a lot of time to sit there and figure stuff out I guess. He was stacking towers of 12-15 blocks/other shapes at 12 months and he is now over that. Then he went to puzzles. He is over that. Then the shape sorting cubes and stacking toys came out, but he got that and he's done with that too. Now what? We read books all the time. That is his favorite thing to do. I have boxes upon boxes of books. He's even started "reading" them to himself. He turns the pages and says: What is that? Cow! Mooo! Moooo! It's like am irrelevant in the process now. Ha! Any toy suggestions?

Problem #3: Others Mommies give me death stares. I guess this is a me problem. I had no idea that other Moms would be so...ummm...competitive? I am not doing anything to my son to make him this way. I let him lead when he is playing and learning and I follow his lead. I don't brag about him and in fact I rarely say anything about him at all in an effort to avoid "the look." I find I frequently want to slink off in a corner when we are around other children his age. My son is super social and he always goes up to older children and adults.

I read about another Mom who said she did some thing where the ran through the house with her then toddler and did a rapid fire naming of objects. I laughed so hard. That's me and my son every morning. He wakes up, nurses, and then we start in the bedroom and he names everything on the way to the kitchen. At least I know I'm not alone!

Welcome!

A few ideas -

Kids may be involved in parallel play at this stage, not usually interacting with each other. Would it help for you to be actively involved by repeating your child's requests (so he knows he is heard and understood) and communicating to the other toddlers or their moms on his behalf, and facilitating the sharing of the toys? Or might the other moms/toddlers be interested in learning signing?

Do any of the same-age peers have older siblings who are 3-4 years old and familiar with younger kids (your son's age)?

It is not too early to begin looking for other outliers. Some ideas are:
- local independent gifted schools
- SENG: local SENG-model parent groups
- NAGC: local state affiliate
- Mensa: local chapters
- Local testers of the gifted (Hoagies list of testers may be a good starting point)

You may also wish to begin a portfolio for eventual application to the Davidson Young Scholars (DYS) program when your child turns 5.

Many parents purchase toys second-hand through consignment shops, garage sales, or thrift stores. If you do this, be sure to wash toys well, a mild bleach solution is often recommended. There are some toy rental services, one which was launched on the TV show Shark Tank has since filed for bankruptcy, presumably due to competition in the toy rental service niche.

If your child remains noticeably ahead of chronological age peers, this may exacerbate throughout the school years. You may wish to begin searching now for a school placement with gifted kids, or plan now for homeschooling. The Davidson Database has several excellent articles on school selection, including this article titled Finding a school that fits. Gifted Homeschoolers Forum (GHF) may be a good starting point for exploring homeschooling a precocious toddler. Some parents also enjoy the Mensa For Kids website.

As for toys: Many times a child will like a toy for a certain period, then tire of it, only to get another phase of enjoying that toy months later. So the blocks were fun, and probably will be fun again later, maybe in a more complex way or maybe not.

Things that do not get old are going outside to play, and sometimes arts and crafts. Go to the library and choose lots of books. ETA: Listen to music a lot, all kinds of music, and invest in good quality drums for kids or kid instruments that will last.

As for the other parents: It may help you to speak about your child's quirkiness because most kids are quirky and it brings common ground. Not what your child can do but what he is interested in. Tractors, cars, numbers, animals, a certain food. If you are genuinly interested in someone else's child, they are probably going to like you. Find out what the other kids are interested in and then you might find more common ground with them.

Playdates are never harmonious. Things always go wrong. Meltdowns are normal.

I think that most toddlers start speaking in phrases between 18-24 months, so the other kids may very well catch up soon in that regard. I don't think my DD spoke many intelligible words til 16 mo. and would have looked "slow" compared to your child, but when she was 2 she was suddenly very articulate with very long sentences and sounded like a much older child. There is such a wide range of development with kids that age and no way to predict what things will be like in even a few months.

We bought almost all our toys used from garage sales, thrift stores, etc....then the ones that were still in good condition I sold and got my money back. You just need to keep getting more difficult puzzles, shape sorters, etc. that are meant for older kids (just make sure they are not choking hazards). We had some toys that my kids outgrew before they even had a chance to play with them.

I don't remember getting death stares from anyone but I remember feeling that way because DS in particular had some delays and it was stressful seeing other kids so much more advanced. So that could be part of it. If the situation was reversed and your DS was the one who was behind you would probably start feeling a bit competitive as well. Everyone just wants their kid to be "normal" and meet the milestones and people don't necessarily know that your DS is advanced. I know that other moms probably looked at DS and felt smug about their own precocious children, but ironically DS is now almost 8 and academically at the top of the class and needs radical acceleration for math. So like I said, you can't look at these super tiny kids and conclude anything definite about their long-term abilities.

That's me! If you can believe it, that was our settling routine before bed and naps.

A few things we did:

- Expand our catchment area for naming. I'd put DS in a carrier and walk downtown with him for 1-2 hours in the morning, with a running commentary of our surroundings. It had the dual benefit of being excellent exercise for me! (Hooray for progressive overload!)

- Get a membership to a local museum and visit for 1-2 hours a few times a week, with running commentary. (I'm sure you're detecting a pattern.)

- Watch orchestral concerts online and try to re-create the melody or rhythm with little instruments

- Borrow about 100-150 books from the library each week. We literally would read for the full time between naps, such was DS' demand for new media. Our library allows us to make online reservations, so I reserve large sets of books en masse and am able to pick them up in a grocery cart from a dedicated shelf. This saves times and helps me make a wider variety of high quality selections. There are some book recommendations under the "Recommended Resources" section, and this thread that I started.

http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/154238/Favourite_toddler_media.html

- DS liked the basic Starfall alphabet app around 12-14 months, and two little apps called "Bugs and Buttons" and "Bugs and Numbers". The touch interface is infant friendly and gives young children access to new material when they need it.

- I started writing the names of household objects on index cards and leaving them around the house. Then DS would toddle from word to word reading them.

- Around that age, we started doing more "experiments" with simple things like buoyancy, colour mixing, prisms, magnets, gravity, measuring (water and small, pourable objects like beans and marbles). It sounds silly, but he started to really enjoy Snap Circuits around ~18 months.

- DS likes collections, so we began accumulating little kits of collectable items: polished stones, coins, animal figurines, minerals, models of the planets, etc. There is a company that makes a product called "Toobs" that your son might enjoy investigating and collecting.

- DS is a truck aficionado, so we amassed a large collection of die-cast Siku trucks, which are priced ~$5 apiece. A set of toy tools from Black and Decker was a hit at Christmas the year he turned 1.

- Time in nature is something DS has always appreciated. A simple ramble through a garden can yield a lot of opportunities for discovery: entomology, botany, the water cycle, weather, ecosystems, food chains, etc. Don't feel you can't delve into these topics, because your son will understand them and soak up the knowledge. (A great series of non-fiction books that DS enjoyed at that age was the Let's-Read-and-Find-Out level 1 books.)

- Around that age was when DS started to like spelling. We have a little set of magnetic letters that I organized in alphabetic order in a tackle box. I'd give him a few letters at a time, and we'd arrange the letters to make real and nonsense words.

Hope this gives you some food for thought! Fire away with any questions. It's an exciting and exhausting time, but you won't regret investing some extra time up front planning some activities.

Welcome to the forum! You've found your tribe!

Welcome!
I am very sorry to say that you will just have to suck it up for the next two years or so, until this will slowly get better. Yes, other kids will start speaking rather well by the time they are two, but only a very few and they will turn out to be gifted, too. Only by three years and up will those very noticeable differences in language output slowly subside. Then of course, your kid may have started reading, but at least it is possible to keep that under the radar. If your kid turns out to be pg, it is highly likely he will continue to stick out in some way for a very long time, and it depends on his social skills and his conflicting needs for integration versus authenticity how well he will blend in at some point.
Have to go and put kids to bed, will be back later with hopefully more hopeful and helpful stuff!

I would echo blackcat in noting that there is a very wide range of normal, both in the sense of broad population norms, and even among the GT population. My PG sib did not speak at all until age two, but then in full sentences (followed within weeks by spontaneously learning to read). One of my children has a same-age friend who began speaking at seven months, who experienced many of the same frustrations as your little one, but isn't currently necessarily performing as far ahead academically as some other later-developing talkers. (And there's nothing wrong with that, btw.)

Others will catch up in language over the next six months, at least in the sense of gaining verbal communication skills. (Perhaps not so much in actual vocabulary, though that may occur, as well.) This may ease some of the tensions.

One of the challenges, I think, is that there is a tendency for new parents to congregate in highly age-homogeneous groups (age of child, that is), with little perspective about the bigger picture of child development. When no one has any idea of what "normal" looks like, other than their N=1, and everyone is feeling the typical insecurity of the new parent, any (even slight) outlier touches a tender spot, which can result in disproportionate responses to natural variation.

For play dates, I think small mixed age groups would be my preference, where he can have interactions with developmental peers in various domains, though not all domains will match in the same individuals. Older siblings of age-peers are an excellent idea, especially as they are often more patient with toddlers than preschoolers who don't spend much time with younger children are (at least they are with toddlers who are not their siblings!). Especially if it's a play date with the age-peer and their older sibling together, which is a more natural grouping (i.e., less conspicuous), and more practical for the accompanying parent, anyway.

Don't forget to maintain your adult friendships that are not centered around having same-age children. That can be very important to your own mental health. (Which is the single best predictor of psychological health in children, after all.)

First of all, welcome and know that you certainly aren't alone!

Our DD (that's dear daughter) didn't have many playmates when she was very small for exactly that reason. You might try casting your net wider in the hopes of finding a better match. The more toddlers you meet the more likely you'll find another one with a similar developmental level. You might also look for social opportunities that are more likely to attract gifted people. Local Mensa meetups, maker spaces, chess clubs. They may not be kid specific, but if people there have kids they are more likely to be similar... Finally, maybe older kids who are generally calm (more interested in playing lets pretend than run and jump) may work. But it could also be that those older kids would be just as uncomfortable because they sense his difference.

I have to admit we never had much luck with the social stuff at that age. After a few years things got easier because she could socialize with older kids more easily.

We also had difficulty with toys. There was frequently a mismatch between what her brain wanted and what her motor skills could handle. One thing we did was kitchen experiments (the more tolerance for mess the better). Art was a great outlet. She had a light bright (she was smart enough not to eat the pegs). At a certain point you have to ignore the suggested age ranges and just experiment.

As she got a bit older we did models. She was particularly fascinated by the visible woman anatomical model when she was about two. Of course we had to hep her A TON but it was still fun.

As for other parents, you just have to let go of the need for their approval or respect. If they give you dirty looks, just give them a deadpan stare back and say "Is there something I can help you with?" If they make rude comments, just laugh and ignore them. And if they ask any of those annoying questions (like "so do you spend a lot of time pushing him to read?") just respond deadpan with "Why do you ask?"

Finally, I agree with indigo that you should start the process of thinking about education now... I know that sounds crazy, but it is the number one issue that parents of high LOG kids face.

So welcome again and hang in there.

We had no experience with parents of age peers at 16mos, because we never even entertained the idea of play dates until our DD was nearly 3. Particularly since your DS is so far advanced, I wouldn't even bother seeking these. As he gets older, some of the differences will be less obvious. Also, his age peers simply aren't ready on a social level. As long as you and your family and friends continue to play and interact with him, his social needs will be met.

As for toys, the ones you described all sound like they're of the early discovery/learning variety, which is great, but there are other types of toys, too, and some of them never get boring. Balls, for one. When my DD was 16mos, she had one of those inflatable ball pens you can fill with little plastic balls and swim around in. Mostly, we used to enjoy throwing them at each other. Fast forward 8 years, we still have some of them around, and we still have ball fights. They also see the business ends of plastic bats and hockey sticks. A number of other balls of various shapes and purposes have joined in the mix. Not only is this kind of play fun, but it's also great for gross motor development.

And there are the toys for imaginative play... trucks, trains, dolls/action figures, etc. Those tend to have a long shelf life, as long as they can find someone to play with.

Our household is much like yours. Well-- was, anyway-- fifteen years ago. Our child is in college now, but she's still an only, and her demands upon us as parents are a part of the reason why. That's not a negative thing, btw-- it's just a thing. She is a lovely person, and we have enjoyed parenting her. Mostly. It's been a continuous set of challenges, however, and mostly without good quality data to guide decision-making. I warn you because that drove my spouse and I both a little crazy-- we're STEM people, and highly data-driven, both of us. Parenting an outlier was a personal development project like no other.

You are effectively raising an alien. Part of your job is to raise the child that you have in the moment-- and part of it is to raise a child who can function in a world which is inherently alien in that it isn't run for people like him (or your spouse, it sounds).

Your son has an advantage in that he has parents who 'get' what this experience is like. It has been helpful to our DD for DH and I to share some of our experiences growing up gifted. That makes her feel less alone.


No-- but MIXED age groups and small doses may be key for a few years. My DD usually did well in mixed-age arts-oriented classes for preschoolers when she was the youngest by 1y or so. That way she could gravitate to the proper level of interaction fluidly, depending upon skills and demand of the activity at hand.

Mostly, just know that this is a work in progress, and much will change as your child's asynchronous pattern emerges. At your son's age, we were only just starting to realize HOW different our DD was from other children. In about four more months, we had a clue (looking back) that she was probably PG in at least one domain (social). She just noticed everything-- even adult emotions and feelings and complicated, non-concrete thinking/planning/anxiety in others.

Introducing another language might be a fun idea, and keep him able to meet agemates for a bit longer, until he develops his own regulatory skills for social interactions. Well, they'll get better with time, anyway.


I wouldn't assume it was late walking. {sigh} DD walked pretty young, and she did this, too. She simply didn't have INTEREST in those 'developmental' toys, that I can recall. Not ever. It wasn't until she was around 5yo that it finally occurred to me that the reason she didn't care about those things was that they weren't in her proximal zone of development. Looking back in her infancy, she was very clearly trapped by her slowest developmental arc-- the physical one. So by the time she could (functionally) use a shape sorter, there wasn't any point since she already had the cognitive skills to make it ridiculous. She often gave us those looks-- "why are you doing this?? What the heck do you expect me to do with THAT, anyway?" It wasn't until I realized, as I was trying to homeschool using Cuisinaire rods and unit manipulatives, that it was something she could have used earlier in her cognitive developmental arc. She was past it, so it was merely annoying. Like someone coming along and putting training wheels on your new mountain bike before a technically demanding trail ride.

Look for toys with the WIDEST possible age ranges that you can find. DD didn't really mouth objects past ~1y, so in retrospect, we'd have been fine with Playmobil, Snap circuits (though she wouldn't have had the hand strength), small electronics, etc. She did have a small portable keyboard. She liked that a lot.

She was another collector. She loved the beach, where she'd collect rocks, shell fragments, etc. that interested her.

Art supplies-- the more the better. DD had free access to markers, crayons, paper, and little-kid scissors from under 2yo. We added to that stash of materials as she got older, eventually adding glue, glue sticks, stickers, watercolor paints, and collage materials.


Honestly, the best thing that ever happened to the three of us was when we finally relented and taught DD to read at nearly 5yo. She didn't learn decoding skills on her own (long, long story-- she was showing some readiness even by your DS' age)-- and I have ZERO problem teaching a toddler/preschooler like this to decode and read for themselves. It's the only way to keep their brains fed.

And I'll reiterate that the 100-150 library items estimate is no joke. We did that, too. Until DD was about 10yo, we usually had a running total of 125 items out in any given week. Not kidding. I had a special box for DD to put them in, and to keep track of them, I had rules about where library books/items could be used (never outside the house, except for occasional in the car use, and never into bedrooms, only the public downstairs areas). We never lost one, I'm amazed to say.


Oh yeah. I'm familiar-- only my child was the one being mobbed by the other kids, and trying to get away from them, looking at me (and sometimes, um-- saying to me, too) as though to say "HELP!! They. are. like. WILD. ANIMALS. Get me out of here!" Needless to say, most other parents didn't appreciate this articulate and mature assessment of their little darlings' company manners. Even if they WERE trying to bite her, shoving her out of their way, grunting in response to her well-stated wishes re: her autonomy, or wiping their noses (or worse) on her clothing. She went through a series of phases from 18mo to about 6-7yo where she found most agemates mildly to moderately devoid of her notions of civilized conduct, and dishearteningly irrational and unpredictable. They frightened her. Now, some of that was that when those children had food in hand, that irrationality and lack of boundaries really was scary-- because she had several life-threatening food allergies. But some of it was her being PG and fastidious by nature.

Then again, she is also an introvert, and it was obvious that this was so even at that age.


Nope, you are definitely not alone. A very warm welcome to you, NowWhat.