Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood

From my last post on this site:

One recurring theme: Bright kids of a certain age are just smart enough to jump to crazy conclusions rooted in lots of knowledge for their age but little real world experience. This seems common in the roughly toddler to preschool age range.

I can readily think of a few examples of this from my oldest son's early years. The easiest one to tell is his ladybug freak out.

He was about four years old and we were living in a third-floor walk-up in Germany. There were some really tall trees outside his bedroom window and one day there was a small ladybug invasion in his bedroom.

He was inexplicably just terrified of the handful of yellow-and-black ladybugs on his bedroom wall. I actually laughed out loud because it seemed comical, but then I took him out of the room and closed the door and made sure he was protected from being around these bugs even though they were harmless.

I kept the door shut to his room for a few days and he slept in my room until the infestation went away on its own. It was a minor inconvenience.

Years later he was able to tell me that because these ladybugs were yellow and black instead of the standard red and black you typically see in such bugs, he believed them to be bees. He knew what color bees were supposed to be and that they could sting you, which was a bad thing, but had no idea what they looked like.

This did not become a long term issue for him. I made sure he felt safe during this minor ladybug invasion and when he got older he figured out where and how he had jumped to the wrong conclusion and it was never a big deal. But it could have been, especially if I had not made sure to make him feel safe and protected and take his fear seriously even though I knew there was no real threat.

When he was seven, he reacted with similar levels of excess fear to rolly-polly bugs in Kansas, but this also never turned into a big issue. I was able to readily infer that he believed their antennae were mandibles like you see on army ants and he was afraid of being bitten and seriously injured.

I gathered a few up and stuck them in a dish with some lettuce. He could see the lettuce being eaten and that it wasn't with their antennae.

I picked one up and showed him they were harmless and explained that they smell you with their antennae. Those aren't mandibles. They can't bite you.

He was soon holding one in his hand and laughing about the rolly polly smelling him and tickling him with its antennae.

I returned the rolly pollies to the yard and this never became a big issue, though I could see the potential for this to become a phobia if I had not readily realized what was scaring him and had handled things differently.

The thing that did turn into a big problem is that he talked late, which is probably one part crazy conclusion from early childhood and one part actual disability.

When he was two-and-a-half or three, I knew he could use sentences but he didn't want to for some reason. He insisted on continuing to use two-word phrases.

Small children generally learn to use one word and then two and then the next step is sentences. And he got kind of stuck at two-word phrases after briefly trying out sentences and giving up.

When he was three, I put him in preschool for a time to force him to talk to someone other than me. He knew I understood him perfectly well with two-word phrases and his gestures (he was a talented mime) and I was certain that pretending I didn't understand would have just undermined his trust in me. It wouldn't have forced him to actually speak.

At first, he loved preschool. Then he began avoiding it. He began begging off and finally dropped out. He was one of the youngest kids in his preschool class and I was very accommodating and let him cut class and let him drop out when he couldn't take it anymore.

It had accomplished what I wanted -- he began talking to people and using sentences -- and I saw no reason to torture him and insist he keep going. So he ended up talking about a year late because and it took substantial resources to force the issue in an effective manner and not use force in a way that would have just caused a lot of harm and done no good.

When he was 11 years old, he tested at college level in some subjects and below grade level in others. Specifically, he was about 18 months behind on writing.

I began homeschooling and brought him up to speed and then when he was sixteen he discovered Fan Fiction and began writing thousands and thousands of words each week having actively avoided any writing for the previous five years. I had mostly accommodated his aversion to writing and had found other means to teach him and test him.

So he began writing these stories about some character and the character wasn't very verbal. This fictional character used a really limited vocabulary.

As he talked to me about this at about 3 a.m. one night, I began saying things like "This sounds like you as a toddler" when he would angrily say things like "He

can

talk, he's just

stupid

!"

I knew something was up because he has low affect. The amount of strong negative emotion he was expressing while talking about this was quite abnormal for him.

I hit a nerve. He got real defensive and didn't want to talk about it.

Writing about this character ended up being therapeutic for him. He was able to eventually get over his longstanding baggage.

It eventually came out that he talked late because he felt like he sounded "dumb" when trying to use sentences because his mother -- who had two years of college before he was born -- used sentences so much better than him. So using the erudite logic of his two-year-old self, he decided to stick with two-word phrases because he felt he had "mastered' those and that did't make him feel

stupid

.

It took a lot of years to mostly clear up his output difficulties, though he still sometimes struggles with that. And he was mad at me for years and years for putting him in preschool and making him learn to talk.

At some point after writing about this "dumb" not very verbal character in his stories at the age of sixteen, he came to me one day and thanked me for making him learn to talk and told me he probably wouldn't have learned had I not forced the issue by putting him in preschool because learning to talk was really hard for him.

And he stopped being mad at me, at long last, for sending him to preschool.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3xcT1s9