Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Reaction from strangers

I also hate when people talk down to my kids. DH and I were just talking about that this morning. The girls are playing all-stars for basketball, and the coach does that all the time! I was telling DH how much it bugged me. Last night, he was telling them, "Now this thing is called the board" as he pointed to the backboard and "You guys are too young to be taught about blocking out. Just try to get the ball after someone shoots it." DH was furious! He was supposed to help coach, but he's out of town. My girls were rolling their eyes and not paying much attention to the coach when he was talking.

This drives me bonkers! I'm sorry Pink's DDs.

DS8 takes along plenty of books when we go to cattle shows. He left one laying in view last November and a good friend who just retired from being an elementary school principal said, "He's reading that?". When I nodded affirmatively he just shook his head and said, "that's a hard one for a lot of junior high kids".

I usually get "Ma" or "Mom". My son does refer to me with other people by my first name.

Ds still calls me "Mama." It's so cute.

I have had to get used to people watching and listening to us because of my son's differences.

At 2 1/2 he started spelling some words instead of saying the words--his name, stop, go, girl, boy and he was very talkative and his voice carries really well so people really started noticing him them, but they didn't say anything. We just got some strange looks.

I tried to ignore other people looking at us and just have fun with it. My son enjoyed identifying words that I spelled out for him so I didn't stop when we were in public. Older school age kids would see us doing this and they would spell out their hardest spelling words for him and he was usually able to identify them. My son, the only kid at home, loved the attention. Before he started kindergarten some kids would also ask him math questions, including multiplication and negative numbers and he was pretty good at that too, but not as good as he was with words. He just doesn't love math the way he does words and literature and history and science.

When he was about four, a middle school aged gifted cousin who met him for the first time, told us she had heard him using metaphor and simile when he talked to her and she was really surprised at this. When he was around older kids it wasn't unusual to have one of them run up to me to tell me something he had just said. When he joined a musical theater group at 4 1/2 we got a lot of comments from the older kids. One teen aged boy told us he thought my son had to be autistic or something when he memorized over 300 words of script and all the words to the songs in Babes in Arms. When my son was seven, he said he thought my son was a adult in a little kid's body.

Doctors told us that he seemed to be "high IQ" and that he would do well in school. The month he turned four, his doctor called in another doctor to watch him as I spelled out words from a probably 4th or 5th grade level book that he had never seen before and my son identified all the words correctly, but he wouldn't just read the book and I later learned that he had vision issues along with motor dyspraxia and hypotonia. Because my son is twice exceptional and cannot get an appropriate education in public school and would would also have to deal with bullies, we must homeschool.

Strangers often tell us he talks like an adult. When he was barely seven, he read an interesting newspaper article to his dad as we were eating our continental breakfast at our motel and then went on to tell us his opinion. He started talking to other people there and as we were leaving the motel clerk told us that he predicted that he would some day be a politician.

People like to predict what he will be some day and usually they say college professor, engineer, or politician, but his sister and a friend add stand up comic to that list. Since he has family members in all of these professions, except stand up comic, I think it will be interesting to see what he ends up doing later in life. Maybe he will try them all. My husband's former boss, a Mensa member, was a lawyer who had first studied to be a doctor. A woman that worked in his office had a law degree but decided that she was happier as a librarian, then tried an office job that required legal knowledge. I think that is the really good thing about being so smart. There are so many possibilities to choose from.

My son is usually okay with people watching him. He loves performing in front of people and he loves making people laugh with his ability to make jokes about any situation. Sometimes he will make some smart remark when he notices people watching him, like once we were having lunch in a museum cafe and my son was talking when everybody else stopped and started watching him. He stopped in the middle of his sentence and looked around and said something like "It's really quiet in here all of a sudden, did somebody call for prayer?"

My 5 year old (nearly 6) loves dinosaurs. Loves, loves, loves them, ever since he was a little past one. It took us a while to realize what was going on, but by the time he was ~2 1/2, he knew the names of a ton of them. He would carry on a conversation for 20 or 30 minutes or more in which he would name his favorite dinosaurs and make up stories about them or talk about how T. Wex had two fingers but Allosauwus had thwee and... etc.

Anyway, the typical reaction of people to this has always been to smile beatifically. Some sigh and say "I loved dinosaurs when I was a kid and I still do." People who barely know him give him gifts (dinosaurs). His little friends in kindergarten draw pictures of dinosaurs and give them to him.

This is sooo different from how people react to my elder son, who is highly advanced in reading and maths. People somehow seem threatened by a 5 year old who can do division or read chapter books. Yet a 5-year-old mad paleontolgist seems to be completely endearing to most people, even if they hear him matter-of-factly making statements like "the dromeosaurs lived in the late cretaceous and the asteroid got them and now they're extinct. I'm going to use my time portal and go back and rescue them."

I have to say, it's pretty cute. And I have to add that I never knew how wonderful dinosaurs could be until my Little Dude came into my life.

Val

((wink - Val))
I always thought the phrase was 'got extincted.'

Giggle - Recently I wondered with DS11 if all little boys could be divided into ones who love Dinos v. one who love trains or trucks...

Here's plug for Rimm's reminder how important it is to handle comments from strangers.
When the strangers comment on 'smart' or 'pretty' - qualities that are inborn and the child has no control over -
Smile, and in an "Thanks for the compliment, you are so perceptive" tone, answer back with a subtle switch the enphasises a character quality that you want to encourage.
"Why yes, she has such wonderful curiosity (or persistience or consentration or whatever!)

It is weird for kids to hear comment after comment on a quality that they were 'born with' or to hear us squirm when they 'stick out.' Much better to graciously accept and re-direct to a compliment of a character trait that you want to encourage.

And if this sounds like a patronizing way to treat people, well, ((shrug)) I think it's worth it!

Grinity

Funny you should say this...I swear by this observation!

I have yet to meet a boy who loves both wheeled vehicles AND dinosaurs. They might like one okay and love the other, but there always seems to be a marked preference for one and only one.

I have wondered if it's somehow related to engineering vs. humanities or math vs. science, but I have yet to make that leap stick, even for my own uncritical generalization.

My DS was never interested in either dino's or trains/trucks.

He was remarkably fond of soil, mud, dirt in all its forms. We took him to Washington DC when he was 4 and I have pictures of him playing in the mud in front of all the major monuments and the Smithsonian!