Just in case anybody ever had any doubt: I think my kid is pretty much the coolest kid ever.
He’s funny. He’s curious. He’s interesting. He is constantly thinking, all day long, and he comes up with the best ideas. The other day he told Will that they should make up a new video game, one that features skunks and pianos. “You could leave your house and ride on a motorcycle and then play the pianos with the skunks!”
He is creative. He regularly composes and narrates long, original stories about Otis the young garbage truck, stories that eerily resemble parts of his own day but that also feature untrammeled wish-fulfillment.
He makes plans. Plans that involve assembling all of the pillows, cushions, and blankets in the house into a “fuzzy spot” for Otto. Plans that involve building a “motorbike” or a spaceship out of a lego table, numerous pot lids, and a number of blocks. These plans also involve making sure everyone in the room can fit into the motorbike/spaceship and making sure everyone has appropriate protective gear, which often involves the donning of my pots or his block storage bins.
He notices things, like tiny rainbows refracted through windows or stamps on the sidewalk advertising the concrete contractor who installed it 40 years ago. He especially notices smells, like the “bad, bad smell!” he observed when he accidentally entered a nail parlor in the mall.
He is the sweetest guy, always thanking people for coming to visit us, liberally bestowing big hugs, telling me every night that he loves me “around the world 4 times and up to the moon 3 times and back again 5 times.”
These same characteristics that make him so great also make him challenging.
His curiosity prompts him to do all kinds of more or less unacceptable things, “because I just wanted to see how it would work if I…”
His persistent commitment to his plans makes it nearly impossible for him to give them up once he’s thought of them. Even when told “no” repeatedly, he’ll try the same thing 3, 4, 5 times.
His exacting perception of the world around him leads him to do and say things that are embarrassing and inconvenient (“why is that boy fat, mommy?”).
I’m reading Mary Sheedy Kurcinka’s Raising your Spirited Child: a guide for parents whose child is more intense, sensitive, perceptive, persistent, and energetic. It pretty much describes Thomas to the letter. Here’s what Kurcinka says about sending your child off to the first day of school:
“You gulp, hoping that [he] will be treasured by those [he] encounters rather than discussed as an oddity or a troublemaker. But you don’t know and you stand there praying that [he] will be successful, that [he] will enjoy school, make friends, and bring a smile rather than a frown to [his] teacher’s face.”
That’s exactly where I am right now, except I’m losing hope. He’s been to two days of preschool so far. On the first day he had to have one time-out, because he apparently hit somebody. I asked him why he did it, and he said that the other kid hit him first. I believe him; he hasn’t figured out how to lie about stuff like that yet. And of course I agree with the teachers’s decision to give him a time-out. Even if he did react to somebody else hitting him, it’s never okay to hit and I’ve told him that a million times.
Yesterday, he had not one but SEVEN time-outs. As far as we could gather, he didn’t hurt or even try to hurt anybody, but he continually broke rules and failed to listen to his teachers. From what I’ve pieced together from Thomas’s somewhat difficult-to-interpret reports, he received: 2 timeouts for dumping bubble solution out of the bowl onto the ground–his reason: “I didn’t want my teacher to see the mess in the bubble solution, so that’s why I dumped it out” (whatever that means.); 1 timeout for throwing a tube when his teacher asked him to put it away; and at least one timeout for putting glue into the paint they were using for a project: “I wanted to make more paint, so I put some glue in it.” Who knows what else he did, since there are still several time-outs left unaccounted for. At first when I heard about this, I was sort of relieved, since he hadn’t been rough with anybody. But the more I think about it, the worse I feel. Seven time-outs is a lot, considering he was only there for two and a half hours.
He tells us he loves preschool. He has been singing the songs and offering breathless accounts of the fun stuff he’s done. He can’t wait to go back tomorrow.
Me, not so much. I am dreading sending him back. I am dreading talking to the teachers in the morning, knowing that they are probably thinking about how difficult Thomas will make their day. I am dreading talking to them when I pick him up and hear about all the trouble he’s gotten into. And during the 2.5 hours in-between, I’ll just be on edge, wondering what’s happening.
Part of me feels embarrassed–what am I doing so wrong that all of the other parents are apparently doing right? Part of me feels frustrated–why can’t he just listen? Why can’t he just cooperate?
But mostly I just feel sad. I have spent much of the last week in tears, envisioning the next 15 years of Thomas’ life. I see him getting labeled as “the troublemaker,” the kid who can’t behave, and then I see him eventually accepting that label and throwing all of his boundless energy into making it a reality. I see people ignoring all of the good in him, all of the positive potential inherent in his curiosity, his creativity, his persistence, his perceptiveness, seeing only the difficulties that these qualities also entail. In addition to all of these things, he’s sensitive, and I know he’ll catch on to others’ views of him very, very soon.
I don’t really know what to do at this point. Of course, we’ve done lots of talking about why it’s important for him to cooperate with teachers, follow the rules, and be nice to his friends. We have a new chart to help him remember what he needs to do at school. We have rewards. We have revoked video game privileges (perhaps the most powerful weapon in our arsenal). I need to talk to the teachers, for more than just the 5 minutes at drop-off and 5 minutes at pick-up each day. When Will picked him up yesterday, they assured him that Thomas wasn’t being “bad,” he was just “being a little boy.” But it’s hard for me to tell if that’s really, truly how they feel. I want to make sure that they appreciate him for who he is, and he’s clearly a very different kid from all the rest of the kids in the class. I want them to really believe, like I do, that he’s not spilling bubbles or mixing paint and glue in order to be naughty, but because he’s curious about what will happen, and because once he’s thought of it, it’s almost impossible for him not to act on his plan.
I don’t want his teachers to think that I’m just making excuses for my child. I desperately want him to learn to follow rules at school, and I’m heartbroken as I come more and more to terms with the fact that it’s going to be difficult–the school environment is so different, so exciting, so stimulating for him, and difference, excitement, and stimulation definitely bring out some of his more challenging characteristics. Ultimately, I want him to remain the amazing kid that he is, and not be forced into becoming a kid that other people might find more convenient to deal with. I am onvinced that the upsides of his personality far outweigh the difficulties of the flip side.
But at this point, I’m not sure how (or if) we’ll ever get to the point where other people see what I see in him. I guess we’ll just take it a day at a time, so if you don’t mind, just send some love or thoughts or prayers our way tomorrow morning.
