I guess I figure that if advocacy seems hard and scary to me, imagine how much more hard and scary it must be to a little boy/girl.
I agree completely that much depends upon personality, and there are bigger and smaller ways to self-advocate, certainly. But I don't think that self-advocacy would be a specific goal for my kids until they're 9 or 10 at the earliest. (Though I wouldn't discourage it!) We'd take steps toward self-advocacy between now and then. Heck, we're taking steps toward that now. DS4 often orders for himself in restaurants, for example. But I wouldn't expect DS7 to be ready to handle conflict resolution with an authority figure at this point. That's a pretty high-stress situation for an INTJ kid...
