My son has been on a kick for playing the rhyming game in the car. We played for 15 minutes just on words that rhyme with "tattoo". One of the words he said was "The animal, gnu." How the hell does he know that? How many people know what a gnu is?
Then he beat me - at freaking rhyming words with "boot". It is so embarrassing to get beat by a 7yo at a little kid game. I need to start him on Scrabble because I can still win that. I'm a better speller… for now.
He's always been good at games. At 3yo, he was playing Cut-the-Rope and levelling up. I was amazed at the time, that he could complete logic puzzles. At a friend's house, they had a bunch of games that were really cool because their daughter was a couple years older. He could not only play them, he was adept at solving and winning them — even if he had rarely, if ever, played them.
As a parent, though, it's a little weird to get beat by a little kid. I shouldn't be getting beat by a 7yo! I'm okay at games. I don't particularly like them for some reason. It's probably my perfectionism that prevents me from enjoying them. I don't like to lose! t's an exercise in humility. I think if he played more unsuspecting adults that don't know him, it might be a little funny to watch. I'll have to arrange that to happen at some point. In the meantime, I should take him to the monthly board game meetups that with outlier kids in the Bay Area. That will challenge him a bit more than mom and dad!
It is a pretty awesome feeling though, because I am so very proud of him. It demonstrates his intelligence in ways academic tests can't effectively measure. He learns quickly, efficiently, and thinks strategically. He thinks about the big picture and is a creative problem-solver. It comes easily to him. He doesn't realize it yet, but his ability to assess a lot of information and derive solutions from it, is extraordinarily valuable. It isn't rote fact memorization or solving problems that have definitive answers. It involves those things for sure, but he has something that isn't easy to teach. It will serve him well as our values move beyond information retention and into information conduction.
As parents, we probably recognize this ability because it is part of what we do for a living - creative problem-solving. I've worked with a lot of people and it is a rare skill to think at a birdseye view. To see and make connections that aren't always apparent. Some people can just think through problems and solve them with intriguing reasoning without jumping hoops to get there. I just hope he pursues his skill for the good of humanity and not to just hawk someone else's products like we do. (I think I'm verging on my mid-life crisis a couple years early.)
