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You are here: Experts > Education > Gifted Children > Gifted Children > What's my son's problem?
Expert: Ettina - 10/31/2009
Question
I have an 8 year old son who doesn't like to go to school. i have read some articles on the site and was wondering if he is gifted or there are some disorders.
My son was very small at birth. He actually almost died and was very cold when he was born. Nevertheless he was very aware of his surrounding. The first thing he did at birth was looking around and as soon as he saw me, he smiled. The doctor had to slap him twice to get him crying.
He was a couple of days old as I saw him looking at me in a strange way. It was as if he was telling me a message with his eyes. He never did things that babies do (e.g.: putting all kind of stuff in their mouth#. As a baby he observed patterns, colors, objects, etc. With 7 months he started to speak. With 10 months he could already speak sentences clear enough for everyone to understand. He never talked using baby words #dada, etc.# When he hears a word he repeats it without any mistake. At age 1,5 he new the whole alphabet. At age 3 he could count up to 100 in Dutch #our mother tongue# and up to 10 in English, Papiamentu #similar to Spanish# and French. He never was interested in painting, coloring, and writing. He always wanted to play with his cars. He was interested in reading and could read at age 5.
At age 3,5/4 I noticed that he wasn't able to speak up what he wanted to say and takes very long to make a sentence. He always wanted to go to school and when he started at age 4, he immediately lost interest into going to school #after the first school day already#. Since then it's a big struggle every morning. It takes him forever to brush his teeth and eat. Doing homework is a daymare because he takes so long to make it. I tried to explain him that it's important to learn but he says school is so boring. He concentrates really bad at school #and doing homework too# and seems to forget everything is said at school #especially regarding homework#. I have to repeat myself constantly because he always forgets what I've told him. Also routine stuff like wake up, brush your teeth, put your clothes on and eat, I have to tell him over and over every day.
He has been tested on ADD/ADHD and dyslexia but all is negative. We send him to a concentration training and they also couldn't find anything wrong. If he has to play concentration games on the computer #e.g. rush hour), he has no problem at all playing it for hours. I have no clue of what is going on with my son and how I can help him. Please if you can give me some answer I highly appreciate it.
Answer
Firstly, your son is pretty clearly a gifted child. However, it's possible that he has some sort of learning problem in addition to giftedness, particularly since he had a rough birth.
I'm not entirely sure what's going on with your son, but I sort of get the impression of a quiet, slow-moving, inactive child. Is that right? If so, that could mean one of two things.
Firstly, he might have sensory processing differences, particularly hyposensitivity. Whereas many hyposensitive kids are sensation-seekers (hyperactive, intrusive, risk-taking, etc), others just don't react very strongly to most sensations. Occupational therapists can assess sensory processing and give advice on how to help the child. In general, with hyposensitive kids, the advice is usually to provide some sort of strong stimulation such as a massage, or getting them to carry or push something heavy, in order to 'wake up' their sensory processing.
Another possibility is slow processing. Different kids generally tend to take more or less time to process something, and this isn't necessarily related to intelligence. Basically, a kid with slow processing is fine at understanding and responding to things, but you need to give them a bit more time. When you give them information too quickly, they typically get overwhelmed and tune out.
I'd need more information to know whether my suggestions are accurate or not.
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