Raising Future Adults

In my youth, I had a spider phobia. As a teen, I watched some cheesy B grade movie with obviously plastic spiders on strings being used as giant spiders and was creeped out by it. When my kids were relatively young, I had to woman up and protect them from Wolf spiders in Kansas and Sun spiders and tarantulas in Southern California. That helped. It's a therapeutic technique called flooding. Enough exposure without getting hurt ramps your phobia down. But the cure for my phobia was homeschooling my kids and thereby learning more science than college ever taught me. They loved dinosaurs and we bought Jurassic Park and prescreened it and helped them watch it comfortably at shockingly young ages because that's what they WANTED. We watched ALL the prehistoric anything that ever aired. Any sciency anything about life a zillion years ago and we watched it. Ditto snakes, spiders, and on and on while my five year old held my hand and reassured me I would be okay. So starting well before ...

At the age of twenty, Christopher Knight quit his job and left town. He had no plans. It began as a spontaneous road trip and turned into 27 years of living in the woods and committing an estimated thousand robberies from vacation homes to resupply himself about every two weeks. He had a burgarly style akin to the advice about take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints. Other than the items he stole, the place was untouched and he locked up after himself. It was so bizarrely clean and respectful of the owners, he impressed law enforcement looking for him and for a time people tried to leave out bags of stuff for him to take and even requested he make them a grocery list because he wasn't stealing what most burglars steal from vacation homes. People with vacation homes are pretty wealthy. People who rob them tend to go for cash, jewelry, cameras and other expensive items easy to carry and readily sold for cash. He had no need for cash. He didn't go shopping. He stol...

When I was involved with The TAG Project, it was so common for bright kids to have "The Princess and the pea" syndrome that people were trading tips on children's clothing brands that didn't have tags and stuff like that. Bright kids frequently  just hate things like seams in socks. Albert Einstein didn't wear socks. Some other famous person cut the toes and heels off all his socks right after buying them. He justified it with saying those parts wear out first and get holes anyway. Albert Einstein also bought several copies of the same clothes and justified it with claiming he couldn't be bothered to waste his great intellect on deciding what to wear. People accept that explanation and typically get very offended if anyone suggests maybe he was ASD. Buying several copies of the same outfit or slight variations on favorite brands is a recommended best practice for accommodating sensory issues in children who gave them.

If you have a socially challenged child and wish to watch Rain Man with them for some reason, please prescreen it and think about how you wish to handle certain things. This is not a children's movie. I'm perfectly okay with that. But you should be prepared to address certain things. If it were me, these are some of my concerns and you may have others: 1. There is a sex scene in it and Raymond walks in on his brother Charlie having sex and sits down and begins watching TV.  Charlie yells at Raymond and tells him get out and his girlfriend says "Go talk to him." and then Charlie continues being ugly to Raymond. To her credit, the girlfriend walks out. This is to my mind a shockingly common theme in movies and TV shows: That a child or socially impaired individual who doesn't know better can walk in on this because they didn't lock the door. In this case, they didn't even close it. I would tell my child Charlie is in the wrong for not closing and locking th...

The title of the movie has nothing to do with autism. It's the toddler nickname of a forgotten older brother, Raymond being mispronounced as Rain Man by a two or three year old. Good points: The movie shows and argues that there's more to Raymond than his limitations. It's a reasonably accurate depiction of the big strengths and big weaknesses of an idiot-savant. Bad points: I look at the behavior of Raymond and see someone who has been institutionalized for decades and never learned to navigate the larger world and the movie doesn't really adequately make that point in my opinion. If you have a socially challenged child in any way similar to Raymond: 1. A lot of his issues are rooted in sensory issues. They may never completely resolve, but treating underlying medical issues can reduce them and you can arrange your life to be quieter and calmer and less triggering. FYI: Raymond should have been losing it in the face of the lights and noise in the casino too. It's ...

As an adult, people have seen me as extremely articulate and have expressed surprise when I have told anecdotes about speech challenges I had as a toddler, as if toddlers who struggle to pronounce things can't possibly grow up to be articulate adults. But it's developmentally normal for toddlers to have some speech challenges and highly unusual for a child to skip that awkward stage -- though it does seem to happen in rare cases. Some kids who  talk late  sometimes just start speaking in full sentences that are relatively articulate for their age, skipping the earlier developmental stages of one word alone and then two words which typically precede the use of sentences. I've heard more than one personal anecdote over the years from people I knew online or knew in person.  "Einstein Syndrome" is a term some people use for this pattern of development and that phrase may help you find relevant articles if you know a speech delayed child and are fretting about it. The...

Many years ago, I attended one conference in the gifted world. One of the presenters told a story about a young girl who was simultaneously being denied gifted education appropriate to her needs and allowed to pursue some kind of sport in which she was talented. They were telling her it would be harmful to her in some way to adequately feed her mind. She made some kind of cutting remark along the lines of "Well, then, why is it okay to harm me so your sports team does better in competition?" IQ is a measure of intelligence relative to age . Children with a high IQ are viewed as being the mental age of someone older than they are. This comes with inherent social, emotional and other developmental changes. They aren't necessarily more emotionally mature than children their age and even if they are, their emotional maturity may fall somewhere between physical age and mental age. Small children with a high IQ may have a keen interest in science, but be as clumsy as your typic...