What is funny to me in retrospect, is that I thought that all 4 year olds would be able to have such discussions if only all moms were as wonderful at explaining things as I am. L O L My denial of my son's giftedness was firmly in place......
And without the shell of denial that most folks are so tuned in to the 'usual developmental path' that families with kids on a asynchronous developmental path are going to need to ignore most of the 'common wisdom' about parenting and find individualized ways to parent their unusually gifted kids.
.... I said: "If you get in the car, I'll tell you all about it" and once he was strapped in the carseat was all onto Child Labor and Child Labor laws! What a fun way to take a 5 year old to school! I really wondered what was wrong with all the other Moms who didn't have these conversations.....Now I get it!
Live and Learn!
Grinity
Grinity,
I was thinking of you as I drove through Connecticut on 95 the other day - and it made my drive much nicer.
I too wondered why other parents wouldn't just talk to their pre-schooler. How silly I was!
Even now, I sometimes forget that most other people don't have children like mine and what works for them won't work for us and vice-versa. What really brought this back to me recently was our trip to see my family for the holidays. My brother's daughters are both GT, the oldest probably PG+, but they have never had any educational issues with them because they are in a district that takes care of GT kids from elementary school on!
(wouldn't that be nice?) My oldest and his oldest are almost carbon copies of each other and it was really funny listening the him remember how they dealt with their DD as a 7 yr old (she's 17 now) and how similar it is to how we deal with ours. Then we saw cousins who have an adopted 5 yr old son and are having problems with him in pre-school. I watched him play with my DDs and knew immediately that he is most likely gifted as well. They had been parenting using all of the "old standbys" that their friends had been passing on to them and it wasn't working well. I pointed them towards Hoagies site as an intro to gt and they went through the initial "wow - this is about my kid" as soon as they started looking at it.
After feeling like we're isolated most of the time with our DDs since we live far from family it was really nice to not only visit them, but to see that our daughters fit in nicely with the rest of the family and that what they do is "normal" compared to their cousins.
