Distressed

3 Years: “Mama, I’m distressed. (I bet you’ve never heard a three-year-old use the word ‘distressed’ before.)”

One of the curses of having a gifted child is that they have a tendency to know it, and pretty early on. That’s not always a bad thing. Unusual kids need to be prepared to live in a world that thinks and functions differently than they do. They need confidence and self-esteem. They need to know what is and isn’t typical about themselves. And they need to learn to adapt accordingly.

The downside, of course, is an arrogant streak, especially when they’re toddlers or preschoolers and haven’t learned the ropes of discretion or humility yet. If a child has learned that she can make any adult putty, simply by saying an unusual word in the right context, she’ll do it, and she’ll do it well.

My daughter was correct that I had never heard a three-year-old say “distressed” before. I had also never heard a three-year-old gloat about her vocabulary. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Fear of Spelling

3 Years:

“Mommy, I’m scared.”
“What are you scared of?”
“I’m scared of trying to spell the word ‘Fantasia.’”

Despite my endless amount of pride and my faith in my daughter’s genius (don’t almost all of us have delusions about how bright our kids are?), my daughter didn’t somehow possess a magical ability to spell difficult words when she was three—nor did she have the dexterity to write very clearly. She was, at least in that regard, a fairly typical three-year-old. She could write her own name, the word “Mama,” and the word “love,” and who really needs to write much of anything besides that, at three?

But, even more than I was delusional about my daughter’s genius, she was delusional about her own ability, too (as you’d expect from a kid that age). The series of random letters, to her, always spelled out whole and complete paragraphs. The random lines and shapes nearby were elaborate, photorealistic illustrations. Every piece of paper that touched her little fingers was a masterpiece.

Despite the fact that she wasn’t “really” writing yet, she was fixated on trying to do it correctly, and would, sometimes by chance, manage to write a cluster of letters that was almost the correct spelling of a short and simple word. I didn’t really focus on this too much, because she was three and she didn’t need to be able to “actually” write. But I also didn’t really discourage it, either. Any educational way to pass the time on a rainy afternoon sounds good to me.

The downside of this game of spelling was that perfectionism was built into it. It wasn’t enough to spell the word “cat” and get it nearly right. She wanted to write something much more interesting and elaborate than that. Specifically, she wanted to know how to write strange name of that movie that Mama got from the dollar bin at the thrift store.

I guess I would have been afraid of spelling “Fantasia” at three, too.