How much do you 'ignore' your children?

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Have just been out with two families - friends of ours- who have kids about the same age, and I have to confess, I am amzed by the extent to which they actively 'ignore' their children trhoughout the whole afternoon.

By this I mean they seem to 'zone out' from all the various requests/ questions/ constant 'to-ing and fro-ing' that seems typical of under- 6s??

As a result they actively seem to enjoy themselves more, manage to have 'adult' conversations (which I gave up years ago )and it seems that their kids eventually give up and go and sort out themselves whatever it is they want....( which seems like a good thing I suppose)

I can't decide whether I'm just a mug with my kids and let them dominate my life too much... but I simply CAN'T ignore them - it seems really rude and uncaring somehow??

Metamorph ty. I can be calm about the truth. If i was reading this post as an outsider and didn;t have my son i too would probably doubt what i had read. BUT as i do have my son I can accept that some children can be very advanced while others are just typical kids. I wish i could change the things Karl had seen and witnessed But i can't and so i accept my son as he is. And he is in my eyes perfect... well he is perfect for me cos he is my baby.

Kelly mine was saying proper sentances at 13 months so 10 months is not really that far fetched and Vaunda may well mean something as basic as yes please which to a chil;d of 10 months is a 'proper sentence'

Talking and reading early are not predictors of ability later in life.

Lots of people would love a child who could respect and be respected by adults, I'm just wary of losing the ability to relate to the peer group because it is more difficult to catch up with them later.

Alexmum what would you propose i had done then? I was a single parent when i was a carer for my grandparents should i have left karl alone at home?

tbhere are aspecial groups that focus on helping kids who have gone through trauma, mainly war, learn how to be kids. these gorups have been set up to teach thiese kids to play and socialise. because it is iimportnat that children get a childhood. yes your karl had a trauimatic start. it sounds from your posts htat you are purposefuly denying this to you 7 year old by giving him too much akcnowldgement and priase for being an adult. you sem to be denying your respoinsibility as a parent by raisng an adult and not raising a child to adulthood.

called in social servicves for some help?

i know that if my dh gets worse and wont survive a transplant, i wouldnt want my kids there to see him wasting away (heart failre makes the body burn calories very fast so he would lose weight quickly, or the opposite could happen and he could bloat up as fluid rentention from LHF starts.) then i wont want my kids there., i would find a sitter somehwhere some how. and at the ageof 5 i dont think my dd1 should go to his funeral. but thats just IMO, and based on my circumstances.

vaunda if you such a wide circle of friends who all adore your son, and love discussing fashion with him and taking him for meals, couldn't you have enlisted some of them for babysitting duty while you went to the hospital?

DS1 was talking in complete sentences etc by the time that he was 18 months. None of the others have particularly bothered. Lots of people would tell me how lovely and how special he was and how I should get him assessed and moved into special classes blah blah... but I took the decision to allow him to be a little boy.

He has lots of friends of his own age. Adults enjoy talking to him and are often impressed that he can hold his own. But what was important for me wasn't that he was bright, could chat to adults, knew far too much for his age..... what was important was his childhood. They are only children for a very little while. DS1 is about to be 13. Suddenly I can see the end of his childhood looming.

Vaunda... in the midst of all that is going on, I think people feel concerned that your son doesn't seem to have any friends of his age to just muck about with. It seems to all be about how "adult" he is. Well fine... but please give thought to the incredibly short period of time in which he can be a child. He will grow to manhood all too soon. If you do not wish to see or hear what some of the posters are saying about allowing him his childhood, then fine. But I think we've all worked out what you are saying about him. To ignore a child is not to damage him or inflict any kind of harm. Sometimes they need to allow their imaginations to grow. They do not need constant attention. Sometimes the stillness is as valuable as the noise. Allow him to develop, play with other children and have nonsense conversations. One day the adults that he talks to aren't going to be there anymore.... then who will he talk to.

I don't mean this to be an attack, but in the midst of all of this, surely you must see the concern that he is not being allowed to be a small boy?

Why do you not think Vaunda is for real? She's been posting for a while.

I think it is important not to talk down to kids and to try to involve them as much as possible. I also think it is important for my ds to be able to play by himself happily (imgaination anyone?)but I also think that it is vital for his long term happiness that he has plenty of friends of his own age. I'd really embrace that last point, Vaunda, and make an effort to try to get him to interact with other children - invite them back for tea, whatever it takes really. Yes, your son may well be frighteningly intelligent, but I've met adults and teenagers who are both frighteningly intelligent and socially inept and none of them seemed to find life particularly easy. So try to encourage both sides to help your son make the most of his childhood.

imagination, even.

Mars and Willow said exactly what I think without being unkind - it does sound like he needs to learn how to be 'just' a "typical kid" (your words, Vaunda). We're grown-ups for such a long time.

I think it is entirely possible to be highly intelligent and socially adept and integrated with one's peer groups.

I wonder whether because he has been around adults so much your son is displaying a great deal of immaturity in the social aspects of his life. Afterall it is a sign of maturity that one can deal with people of all ages and all walks of life.

Whilst I think your DS sounds a lovely person and you are clearly very proud of him (as we all are of our children) I really do think that your child is going to have the most enormously rough ride at school. I wouldn't wish that on him, I really wouldn't!

Alexmum,
My friends do not live next door to me. By the time i had contacted them i could have possibly lost my dad. As for when i was a carer for my grandad my friends were at work so i had to take him.

And now I'm going to stop ignoring my children (because that is indeed what I am doing as I type on here!) and go and do something more productive.

Marslady he is allowed to be a child but he choses to be himself. I have just recently spent a small fortune on his b'day party and invited majority of his class mates. They all played and karl was quite happy until they started acting (his words) really silly nd throwing things and running off. He knows he can invite children here to play whenever he wants to. Hence the reason he has 2 rooms one for his bed the other for his toys, so that they have more room to play in. But he rarely does. Today he had the choice of coming out with me and his dad or seeing his father at my sisters. He chose to come out with us even though i explained some of his teachers and his head will be there.

RE having children in Adult company all the time can I put in the voice of personal experience here?

When I was a small child I spent my time almost exclusivly with adults and much older children. This is not because my mother had any theories of child rearing or attachment parenting (this was the 60s in the vallies of S wales ) She did this because she was an older mother and all of her friends and family had much older children. The nearst child to me was 7 years older. My mother never saw the need to get me to mix with other children.

To say that I was an odd child is possibly the understatemennt of the centuary, I would only talk to people on alternate days , for example. My social skills reagarding play with my peers were non exsistant. I was bright and able, had an excellent vocabulary at a very young age, and no idea that I was , in fact, a child. I went to nyrsery at the age of three under the misaprehesion I was a short adult!

I then spent the next years of school beeing teased and very badly bullied.

As you can guess I was very quick to make sure that my two could function 'normaly' with their peers and beleiev that healty 'independence' is the way forward if at all possible.

A plea from the heart, I had a shit childhood because of the way I was raised. Sure , I've got over it, and I know that my mother didn't do this delibertly, but it was bloody grim, people, don't do this to your kids!

no point in continuing this. you are obvioulsy veyr proud of your child being a mini-audlt. other people were just trying to say that from their point of view you are making a mistake and risk damaging him in the longterm. obviously you know best as he is your child. i am going to stop letting this thread wind me up now

Vaunda, I wish you luck - my so-called-by-adult-friends 'special' boy is now starting secondary school. Above all else, fitting in with his peer group really matters to him at the moment. Everything from having the right sports kit to the right lunch arrangement. So far, things have been fine, and he is making friends. I am trying to make sure he doesn't stand out, so he can have an easy transition.

Abiltywise, he will be one of many reasonably bright children, as the school is a grammar - but he will not be marked out as a genuis as he is not one. There are lots of other 'bright' children out there, and he knows this.

Soapbox, he did for a while suffer bullying but for a totally different reason than not for not mixing. He was bullied for being the only white child in the class. and only then by one child.

then I shall bow out and leave you as I am clearly giving unsolicited advice/opinion. My parting shot (which of course I cannot resist) is that it doesn't harm them to have a little disappointment or sadness. It allows them to deal with the whole of life when we are not there. You say that when his friends began acting the way small children did he didn't like it. I suspect (could be wrong) that you encouraged him in this and ended the party pdq. You say he is accepting of all people, clearly not!

I should do as I originally stated. I bow out.

hmb
we were cut off from our peers too, by our mother being older, and later, by her snobbery. How old was I when I got over it? thirty, maybe?
Isnt it a relief to be normal now, though!

dx is very careful not to let our sons mix with older boys as well, as he knows EVERYTHING about what boys get up to when left on their own.

mars, I thought your post was spot on actually.

NN I was lucky enough to meet up with some similar kids when I was in my early teens, so I started to get 'better' then. But my early childhood was very unhappy, up to the age of about 13 I would say.

I'm not unscarred now! And I am not very 'natural' with small children, and have to make an effort to do things that other people do naturaly with them.

Tigermoth, karl also knows there are many other bright children out there and is in no way big headed. He doesn't like to be told anything but the truth and i would never tell him anything but the truth. I was never lied to and nor will he be.

ah, but there are ways of telling the truth to a child - do you not agree?