What to do with a bright child?

[Mumanddone]

I will be accused of bragging but I really am looking for genuine ideas here please.

4yo DD has started reception. She is in a private school. She can read fluently, writes and her maths skills are great. She is basically bilingual. She carries a conversation like a grown up - she’s hugely imaginative and great fun to talk to. She’s not some prodigy - she’s actually a bit of a silly little girl prone to not listening but she is objectively very very bright.

When I observe her peers, I don’t feel like they are on the same wavelength for the most part. Some of them are barely able to string a sentence together and they still seem to have very infantile form of expression. DD makes friends easily and is happy to play with anyone but at the same time - will this hold her back?

we decided for private school to boost her, but wondering if this is enough. I suppose there is a sliding scale to private education. Are there places better suited for her? Or is there something we should be doing to support her at home/ outside. She does the general run of clubs ie: drama, swimming etc.

Why to do with a bright child? Play with her, read to her, bathe her, feed her, laugh with her, cuddle her, take her out for walks and outings, take her to see friends and relations, encourage her interests, watch TV with her, cook with her….all the usual stuff.

It sounds like she is gifted. The website for Potential Plus UK has lots of information on this, including practical tips, handouts, and recommendations for how to handle children with high learning potential.

It’s a shame, by the way, that you’ve gotten so much hate on this post. All children deserve to be appropriately understood and supported in their learning!

Creative = neurodiverse?

What are you trying to say?

After reading a lot of the pages here and seeing people tell you about what they have experienced in their own lives where their children were fast achievers and turned out to be living with a neurodiverse diagnosis, I decided to read your comments only and got this far before I couldn't hold my tongue any longer.

You're not my people lol who the heck do you think you are lol

My son was walking and talking by a year old. Did everything your child can do although we didn't let him play by himself ALL the time at home.

Guess what...?
He's neurodiverse and so am I and it was seeing myself in him from my childhood that made me realise that I'd lived with ADHD all my life and was diagnosed last year. These labels are a godsend to some. For the first time in my life I don't feel like an odd weirdo. I'm a happy weirdo who understands my whole life now, at 47. I've been able to heal so much past trauma and some of that I carried for decades!!

And we're not all a bit on the spectrum.
More people especially women are being diagnosed later in life because they have grown up having to hide/mask who they truly are in order to not be bullied and get on in life.
Now those people are having children who are ND and because we recognise ourselves in our children.....
Diagnosis is so helpful and important to be able to get the right support in areas that may need a bit of help.
I cannot believe the positive impact it has had on me once I was past the initial lull of how different my life could have been had I been diagnosed younger.
I wouldn't have lost so many jobs or be spoken to inappropriately by management if I had but I'm me and I love me. Warts n a.

Also, if your child puts something on the TV that's not age appropriate you, turn it to something that is. She doesn't have to have her own way with that one.

Your judgements towards people like me are absolutely out of order when we already have to fight to be heard and seen.

Amen x

I did have some compassionate things to say to you but your negative comments have blown my mind

Lewis or theatre?

Since you’re making it personal, so will I. I never asked about your experiences. If you want to trauma dump on here then please do so. I do feel for you.

I don’t know why this is such a big talking point, but I put that show on for ME to watch and my daughter watched with me for a short while. For all her genius (lol), she can’t operate a TV remote.

And no many of you are not my people because it baffles me how you speak about yourselves and others.

Thank you and to everyone else who has been helpful and DMd me as well outside of this horrendous pit of negativity. I have learned a lot.

My DD reads using phonics I guess, but the difference is she picked up the sounds just from a few prompts or ‘previews’ of teaching it, I think we only once sat down and ran through the sounds and that was vague because I hadn’t really learned myself how they should all be pronounced. That was enough though. She never had to go through the blending phase, skipped that although she will use it occasionally if she comes across a really complex word.

Yup, I’d say this is our situation. Most of the time she’ll give the harder words a good go and wait for me to correct her and then it’s an extra word added to her arsenal. Some kids just skip the blending.

Children who appear to learn from sight reading / whole word memorisation- especially those who are self-taught - have in fact ‘reverse engineered’ the phonic code. In other words, they associate words, letters, part words with sounds and work out how to generalise this to words they have not seen before.

I watched DS do this - self taught preschool reader - and it was fascinating. Despite not being taught phonics explicitly, when he did have phonics lessons, he already knew the phoneme / grapheme correspondences through having worked them out (though he did not always ‘segment’ a word in the standard way, perhaps seeing nd together and giving the combined sound).

Modern synthetic phonics (and phonics as taught to children before the brief ‘whole word’ educational fad) teaches the code directly, so children don’t have that extra effort of creating it themselves.

Some of them are barely able to string a sentence together and they still seem to have very infantile form of expression.

DD makes friends easily and is happy to play with anyone but at the same time - will this hold her back?

With respect you are sounding like my family, who wanted to interfere inland decide who their bright child should be friends with. Result is I have not been able to meet my potential despite being bright due to anxiety and perfectionism caused by such demanding childhood and living with immature mindsets which comes with parents who don’t see their children more than objects to perform and make them feel proud and give them something to boast about.

4 years is the age for kids to be kids. Let her explore her friendships. If she is so bright, she would have good intuition to know who she wants to be friends with, and don’t need your interference. Don’t mess with her confidence and mental health just because you have some strange ideas of brightness and achievement from her.

She can read fluently

I can tell you beyond a shadow of doubt that she does not. You mean fluently for a four year old.

Or is she reading war and peace. Or Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Honestly, let her be. I was the class thicko. Now Im a solicitor.

Your child has time to crash and burn, and she certainly will if you put that pressure on her.

You are sounding exactly like my family. Pinning all their hopes on me, which resulted in me living in constant pressure to fulfil the dreams they couldn’t achieve in their lives.

She needs normal childhood to develop into a well rounded adult, which includes friendships with people she connects with not based on their IQs. If she is bright like you say she will do well in life as long as she does not have this pressure from you.

Your child has time to crash and burn, and she certainly will if you put that pressure on her.

I agree.

It’s not horrendous pit pf negativity. Some of us had that pressure from parents and know how it impacted us. If you care about your dd, you would see those ‘negative’ message from point of view your dd.

Let’s be clear here. Her peers are not “infantile”. They’re typical four year olds. Your daughter is exceptional. Don’t belittle her peers. That’s when you come across as bragging.

It wont hold her back, my year 5 child works at a senior school level in maths & science he does get bored in these lessons as he knows it, but he enjoys being with kids his own age.

OP you sound very much like my mum when I was growing up (she was also ‘just’ a teacher but very smart herself) and I was much like your daughter, reading relatively difficult books before reception, reading novels by the time I was six and way ahead of everyone in my class. The difference was I lived in a relatively remote area with no private schools so there was no option to improve my education until we moved many years later. My mum stressed endlessly about the fact I wasn’t being given enough opportunities to be stretched and enrolled me in every additional thing she could find, language classes via correspondence (no such thing as online back in my day), three musical instruments, four sports and spent endless time herself teaching me stuff I wasn’t getting taught at school. At the time I did sometimes resent her pushing me so hard when all my friends parents were so different but looking back I’m very glad she did, as I can see now it made the most of my potential and set me up for success whereas if I’d been allowed to coast my life would have turned out quite differently. Just wanted to offer that perspective, to say I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong by trying to support your daughter in this way. I’ve had the opportunity to travel and live all over the world and to make a lot of money (relatively speaking, having come from nothing), and I do mostly credit that to my mum’s influence. Also I’m not autistic or ND, plenty of people are gifted readers with no ND.

I read another post where you say you are foreign born. I am foreign born too. I won’t be surprised if you are from the culture I am from seeing that you think ‘you are just a teacher’. I also grew with messages that teaching is sub par career, it took me long and a lot of questioning of my own rigid belief systems to realise how ignorant I was. Teacher is not ‘just a teacher’. It is a low paid, overworked job but it deserves a lot of respect. By any chance, are you from Asia? Because I am from there and I have noticed that there is a very weird mindset developing there for decades now - to be a corporate leader or be in high powered, high income job. Your dd is bright she will do well as long as you are supportive and not try to control, but you are already seeing problems with her friendships and her peers not being smart enough, so I am afraid that she may resent you one day for the pressure you put on her. Being smart is good but being happy and well adjusted person is a lot better.

I think this is the most useful post of this thread.

You are talking about a 4 year old child. My daughter is a similar age & Im most concerned with how she’s settling in school & whether she has made friends. She can’t read beyond letter sounds and it doesn’t bother me as I know it will all come in time.

This poster is too arrogant and defensive to pay attention to anything other than posters sharing her mindset. For her being teacher is a lower achievement, mentioning that exceptionally unusual ability to read at such age can be linked to ND is an accusation. Who sees ND as a crime or flaw to attach a word like accusation with it?
I feel sorry for kids whose parents have such high expectations. Bright or average, every kid deserves to have a childhood full of love exploration and fun. Interfering with friendships of kids because other kids are not smart enough is not only mean, it’s unhelpful to your own kids too.