So the less I do, the less he wants to do. The less I do the more I feel like what I DO do is hothousing.
Add the gifted child/hothousing stereotype and I'm a mess!
DeHe and anyone else - how did you get out of it?
Reading this and the other thread I realize on the one hand I am very lucky for DS personality but also that I have done a lot of growing myself in this year and half of revelations (prior to 4 we thought he was smart, brag worthy but not needing accommodations or anything).
DS LOVES learning - and loves anything new - someone in the other thread (i have not mastered multiple quotes yet :)) said they could offer to ship their kid somewhere in a carton and they would say yeah, lets go because it was new - that's mine too. He wants to learn everything, see everything and do everything with us and then some stuff in super depth. When he is not interested you can always tell, he doesn't stay as long, he fidgets more (although not always a sign - he can fall off the couch when really paying attention). I bring him his stack of books and he reads them or he doesn't, I never insist he read something, often I will just bring it back later. He wasn't that instantaneously math person that some kids are although that is where all his growth is now - and its as amazing as the reading development was. So I think I was a little more conscious about mentioning math concepts but I dragged out the cuisinir rods one day, he didn't like them so I put them back. I have noticed that if I approach things he has "difficulty" with from his strength - reading about math - he does great and learns and then enjoys multiplying and dividing IRL - like eggs with the egg slicer!
We did hothouse, in my view of the word, writing, but only briefly - to force him over the perfectionist rut he was in by borrowing Grinity's focus on grip and then doing it just 15 minutes a day, then we got him OT and then we let pre-k handle it and dropped all efforts focusing instead on attitude - oh you can do it, see look how much better you are, Ill draw this, you draw that. Sitting with workbooks just made him feel badly. Plus I've noticed that any hothousing tendencies arise from me thinking he "should" be doing something or "needs" to be doing something for some other reason than actual learning. I am learning to separate my drive from his - and since we are past the basics of reading, writing, numbers, colors and the potty - I feel like I only need to play cruise director - look at all these options for learning and let him lead.
I told DS that we make him do things for 2 reasons - his safety and wellbeing (we hold hands crossing the street) and our values (we eat with forks). Nothing we are doing with him intellectually falls into those categories so we don't make him do it - did I think it was important that he learn to write at 4, not until the pysch said he was really frustrated by not doing it, that falls into wellbeing. We signed him up for swimming and soccer, that falls into wellbeing. Do we need to focus more on addition and subtraction - no - so I follow his lead. I will keep offering more and more info, pacing myself with him and his responses. This is what works right now.
He is going to a gifted program like we hoped for - I suspect there will be people who think we are over the top tiger parents - but its not us, we let him drive that bus.
Sorry, I just don't seem to write short replies anymore!!!
DeHe
