Raising Future Adults

There's no single test for ADHD and they have to go through a process of elimination and rule out other things first that may be causing the issues. ADHD was at one time a diagnosis given to a small number of children and now it gets described as being at epidemic levels. My oldest son was assessed for ADHD when he was five and attending an unusually good public school in a small city with a big university where there was enormous competition for teaching positions by qualified people. They concluded he had some kind of attention span issue, but it wasn't ADHD because he weirdly paid more attention to longer, more complex sentences and they had no idea what that meant. Years later while involved with the gifted community online, I dubbed that Bored Gifted Kid Syndrome. Prior to that, at one school his frustrated teacher said we should "Put him on Ritalin." to control his behavioral issues and made no mention of assessment for ADHD and didn't bother to ask if he ha...

I coined the expression Bored Gifted Kid Syndrome while participating on Tagmax and I have a post with that title that doesn't really talk about that. So let's give it another try. When my oldest was probably twelve and I realized his real problem was Bored Gifted Kid Syndrome and that was a very large part of why he made me crazy, I began engaging him in ridiculous arguments with circular logic and over the course of eighteen months this stopped a lot of his worst habits. Like his dad, he just argued with me all the time and made me nuts. I don't remember what I turned that into but I had something I would say to him where arguing with me proved me right about my statement and ceasing was the only way to actually win the argument and prove me wrong. And he's genuinely socially challenged, so the first time I did that, we argued about it for something like ninety minutes and years later he told me it took him about forty-five minutes to get it and then he kept it going...

Here is a short clip of Trevor Noah talking about promising his mom he would be rich so he can buy "two" (things from the menu I guess) and buy desert. He basically says they were poor and did takeout about once a month and trying to pick the one thing he wanted off the menu was such a big decision and very stressful, so he decided he would get rich enough to buy whatever food he wanted. He doesn't say how old he was when this conversation occurred. I'm inferring he was fairly young, like four years old. That's not really poverty . That's probably developmental and has nothing to do with budget. He kind of retconned that after he grew up. When my oldest was two years old and I was pregnant with his brother, we were living in Germany and the American military grocery store was kind of kitty-corner across the street and I was in a third floor walk up. I think the grocery store was open six days a week and I typically went grocery shopping every single day it wa...

I read an article about a woman Supreme Court Justice, probably Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and it briefly mentioned that her children kept a journal documenting anytime "Mommy Laughed" because she didn't laugh much. She was a very serious person and didn't do a lot of laughing. That resonated with me.  My older sister who was a serious person with a serious career and not exactly your giggly party girl, once told me one of her friends asked her if marrying young and having children young made me so serious and sis replied "No, she was always that way." My kids think I'm fun. I had to stop reading bedtime stories to them because they would get so excited, they were jumping on the bed and all revved up instead of nodding off to sleep. But even my kids agreed I didn't laugh much. My oldest son eventually told me that at an extremely young age, probably prior to his second birthday, he decided he wasn't a freeloader and he needed to earn his keep. He decid...

Caroline?   is an obscure made-for-TV movie with a one-paragraph plot summary on Wikipedia that completely leaves out anything substantive. Wikipedia says "Caroline" shows up just before a large inheritance is due, but my memory of the movie is that the concern of the person claiming to be Caroline isn't money. It's the fate of two minor children in a wealthy, dysfunctional family. The majority of the movie focuses on the drama involved in inserting herself in their lives successfully, gaining their trust and establishing the ability to meaningfully help them. They are probably Winston and Heidi in the list of characters on Wikipedia. Heidi is presumed to be retarded. She's actually hard of hearing and being treated like a baby doll and dressed up in cutesy clothes like she's still four years old and she absolutely hates it. The fake Caroline initially thinks she can help Winston and then Heidi but ultimately concludes she needs to help Heidi and that will fre...

Video (not quite 10 minutes):  What face blindness is actually like . He uses garlic cloves instead of stones, but it's a similar analogy to a piece I linked to previously when I wrote about face blindness  before . My ex-husband really liked movies and TV shows, so a big part of our relationship was watching movies and TV shows together. And over time it became apparent we had very different strengths and weaknesses for recognizing the same actors in different roles. The wife of Peter Falk played in some of the episodes of Columbo. After learning that, we would try to identify her. She didn't play a recurring character. She always played someone different and they tried to cover up the fact that the same actress was used repeatedly, so they tried to dress her very different. I was better at identifying her than he was because this was typically about changes in hairstyle and clothes and makeup. If you recognize faces, that's a huge advantage. But Christopher Lloyd, who pla...

There's a certain amount of natural variation in personality traits. There's probably not a single person alive who doesn't have a few "difficult" personality traits. I don't believe in nature OR nurture. I believe in nature AND nurture. I believe that a great deal of social stuff is learned or learnable. Spiders get just BORN with behaviors hardwired into them. People, not so much. I have difficult children. One lacks a conscience, an innate sense that "It's WRONG to hurt other people." He's head injured from an incident involving an irresponsible nurse when he was four months old. Maybe he was born with a conscience and lost it due to head injury. Or maybe he never had it. I raised him to understand WHY he needs to behave ANYWAY. Traits like that can be useful in times of war or in certain professions or whatever. He's not bothered by things that can be unpleasant but simply need to be done the way some people are.  I taught my kids thi...