My DS is academically bright. That's his 'thing'!
His social skills are not very finely tuned and I've known this since before he started preschool. I've mentioned it and asked at every parent's evening and every time, his teachers have said "No, he's fine". Parent evening just gone and this time the teacher has picked up on it.
He is one of those children who's glass is always half empty. Ask him to rate his lunch time between 1 and 10 and he will always say 1 or 2.
He doesn't have a best friend - he just tries to muddle along with anyone who is around but he will never approach them. They have to ask him to play, otherwise, he plays by himself and chats to his imaginary friend. He only talks to imaginary friend at school because it "stops him being lonely"!
Yesterday, he misheard a maths question and shouted out the wrong answer. According to him, the WHOLE class laughed at him so he started to cry and ended up hiding in the toilets. The teacher had told him to go and wipe his tears but he stayed in there until eventually, the TA came to see where he'd got to.
He quite often says things which really turn other children off. The latest one, as an example, is he snarled "That's a stupid place to put my book when I'm not even sitting there!" to a little girl who was handing out the workbooks. Little girl ended up in tears apparently but my DS wasn't aware of how much his words had hurt her feelings. This is his biggest problem I suspect - he turns the other kids off because he tries to say clever things or the 'right' thing and it comes out all wrong for him.
He also has bright carrot orange hair and he wears glasses. Personally, I think he looks dead cute and you can tell already that he'll be a lovely looking adult but unfortunately, some of the other children have taken a few cheap shots at him because of his hair mostly.
His sister, meanwhile, is the happiest, chattiest, funniest and most popular girl you could imagine. She is 5. If it wasn't for her, I'd seriously wonder if our parenting had damaged our son but they've both been parented in much the same way. I just think it's something in my lad's genetic make-up and we have to help him.
I know what I have to do - build his self esteem with lots of positive praise (which we do already but I think we might need to step it up a bit) and then maybe do some role playing and discussing ways he could approach other children etc.
My thread is really asking - does anyone else have a child with a personality like mine? If so, do you want to try a week of positive parenting and esteem building with me, so maybe we could compare notes and come up with some good ideas to help?