The Challenges of Overexcitabilities

This is a fantastic article about kids with overexcitabilities. I can't explain how challenging it is to deal with these behaviors day in and day out. My son is incredibly bright, but he still can't tie his shoes well or use a napkin. He can ask some pretty profound questions and yet not have the emotional maturity to deal with the impact of his line of questioning. It's a bizarre world where I'm raising a 7 year old who thinks like a 13 year old and acts like a 5 year old - all at once. It's all consuming, but it's a "gift" right?

I am blessed that he's healthy and bright, but some days it's really, really challenging. Everything is an exaggeration - yeah my kids bounces off the walls (literally), he yells and nothing is ever too loud, he talks all the time, he likes to touch everything - especially his food, he delves obsessively into topics. Lots of kids do these things, it's normal, but it's just times 10 with him. It's like when he was 3 and he had tantrums. Every kid has tantrums, but his would go on for 2 hours. I thought the articles were joking about 2 minute tantrums. That was a dream scenario for me.

"Some of the most overwhelming aspects of raising gifted children are all the quirks, idiosyncrasies and discrepancies in abilities. Without a thorough understanding of what overexcitabilities are and how they impact a child’s experience in the world, parents and others close to the child may contemplate attaching a pathological disorder to try and explain away the difficult behaviors and outbursts that unfold in daily life. To contemplate matters more, asynchronicity creates a layer of confusion when a child whose physical age, intellectual age and social-emotional age conflict with his chronological age concurrently and in any given moment."

http://www.giftedunschooling.com/overexcitabilities/