Hi all,
Some random ramble about DS8:
1. she says she doesnt laugh at jokes like some other kids in class (as gifted from what we can tell) since the jokes are 'immature'.
She has never really giggled and laughed silly like kids of her age...I worry that she is not being a 'child'. In general, increasingly her analysis of happenings at school and home sound very very adult-like to me.
2. she worries excessively about running out of money despite our assuring us we are fine.
3. she worries alot about her health. She has been, touchwood, a very healthy child - a mild throat ache though is enough to send her talking for long about the worst possibilities.
She is still an extrovert, easy-going but a fairly serious person. I know intuitively that there is nothing to 'intervene' about here..but I wonder if I am doing my best in shaping her as a positive person.
I would appreciate any opinions, suggestions, like experiences etc.
(None of the above patterns are brand new but the intensity seems to increase with age..)
Hope someone can empathize.

I think my 10 year old son stopped being a carefree little kid at age 5. It wasn't just that he had an adult like vocabulary, it was something more. He took things in and really thought about things, difficult things that other kids didn't have to deal with.

He notices that most kids his age have a different sense of humor and he says they laugh over the stupidest things. They don't get his jokes, but older kids and adults usually do.

He always seemed to have more common sense than his adult half siblings. He once told me that with pain comes common sense and this is how he remembered that Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense.

My son is more of an extrovert than I am and uses humor to deal with things, using sarcasm and irony in his humor along with physical humor and wordplay. For example, the day we went to vote, my husband told our son before we left "No politicking" because a few years ago my son used to try to get me to change my vote when he didn't agree with the person I planned to vote for. As soon as my husband said this, my son immediately looked at me, grinning, and said something like "Well I am going to do some "poly-ticcing" and pretended to do a flapping hands kind of thing along with a strange eye blinking thing. He did not do this in public. He just likes to tease me sometimes. But there are times when I wonder if we really do need professional help.

My DS had some anxieties when he was about that age. He also worried about his health a lot, excessively. I think that at that age their GT brains pick up a lot of information, but aren't able to process is fully and they tend to get stuck in the worry spots. It may be part of assynchronous development.

A GT counselor suggested we read The Anxiety Cure For Kids. It gave us a context in which to understand his worries and a vocabulary for discussing it within our family. I would not have said that DS had an axiety disorder, but maybe was tending toward a somewhat anxious world view. But once we were able to talk about it and name what was happening in his brain when he started worrying, it really got him back into a more optimistic world view.

Wondered if you had read "The Optimistic Child"? (M. Seligman). We're doing a course based on the book with DD 7 and DD 4, and have started implementing the program at home. Seligman's objective is to try and immunise kids against depression by giving kids the skills to be more optimistic. I found the book to be really wonderful. We use the red light/green light thought concept a lot, and it's good to be able to challenge unhelpful thoughts in a constructive and practical way (such as "I can't do this. I'm never going to be able to do fractions. It's stupid. I want to quit!"). The link between thoughts and feelings is really helpful too. Just by having a framework for thinking about feel good friends and feel bad friends means that DD 7 now knows how to talk about incidences that happen at school with me. I highly recommend the book... jojo

I enjoyed that book, too. I think my own mother--a remarkably sensible woman-- could have written it! I haven't read it since DS was 2; perhaps I'll look at it again.

Thanks all for your responses. This is been of great help. I will hurry now to buy the book as a first step.