Just that really. He has recently discovered sport, mainly football, cricket and tennis, after showing no interest in the past. He was gushing on, like he does, about how he will probably play for England, how great he is, etc etc. I gently told him that only a tiny minority of people who enjoy playing a sport will reach professional level. I mentioned the extraordinary dedication, as well as natural talent, required for this to happen. I told him that of course he can try, but I think it's fair to say that I put the dampners on the idea, in fact the phrase 'pissed on his strawberries' immediately sprang to mind, though that was certainly not my intention. I am posting because he did look really crushed, and that made me doubt myself.
Context is that he attends a small school and has been on the top table since he joined in Y1. I get the impression that he is top of the class in nearly everything that is measured (from his teacher, she told me that there was one other child at a similar level, but that ds was working ahead in most areas) and that other children seem to be aware of this. Ds has a bit of a 'professor' persona going on - he loves reading, documentaries etc and I think he, ahem, enjoys sharing his knowledge at school. I have worried in the past about his social skills, but he seems fine now, has plenty of friends and his teacher describes him as 'so nice'. However, he is always telling us that others children have said stuff like 'why are you so clever?" etc and, from what he says, his 'cleverness' is frequently commented on by peers and teachers.
I don't think this is doing him much good. He seems to expect to excel at everything and, if he doesn't, gets ridiculously frustrated. He took up chess recently and skim-read the age appropriate book we got him, declared himself an expert and promptly discovered he was not. Although this resulted in a lot of upset, we saw it as a valuable lesson: He's bright but not 'the best' in everything.
So AIBU to temper his ambitions somewhat?