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Pud got a squishy ball for Christmas that when you squeeze it, it bulges out and is full of plastic cockroaches. It really freaked him out. When he saw what it was, he dropped it and screamed and has refused to touch it again.

Today, he was arguing with me over eating his grapes. He finally told me that he didn't want to eat them because he was scared they had cockroaches in them. Actually, he didn't say "cockroaches", he picked up a page that goes in his Wildlife Explorer book (with a binder clip, he wouldn't even touch the page) that was about cockroaches and showed me what he was scared would be in them. Then, he refused to brush his teeth because he was afraid the toothpaste had cockroaches in it.

So, is this an overexcitability/over-imagination/sensitivity thing or is this a "manipulate mom" thing?

I even ate some of the grapes to show him and he refused to even touch them.

I don't recall his age, but if he is pretty young I would venture a guess that it is the first one. But if there are never cockroaches in cake or ice cream, that would make me wonder as well...lol It's hard to say. My DS has had a few strange phobias that he outgrew, mostly as a toddler/infant. There was a toy he was deathly afraid of, then there was the very quite cricket where he loved until 10 months, then he became terrified of it for about a year. And he was scared of the Oh, David books...but then we realized he was scared of the word "oops" I know it is crazy. Thankfully he is over all this. He still has a little sound sensitivity...but thankfully nothing like that.

He's 7 so I don't know if that makes a difference.

When dd2.5 was about 1 or so she crawled into ds's sleeping tent he had at the time and found that he had strung up a fake spider web and spider. This was a real shock - for the next couple of weeks everything was 'scawy spider' this and 'scawy spider' that. She was freaked! Scared. It was just too much for her little self, but eventually she got over it.
Sounds similar...how old is your ds?

7. Well that is tough, does he have anything else that he has ever reacted to like that? Does he look genuinely scared? I can tell when my DS is suddenly terrified of something. Of course he is 4 and can't quite fake it yet.

I think it's probably a relatively normal reaction to something creepy like that. I'm guessing he'll probably relate that to anything that might have a squishy component, for awhile anyway. I have a friend who bit into a maggot-filled reeses PB cup, and had to cut every food open for the longest time. She still won't eat PB cups of any sort. Good luck. Sorry I don't have any helpful advice.

The movie Jaws came out when I was 10. I was too young to see it, but that didn't stop me (and all my friends) from being petrified of any body of water - lakes, pools, bathtubs.

If that little cockroach-filled squeeze ball was designed to freak people out then maybe it was just well designed.

I wonder if you could cut the ball to pieces to show it's just a toy with pretend cockroahes and desensitize your DS.

Oh, and don't let your son see Enchanted if he hasn't already, because there's a scene where the princess gets help cleaning up the apartment from regular NYC residents (rats, pigeons, cockroaches).

Your poor son. I am 38 and that would creep me out! I have always had this fear of cockroaches probably b/c I grew up in an old pier and beam house and we have those huge ones around here. If one appeared on a wall or on the floor I would freak out and even though my mom would dispose of it, I was sure it was coming back to life and crawl all over me while I slept. Even today I can not deal with roaches or spiders for that matter. So maybe I am gullible but by what you described of his reaction to the ball it sounds like genuine fear. As for how to over come it? That is a hard one and I think the idea of cutting open the ball and showing him the toys fits under the mentality of facing your fears but do be careful that just might backfire on you and now you let them free. I think the best thing is to not make a big deal out of it and feed into his fears almost ignoring it and if he is acting he will soon get bored.

He is genuinely either terrified or freaked out by the ball itself. He was looking at his wildlife book this morning and maybe seeing a picture of the cockroaches was enough to set him off. It has persisted all day. He still wouldn't brush his teeth tonight. I'll have to think about cutting the ball open. It might help or it might make it worse.

My 16 year old neice gave it to him. I'm sure she thought that being a boy he'd think it was cool. Thanks. I just didn't know what to think.

I have to admit that my boys would love that ball. I'm sure your niece thought he'd enjoy it but I'm also sure she wouldn't want him to be upset by it. I'd say just throw it away. No sense in keeping something around that is upsetting him. If he keeps on being upset by grapes and such, cut them open and show him nothing is in there. I'd be very matter of fact about it and treat it like it is no big deal. I'm sure after while he'll forget about it.

Hi Squirt,
Oversensitivity and excitability is a trait of exceptional kids. Our son wore us out with it. When he was three, it was monsters in his room. But the weekend before he began kindergarten, his friend showed him the second "Wizard of Oz" movie. He threw a fit the first day of school when we tried to get him out of the house. He was sure his teacher, whom he never met, would be green. It took several min. to get him out the door. He also imagined our was a vampire, although we'd never let him watch horror movies. He'd get himself in such a state that it took a lot of effort to calm him down.

He threw up the flouride treatment at the dentist when he was about 7. For years, we couldn't get him into the car for the dentist. He wanted a flute badly. We'd just gotten him one but held it as collateral until he went back. He's 27 now and says he wishes he'd gone because he's sorry he never played the flute. The will is strong in these kids. As I often say, they make fabulous adults; ours is great company and well-behaved now. His thinking was always "all or nothing." "Black or white."

It seems that the part of the brain drives them to voraciously acquire information about the world, also brings oversensitivities in thinking, "What ifs." They're just wired that way. I'd wager that the higher the IQ, the more hypersensitive they are. This is one of the sources of stress for us as parents; these episodes create more jobs for us, dragging us along on the rollercoaster of their emotional upheavals. I think it's important for parents to take breaks, dates if you will, as they need breaks from the intensity. Ours is 27 now and it was a hard road, but worth it now that he's a wonderful adult and soon-to-be prof. Also, I'd wager that the more hypersensitive ones are also the most argumentative and exacting.

When I told my son that I was not gifted he said it was not true. He said I was very gifted at coming up with "scenarios." Being hypersensitive and constantly thinking about the "what-ifs" feels like the only characteristic I share with my son and with me it got out of control.

The things my son fears come from experiences that left him with too many what-ifs. I believe his fear of being in water that is over his head and learning to swim comes from the neighbor boy drowning in a backyard pool. I believe the fear of the dark and people breaking into our house is partly because his sister has a good friend who was a victim of a home invasion. My daughter's friend survived but his roommate did not. As long as my son has a plan for dealing with those what-ifs he is usually okay, but then he can usually think of something else that would be difficult to prepare for. My daughter is the same way and when she had a stalker (and my son heard about this) her fears got bad enough that she moved and things got better, but then there was someone breaking into apartments of young women in her apartment complex and raping them. She took care of that fear by letting her boyfriend, a 6'5" bodybuilder move in with her and she feels safer now. How do you tell a smart kid that okay, this horrible thing happened to people you know, but it won't happen to you.

I honestly don't think it would have helped me to get a babysitter because I would have spent any free time worrying about what would I do if my husband's cancer comes back and I had to finish raising my son on my own. He has 3 months to go before he will be considered to be in remission. I have had people tell me that they knew people whose cancer came back in those last few months and they died. I don't know why they felt they needed to tell me this. I don't know why my sister-in-law, a college professor, felt she needed to tell me that I might be at higher than average risk for having a stroke and developing dementia. I keep doing a lot of "what-ifing" when it comes to my son. What if something happens to me and my twice-exceptional child has to go back to public school with the bullies. How do I know if he is learning the right things so that he can go to college?

And I worry that my hypersensitivities will cause my son's hypersensitivities for be even worse.

I need to hear about people who made it through to the other side of the parenting journey with a hypersensitive gifted child and that the child turned out okay, so thanks for posting about your experiences.

Well, I'm not sure I buy this. Most people who know me and know my son would say that we are sort of anti-sensitive. Now, we're excessively logic-oriented, so maybe that's our thing instead of extreme sensitivity. But I think personality really plays into this. A family of INTJs are not going to be hypersensitive. (DS4 got ALL of that for our WHOLE family of 4! ) But for the other 3 of us, hypersensitivity is just not our nature.

This, however:


is OBVIOUSLY true!

Where's that rasberries emoticon I asked for...........

<smirk>

I guess what I mean by hypersensitive is the bizarre obsessions our son would have as opposed to those people who are just "too sensitive" as others say. And we found the same thing to be true as you did; he'd hear of something happening somewhere and take off with it. Or, one bad experience with flouride meant, to him, that all future visits would be horrible. To this day, he has a lot of trepidation of throwing up and reacts extremely when someone around him is sick or has been.

Yeah, but DS7, DH and I just really aren't like that. Stuff tends to roll off us. We can just reason our way out of stress, fear...all that bad stuff. It took me a long time to understand why people can't just stop themselves from freaking out over things that aren't really dangerous.

Even my one borderline phobia--crushing crowds--is actually a pretty logical thing for me to fear. I'm under 5'3". Crushing crowds can do me real damage very quickly! Add in my introverted nature and my need for personal space, and it all makes perfect sense in its own weird way. I don't think there's anything else I'm really truly afraid of in any sort of extreme sense.

I don't mean that DS7, DH and I never get upset. But we don't tend to spiral out of control with irrational fears of things that aren't really problematic. And we tend to confront our fears head-on. DH was afraid of heights when he was younger...so he went skydiving! He loved it! Problem solved.

Now, DS4 is a whole different ball of wax! He's scared of the basement, his room, the dark, scary stories, a mask my husband has...You name it, he's scared of it. Logic doesn't help. Confronting the fear doesn't help. He has a totally different personality type, and he is a classic example of an extremely sensitive kid!

I just think personality has a lot to do with it. That's all I'm saying.