Brendan is incredibly lucky in that he is naturally friendly, outgoing, compassionate, and attractive. These attributes enable him to make acquaintances in most settings. While he has 2 or 3 age-peers whom he considers his best friends, he isn't able to see them as often as he would like. He craves other friendships, but it is hard for him to emotionally connect with most children his age. He prefers the more complex role-playing games of the older children vs. the "run-around" that most kindergartners still engage in, but his 5 year old body's motor skills impede him from keeping up with the older crowd.
I digress to share my favorite story about this..... Brendan started preschool when he was 3 years, 3 months old. At the time, he was crazy about the Lion King and would invent these long drawn out "movies", assigning everyone roles like producer, director, etc, and tell everyone their lines. Every day of his 1st week of preschool, he came home sad because the other children wouldn't play with him. Finally, I asked his preschool teacher if there was a problem. His teacher explained that Brendan was trying to direct the class into his production on the playground during recess. As she explained it, Brendan had this huge vision for what the other children should be doing, but the others were "just normal 3 year olds, and most of them barely even talk. They had no idea what he was trying to do." More than 2 years later and 2,000 miles away, the same playground issues still abound.
While homeschooling and co-ops have helped blur the line between his age peers and his academic peers, the grade level gap appears over and over again as well-meaning people ask him what grade he's entering. (We are keeping him registered as a 1st grader, but his work will all be 3rd grade and higher.) No matter how normal we try to keep it, every time he's somewhere doing homework while Ryan has a class, or reading a novel while waiting for an appointment, or I get asked why we're homeschooling, the comments come about how he's not "normal" for his age.
All this leads to a lot of confusion for this little 5 year old. Sometimes, he's scared of letting the other kids know that he's smart because "the smart kids always get beaten up in the movies and books." (Sadly, he's right.) Or, he doesn't want the older children "to be mad at him" for being in higher level curriculum than them. As I talk with other moms of highly gifted children, I hear that these feelings are extremely common, and they are highlighted even further by the fact that these children also have deeper and more sensitive feelings than others.
Brendan wrote a tongue-in-cheek autobiographical essay about these feelings to share with his last writing workshop. He wrote it in the style of Diary of a Wimpy Kid to get a laugh out of his (older) classmates, but I still found parts of it rather poignant:
So, what is a parent to do? We do not want him to skip over years of his young childhood, but it is also unfair to pigeonhole him with younger children when he fits better with older ones. My hackles rose at one person's suggestion that we seek a psychiatrist. A mom of other highly gifted children had wonderful advice passed along from a psychologist, though. She suggested that we take the summer off from reading Harry Potter and other books where the child heroes face heavy burdens, and instead focus on lighthearted entertainment. I am going to try and pry those heavy adventure novels out of his hands, and help him enjoy summer playdates, vacation bible school, swim and soccer, and other non-academic activities so that he can simply be 5 (soon to be 6) years old. When the new school year begins, we'll do what seems to work best.....participate in educational co-ops where the age/grade lines are blurred, and figure everything else out on a case-by-case basis that best works to his unique needs.
