Well- he's 3.5 yo, in preschool and interacts/plays OK with some of the kids there.
But if I am with him- we go out to the parks- he prefers to do complex pretend play (pirates, giants, etcetcetc) with Mama more than trying to play with the other 3-4 yo... He does try to engage them in pretend play- run a pretend lemonade stand, etc. but the other kids don't seem interested or do get it or just aren't there yet dev...
So, what do I do?
i love playing with him, but is this normal for a gifted kid? I AM fun to play with tbh...

The problem I see with 3.5 year olds is that they quite like to play with others, but they don't really get compromise. So five children might each be wanting to play dinosaurs, pirates, playdough, a running game and puzzles, but if no-one else feels like doing it at that particular moment they end up each doing it on their own. You can coach him in how to convince other kids to play with him, or in how to adjust his play to other's ideas.

We do co-op preschool so I get to watch the dynamics quite a bit. It's really very interesting. This year for the first time one of my kids has been in a class with a few speech delayed children, and they really do have the problem with the negotiations, but not the imagination. So they'll be doing something just as elaborate and interesting, but on their own because they can't explain the game.

It's normal. I don't know if it's normal for all kids or just gifted kids or some combination, though. I'm guessing the third is probably the case.

DS1 just turned 3, but he does not love playing with anyone his age. Part of the problem, I think, is that kids (ALL kids) at that age are very self-directed and still pretty self-centered... and TOTALLY biased towards things with which they've had experience. Your son wants to play lemonade stand, for example. Maybe the kid next to him has never seen a lemonade stand (I know my son hasn't) and wants to play dogsled race (my son has experience with this). SInce they're three and not great at communicating ideas to people who have no earthly clue what they're talking about, and since they're three and don't love things with which they don't have experience, they just sort of stare at each other like they're speaking different languages. That's just the nature of a 3 year-old's life, gifted or not. If they're kids who hang out a lot (like if they're in preschool together or live together or whathaveyou) and have developed some shared/similar experiences, they can pretend together more effectively. Otherwise, they literally just don't care what the other one is talking about.

And then there's the gifted/precocious issue. Exchanging money for goods and services is an advanced skill. Elaborate pretend is an advanced skill.

But I have a feeling if you get two gifted three year-olds who have few common, shared experiences or obsessions together, they'd likely still not "play" together in the sense that two gifted kids will when they're a little older.

Hi speechIe
I think Talullah and smacca are right - but I know from experience what it's like too - I have that kid. My DS5s games and imaginary worlds are incredibly elaborate and detailed. At 3.5, younger even he liked to stand on jungle gyms and play toll booth he wanted to do the whole thing, and few kids would get it, we would constantly tell him to explain what he was doing because to the parents he looked like an extortionist - give me money to get on, but he just wanted you to pretend it and he lifted the gate! It's still a problem, which is why we are hopeful for G&T for K, he now makes up things to explain simple games like tag to make them more interesting to himself. So he has adapted, mainly because of pre-k, and I think does get enjoyment out of it but it's not truly satisfying to him because his age mates are just not where he is in terms of interests. I think it gets easier as they get older because the age difference isn't so stark a 6 yr old playing with an 8-10 yr old is not as crazy as a 4 year old wanting to play with one, even if they are reading the same things! But I am luckier than you, DH is the best friend, I'm the sub, so he plays with me but also plays nicely by himself too, although not so much in the park, he stopped wanting to go there around 4.

DeHe

We have (with DD 3) and have had (with DD8) the same issue too. I noticed it was especially difficult if the other 3 year olds ( 2 or 1) were not as verbal as my DDs were. Both of mine were talkers from early on and my first one was a motor mouth of unbelievable proportions at age 1! For them if a child can't actually keep up with them verbally they are not interested in trying to play with them. They have both actually told us that this is the problem at various stages too.

DD8 still has some issues playing with other 8 yr olds if they can't understand what she is talking about. She is getting better about using easier words to explain things, but more often than not she simply becomes bossy or annoyed and walks away in disgust.

I can't even begin to count the number of times I've had to play in her imaginary games at a park full of kids because they can't verbally communicate at their level with the kids around them. Sometimes this has lead to older kids coming over and joining in or parents asking why we're so protective of them that we won't let them play with other kids, but that's life.

I think for most children (gifted or not), they engage in parallel play until age 7-8 or even older. They don't really "play together" at younger ages, for most kids. My gifted 8 yo likes to play with children he can boss around and lead the play, so I'm not sure that's even playing together.

Thanks everyone for your insights and experiences! As the mom of a singlet- it's not always easy for me to know what other 3-4 yos are doing.
I will continue to encourage him to communicate with the other kids and adapt to their interests/games too.


sounds very similar to my LO! He has this great imagination and creates games with rules/ideas of how things work...He complains when the kids in preschool don't want to play radiology with him, and I often need to explain he should use a different word, maybe playing doctor or hospital...

My LO is very verbal and physically advanced, and bossy. sigh. a joy for me, but maybe hard for some kids to understand yet. He is fun, and your posts give me hope that it's just a normal thing for a 3-4 yo. thank you!

My DD did not play with other kids really at all till about mid-4. Now she is very social and would have a playdate every day if she could. My son is 3 and has been playing beautifully with other kids since 2, but he's been fortunate to attend a small daycare with some slightly older kids who are also bright and verbal. He's also very socially skilled--much more so than his sister was at this age.

DD was not in a good daycare environment for her and seemed to just decide that the other kids were not fun, preferring teachers instead. In a large group she sometimes still gravitates to the teacher; she prefers one on one. I think a lot can depend on finding the right other kids.

I know this is a little old, but having just come back (last night) from hanging out with a kid EXACTLY DS's age (they're like 10 days apart or something like that), I wanted to chime in again.

After another adult and I took turns letting the three year-olds catch and tackle us, we could sort of casually bow out and go back to sipping beers around the bonfire, and DS sort of picked up the leadership mantle and started directing... "Now you chase me!" "Now I'll chase you!"

When we had been inside earlier and they were trying to play with cars together (something DS does EXTENSIVELY and elaborately on a regular basis in his own little world), we ran into problems because he just had a certain way it wanted to be done. He is usually the king of his little vehicle-play world, and the other little girl stared blankly when he started going on about the toy train being a steam engine and needing coal. When they tried to race them, well, let's just say all hell broke loose. He is very particular about how he plays with his cars, and is used to doing it alone and at-will, or with an adult.

I guess helping find something that is a "different" kind of play than what he usually does if left to his own devices helped. Or something where precocity doesn't make much difference. If left to his own devices, DS would have carried my niece's toy cars around all night (the joy of being at a different house, to DS, is that WOW MOM DID YOU SEE THERE ARE DIFFERENT TOY VEHICLES HERE?!?!?!?!) and played with them non-stop. With a little direction, he made a new 'friend.'

Ah, the park. Where you would think the main attraction is playing with other kids.

Since my son was three, he would run around a bit and play on the equipment for maybe 15 minutes and the rest of the time want to wander the grounds looking for numbers. For the longest time, I think the whole reason he went was to "find" all the light pole numbers.

No other kid his age had shown interest in that (that I saw). But then again, he didn't invite a companion; preferring to do it with me or dad.

My 3 year old is very social and shows interest in other kids her age but once they get together it quickly fizzles out and she becomes frustrated with them. You can tell they simply just do not get each other. She plays much better with 5 and 6 year olds. I was really worried about it until I spoke with her doctor and he said it is common for gifted children to not relate to kids their own age.

Ametrine, my son would have gladly followed yours around looking for numbers. To say my little guy is obsessed with finding numbers and letters is an understatement!

My son is almost 3 and I'm just wondering how you guys with the 3 year-olds know that you can use that 'gifted' label with your kids. I'm pretty sure my son is bright, but have you had your kids tested or anything or are you just assuming? Did you family doctor bring it up to you or did you have to ask questions about it? And as for the numbers thing, my son would be right there with the rest of them, hunting down numbers on the playground!

This sounds less like a gifted thing and more like a kid who hasn't had to negotiate playing with others much yet. It will come. They need a certain amount (not too much!) of this. He may also prefer parallel play for a while longer.

I notice that my second child has had a much easier time learning to play with others than my first did, surely in part because he has been negotiating in play from as soon as he COULD play.

I don't know, ultramarina, if the child is playing at concepts those children don't get the play could look like that. If the other children are at the push it along and make chug-chug noises while he is at the trains need fuel and stations, and a developing storyline, he is going to look bossy, and the other children are going to be a bit flabergasted. He might not even realise the other children can't play like he can, and think they won't play, something that could be very frustrating and upsetting for him.

There could be a little bit of both. Adults are more apt to go along with what the kid wants to do in terms of you be the coal manager, I'll be the engineer, etc. Even another gifted kid will balk at be told what to do, when. Which is probably one of the reasons little gifties like adults or older kids. But I think GeoMamma's point is the more significant, we dealt with this a lot in my DS 5's pre-k, the kids just didn't know what he was talking about, he used different vocabulary about different subjects and often the kids would just stare blankly. You could almost see them accessing their memory files, going this does not compute!! DS was more saddened by this than frustrated. He compensated by layering his imaginary world on top of the simpler games is
companions were playing.

I'm not saying there isn't a need to teach the social arts, we talk a lot with DS about
how playing is a give and take and he can't order people around but from his perspective, no one's games are as good as his. With his older cousins we saw much less of this behavior, as their play is much more complex also he is in with first graders for camp and there seems to be less of the "do it my way"

DeHe

Yes, sorry, I didn't mean that gifted children couldn't be controlling, or that all children shouldn't learn social skills.

Gifted and controlling is the state of being around here, with peers or without!!! LOL


DeHe

DeHe - you described my PG 5.5-year-old son to a T. I tried to take him to the library where they had a Legos for kids to play with today. My son lasted maybe two minutes. He looked around the room and the other kids and then promptly pulled on me to leave. Some of the kids were his age, but he didn't want to know or even attempt to interact with them.

This part - "we dealt with this a lot in my DS 5's pre-k, the kids just didn't know what he was talking about, he used different vocabulary about different subjects and often the kids would just stare blankly. You could almost see them accessing their memory files, going this does not compute!!" - I couldn't agree more. It's rather challenging when your ds is using words and talking over kids heads. The other kids just don't know what to make of him/them.

Control is the number one mode of operation. These kids seem to want maximum control over their environment and every situation - or at least that's how it is with my ds.

When it's not happening in the moment it's so interesting to analyze. In your Lego
Library event my DS would have stayed and just ignored all the other kids. Around 3-4 I found it so strange that he would still basically try to parallel play at other kids houses then I realized he had given up on the social side and preferred to focus on their stuff. But if kids came to our house, he totally ignored them, preferring to engage the parent!! The parent was what was new and interesting. the only upside was he never got worked up about kids playing with his stuff, although he hated the fact that his room looked like a bomb went off!

I got a lot of advice here about finding older kids to play with, it was hard while in pre-k but for camp he is in with first graders and it is SOOOO much better. He is still using words they don't know, but not as many or just don't worry about it as much, but they are so much more interested in imaginary stuff so they like him. Which after the year we had with him unable to fit in and 3 kids being so mean, it almost makes me cry!!! And he SOOO much less conrolling when the kids can keep up with him. When the fit is bad, he acts worse - and it's why I never understand why teachers like the, "he can teach them" approach.

DeHe

This was our experience when DD started preschool. She wasn't interested in the other kids (never mentioned a single other child) & the teachers asked us after a term if she had a speech impediment because she never spoke. But she loved to go, they had an enormous array of interesting materials to explore. It was quite a process to get her to engage in group time, follow instructions or do anything that interrupted her exploration of what she found interesting.

Well, DeHe and MumOfThree, you've hit the nail on the head with my son. When the fit is bad, my son often acts up too - to remove him from the scene. Thanks for letting me know I'm not the only one with a child "who doesn't want to engage in group time, follow instructions, or do anything that interrupts his exploration of what he finds interesting" (exactly true for us!).

My son wasn't interested in other kids either when he was 3/4 years old or even part of last year either.

My son had a speech delays as well as other delays and was in a special needs program until last Nov when we put him in a private gifted school since we live in MA where there's hardly any gifted programs or accommodations made in public schools for gifted kids, especially PG kids.

We noticed a huge difference when we put him in the private gifted/creative school which is an open-room type school with 28 kids from pre-k to 8th grade. The older kids act as mentors or peers to the younger tykes and coax them to do work, which seems to work considerably better than the drill-and-kill approach or the teacher-driven method to instruction that my son totally resists.

Our son was sociable and interactive (at times) at the playground, but not in the classroom or other certain settings like with the recent Legos event at the public library. So our son selects when he is sociable and interacts with others, which often made previous teachers think he was on the autistic spectrum even though autistic people don't have a sociability switch that they can turn on at recess on the playground and switch off once they enter a classroom.

Of course, the problem now is that school is out and we don't have the money to pay for camp, so I'm kind of stumbling around to occupy my son - which is why I took him to the Legos event at the public library!

I'd be interested to hear any suggestions or ideas on what other parents find what works.

That's how my parenting has been, holding on tight to those little moments when I can see flashes of happiness in my son and believing that things can be so much better than the behavior that shows when the fit isn't good. I use those moments to motivate myself to keep trying to find a good fit, even when it's emotionally exhausting.

As my son has gotten older, there are more and more 'back to back' months of happiness: 8th grade at public school with a gradeskip was excellent from September to March, Summers at CTY camp have been great, and this year, 9th grade deceleration at boarding school has been excellent. What a difference from elementary school (One amazingly good year plus 1 terrible year and 2 'quite bad' years!)

As far as peers, DS went to daycare at age 7 weeks. His stratagy was to choose a single child to be his main focus, and all was well as long as that other child was in school and willing to play. The teachers were also concerned that he seemed to want so much of their attention. In retrospect I think he craved adult attention because the Adults could talk, unlike his classmates.

Love and More Love,
Grinity