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Je Ne Sais Quoi

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 longer for fun.

Once, he asked me if I knew what the French phrase je ne sais quoi meant and I said "Yes." And he asked me "What does it mean?" And I replied "I don't know." 

We went through a few rounds before he caught on that's the translation. It actually means "I don't know what." but you can just translate it as "I don't know."

I made an effort to generally feed his mind better and made sure he had adequate access to books and other resources that met his intellectual needs and I found ways to shut down his long established bad habit of arguing with me as his only reliable source of adequate mental stimulation.

Twice exceptional kids seem to be especially prone to just messing with people as the easy answer for entertaining themselves when bored. If you give them no other viable options, this is a recipe for ending up with a socially maladjusted awful kid you won't like whose future looks pretty ugly.

As I told him once: When your own mother wants nothing more to do with you, your life will get super duper hard because the rest of the world already wants nothing to do with you.

Enough books, magazines, movies, video games, Internet access and similar was the primary means to cure that and he now knows how to adequately meet his needs in spite of his various limitations and it's just not really been an issue in a lot of years.

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