Tips for children who look older than they really are
June 6, 2022 4:18 PM Subscribe
How to support a child who appears older than they actually are?
I'm close with a child who is tall and very verbal, with a big vocabulary and notably crisp articulation. People often think he's 5 or even 6 - but he's actually almost 4.
He's either age-appropriate or ahead for his age in every area, but adults consistently expect him to have a first-grader's attention span, not a young kindergartener's. So they think he's unfocussed or slow, and they tend to be a bit short with him. For instance, where a smaller child might get "Ok buddy, now let's do this new thing, can you try it, yeah, like this.... great job!" Instead he gets "Hey! Come on, focus!"
He also has a strong personality so his confidence and assurance is high for his calendar age, which adds to the impression that he's being wayward rather than age-appropriate. For instance, an instructor might say, "Hey do you want to come sit in the circle?", meaning "Come sit in this circle right now", but he'd likely take that question literally and politely and confidently reply, "no thank you". It's innocent but could seem cocky.
When older kids talk to him as a peer, he responds appropriately as a much younger child, and they visibly think he's strange and babyish. The other day at the park, a girl who appeared to be about 7 was very confused and annoyed by the way he interacted - for instance, he didn't want to share - which is appropriate at 4, but very "wrong" if he were 7. And while that girl would likely have brushed off a little kid's immaturity, she instead perceived him as a peer and felt quite affronted that a "peer" wasn't sharing, so she kept trying to engage with him and actually told him off pretty strongly.
Of course, he'll learn to share faster with that kind of feedback, so that one moment wasn't all that bad... but the sharp tone and judgement from others will also be consistent and it's not at all warm or gentle. It hurts to imagine him being snapped at all the time.
How can his family help people perceive his age more accurately? Ideas already in process:
Dress him in light bright colors and childish styles (sun hat rather than baseball cap, etc)
Keep his haircut babyish rather than "cool"
Avoid violent shows, so his play remains innocent and imaginative - for instance he likes to pretend to be a puppy, rather than "action hero" type play.
Tell adults his age as often as possible and explicitly mention that people tend to age him up (doesn't really work because they just keep responding to his size, especially in groups of children where he is both the largest and youngest child)
Putting him into sports, to ensure that he'll feel his size is an asset somewhere
Discouraging adults in his inner circle from constantly commenting on his size (which is hard because it's very noticeable!)
Is there anything else his family can do to help people see him as the kid he is, and encourage others to give him the patience and gentleness he deserves?
And, can anyone share stories about big-for-their age kids who did ok?
I'm close with a child who is tall and very verbal, with a big vocabulary and notably crisp articulation. People often think he's 5 or even 6 - but he's actually almost 4.
He's either age-appropriate or ahead for his age in every area, but adults consistently expect him to have a first-grader's attention span, not a young kindergartener's. So they think he's unfocussed or slow, and they tend to be a bit short with him. For instance, where a smaller child might get "Ok buddy, now let's do this new thing, can you try it, yeah, like this.... great job!" Instead he gets "Hey! Come on, focus!"
He also has a strong personality so his confidence and assurance is high for his calendar age, which adds to the impression that he's being wayward rather than age-appropriate. For instance, an instructor might say, "Hey do you want to come sit in the circle?", meaning "Come sit in this circle right now", but he'd likely take that question literally and politely and confidently reply, "no thank you". It's innocent but could seem cocky.
When older kids talk to him as a peer, he responds appropriately as a much younger child, and they visibly think he's strange and babyish. The other day at the park, a girl who appeared to be about 7 was very confused and annoyed by the way he interacted - for instance, he didn't want to share - which is appropriate at 4, but very "wrong" if he were 7. And while that girl would likely have brushed off a little kid's immaturity, she instead perceived him as a peer and felt quite affronted that a "peer" wasn't sharing, so she kept trying to engage with him and actually told him off pretty strongly.
Of course, he'll learn to share faster with that kind of feedback, so that one moment wasn't all that bad... but the sharp tone and judgement from others will also be consistent and it's not at all warm or gentle. It hurts to imagine him being snapped at all the time.
How can his family help people perceive his age more accurately? Ideas already in process:
Dress him in light bright colors and childish styles (sun hat rather than baseball cap, etc)
Keep his haircut babyish rather than "cool"
Avoid violent shows, so his play remains innocent and imaginative - for instance he likes to pretend to be a puppy, rather than "action hero" type play.
Tell adults his age as often as possible and explicitly mention that people tend to age him up (doesn't really work because they just keep responding to his size, especially in groups of children where he is both the largest and youngest child)
Putting him into sports, to ensure that he'll feel his size is an asset somewhere
Discouraging adults in his inner circle from constantly commenting on his size (which is hard because it's very noticeable!)
Is there anything else his family can do to help people see him as the kid he is, and encourage others to give him the patience and gentleness he deserves?
And, can anyone share stories about big-for-their age kids who did ok?
I don't know, but I lived it and it can take a toll. I'm not sure what's worth doing, except when the kid finds peers that they work well with, do what you can to encourage that.
posted by wotsac at 5:40 PM on June 6, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by wotsac at 5:40 PM on June 6, 2022 [1 favorite]
Can he wear shirts that have his age on them when they expect him to be in those situations?
Can you teach him to make friends by saying "hi, I'm So-and-so, I'm 3 years old! What's your name?" when kids approach him?
posted by never.was.and.never.will.be. at 5:52 PM on June 6, 2022 [7 favorites]
Can you teach him to make friends by saying "hi, I'm So-and-so, I'm 3 years old! What's your name?" when kids approach him?
posted by never.was.and.never.will.be. at 5:52 PM on June 6, 2022 [7 favorites]
Unfortunately, people do treat highly verbal, seemingly confident young kids this way no matter their size and even if they look younger than their age. Consider it might not just be about his size but about some weird thing where both adults and other kids feel entitled to knock young children down a peg who seem precocious in any way. I'm not answering your question directly but hoping that if you broaden your premise about why this is happening it might help you find a better response -- because even if the other kids reach his height in a year or two, this pattern might not resolve on its own just because of size...
posted by nantucket at 9:24 PM on June 6, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by nantucket at 9:24 PM on June 6, 2022 [2 favorites]
Living this now with my younger daughter who is 4 and a half, and having seen it some years back with a friend's son (who looked 8 or 9 at age 5), I find the extra guidance for playmates and adults that Rock 'em Sock 'em outlines is the best approach.
It only takes a quick word; I've found that adults running activities etc. usually appreciate the heads-up, and kids are actually even more quick to adapt once they've been told. A minority of older kids will then react by avoiding playing, but tbh I generally see that as beneficial self-selection.
posted by protorp at 1:29 AM on June 7, 2022
It only takes a quick word; I've found that adults running activities etc. usually appreciate the heads-up, and kids are actually even more quick to adapt once they've been told. A minority of older kids will then react by avoiding playing, but tbh I generally see that as beneficial self-selection.
posted by protorp at 1:29 AM on June 7, 2022
I’m the mother of a very tall and mature looking son and it’s been very tough because he also has had some developmental delays and had immature behavior. So picture a kid who looked seven when he was four and a half and acted like a 3.5 year old. I also did like Rock ‘em Sock ‘em and often announced my child’s age. I did find that sometimes even if people claimed to understand or say they would take it into account that they could not treat him his actual age. Some care givers were just extra hard on him in comparison to how my younger more typical sized son was treated (he is 11 months younger) for example, getting exasperated when he was slower getting his coat on or rough housing. I also had to fight a few times to make sure he was in his age appropriate group in stuff like karate… that teacher tried to put him with the bigger kids with the justification he had been bored with the “smaller” kids… ummmmm no… I watched the lesson, he had been enjoying himself and was thrilled.
posted by pairofshades at 5:13 AM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by pairofshades at 5:13 AM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
I had kids like this - they were ginormous, tall, verbal AND developmentally delayed. So at nine my son could easily pass for twelve but was developmentally six...
Puberty helped with the boy - that is, when he didn't show signs of hitting puberty yet people treated him like a kid too young to have hit puberty. They could see he wasn't as old as he was tall. It did the reverse with the youngest girl. When she was about eleven sixteen-year-olds assumed she went to their high school and was in their peer group and was old enough to date them, even when puberty was still four years away for her. The slender gazelle look that kids of her age have, looked to them like a a good facsimile of a fashion model type of build. Now, those kids did nothing bad, but it was one of the things that led to her being extremely withdrawn the older she got. It helped train her to avoid social interactions.
I don't think people who treat a big four year old like they are seven are particularly impatient with little kids. It's just that the wrong signals stand out so strongly.
One thing you will want to do, I think, is make your son aware that this is happening. Telling your son, "She thinks you're a big kid, the same age as she is!" will convey the situation to both him and to her. You might also want to discuss it with him in more details. Try talking about it in terms of grade rather than age. Many adults who are not around kids can't visually tell the difference between an eight year old and a ten year old, nor do they know the developmental differences, but they do understand the difference between grade three and grade five. Saying cheerfully, "We are helping him practice his social skills because he is going into Kindergarten in September!" is a very quick way of alerting people to where your developmental expectations are.
If your son is not present watch out for using the word "big" to describe him, as people will assume you mean "fat" and instantly start thinking of weight problems and will miss the fact that you are not telling them that he is dealing with social difficulties and trouble keeping up with sports. They will be so much more familiar with that problem or fat prejudice that they will probably have trouble hearing what you are really saying while concentrating on avoiding saying something that might be hurtful to the parent of a fat kid. I found saying, "She's really tall for her age, but her proportions are still the age she is - She's not yet grown out of being a toddler," got the issue across. If your son is present, you won't get this derail because they can see you're not using coded language to say he's fat.
Being verbal can be a downright handicap, because it is so very easy for people to assume that his executive functioning can and should match his verbal age. Once he starts school, if he is bright and verbal, people may struggle to accept that there can be learning disabilities and executive issues. So when talking to his teachers it will help to ask how he compares in these things to his cohort. I had teachers tell me several times that my children were so bright that they obviously could be more organized or remember their times tables - despite the fact that a third of their classmates were also still struggling with those things. Somehow "being bright" and being able to discuss what times tables were or how study strategies worked, meant that if my kids still struggled with it they had to be malingering. If you keep turning it back to percentage of age cohort with difficulties by asking "How many of the other kids in his class haven't got their six times table yet?" it may help the teacher to re-calibrate their expectations.
Watch out for people who make a big deal about verbal precocity and equate it with being superior to the other kids, or to your kid being smarter, and avoid using that trait to boost your child's ego - focus on other things, like how hard he works, how kind he is, how curious he is to be interested in other things and so on, because you will probably have to provide a counterbalance to the people who praise him for being smart above all other things, or he could end up with the problem that gifted children get where they wonder why they feel so stupid if they are so smart, and are too terrified to try in case they fail. "Oh, the others will probably catch up a couple of years - it's like puberty, everyone gets there and it all evens out by the time you are adults," is a really important concept for him to get. The fact is, if he is verbal now, he will probably always be verbal, and some other people will never be - but being verbal is not a gift that he needs to live up to. It's just one tool in his toolkit and had better not be the hammer with which he tries to cut wood and replace panes of glass.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:06 AM on June 7, 2022 [11 favorites]
Puberty helped with the boy - that is, when he didn't show signs of hitting puberty yet people treated him like a kid too young to have hit puberty. They could see he wasn't as old as he was tall. It did the reverse with the youngest girl. When she was about eleven sixteen-year-olds assumed she went to their high school and was in their peer group and was old enough to date them, even when puberty was still four years away for her. The slender gazelle look that kids of her age have, looked to them like a a good facsimile of a fashion model type of build. Now, those kids did nothing bad, but it was one of the things that led to her being extremely withdrawn the older she got. It helped train her to avoid social interactions.
I don't think people who treat a big four year old like they are seven are particularly impatient with little kids. It's just that the wrong signals stand out so strongly.
One thing you will want to do, I think, is make your son aware that this is happening. Telling your son, "She thinks you're a big kid, the same age as she is!" will convey the situation to both him and to her. You might also want to discuss it with him in more details. Try talking about it in terms of grade rather than age. Many adults who are not around kids can't visually tell the difference between an eight year old and a ten year old, nor do they know the developmental differences, but they do understand the difference between grade three and grade five. Saying cheerfully, "We are helping him practice his social skills because he is going into Kindergarten in September!" is a very quick way of alerting people to where your developmental expectations are.
If your son is not present watch out for using the word "big" to describe him, as people will assume you mean "fat" and instantly start thinking of weight problems and will miss the fact that you are not telling them that he is dealing with social difficulties and trouble keeping up with sports. They will be so much more familiar with that problem or fat prejudice that they will probably have trouble hearing what you are really saying while concentrating on avoiding saying something that might be hurtful to the parent of a fat kid. I found saying, "She's really tall for her age, but her proportions are still the age she is - She's not yet grown out of being a toddler," got the issue across. If your son is present, you won't get this derail because they can see you're not using coded language to say he's fat.
Being verbal can be a downright handicap, because it is so very easy for people to assume that his executive functioning can and should match his verbal age. Once he starts school, if he is bright and verbal, people may struggle to accept that there can be learning disabilities and executive issues. So when talking to his teachers it will help to ask how he compares in these things to his cohort. I had teachers tell me several times that my children were so bright that they obviously could be more organized or remember their times tables - despite the fact that a third of their classmates were also still struggling with those things. Somehow "being bright" and being able to discuss what times tables were or how study strategies worked, meant that if my kids still struggled with it they had to be malingering. If you keep turning it back to percentage of age cohort with difficulties by asking "How many of the other kids in his class haven't got their six times table yet?" it may help the teacher to re-calibrate their expectations.
Watch out for people who make a big deal about verbal precocity and equate it with being superior to the other kids, or to your kid being smarter, and avoid using that trait to boost your child's ego - focus on other things, like how hard he works, how kind he is, how curious he is to be interested in other things and so on, because you will probably have to provide a counterbalance to the people who praise him for being smart above all other things, or he could end up with the problem that gifted children get where they wonder why they feel so stupid if they are so smart, and are too terrified to try in case they fail. "Oh, the others will probably catch up a couple of years - it's like puberty, everyone gets there and it all evens out by the time you are adults," is a really important concept for him to get. The fact is, if he is verbal now, he will probably always be verbal, and some other people will never be - but being verbal is not a gift that he needs to live up to. It's just one tool in his toolkit and had better not be the hammer with which he tries to cut wood and replace panes of glass.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:06 AM on June 7, 2022 [11 favorites]
I have a tall leggy bean of a child who has acutely developed verbal skills (I repeatedly hear folk say "oh wow you can have a real conversation with them" and have since they were about four). Even I tend to have a higher expectation of their understanding than is developmentally appropriate sometimes. This is occasionally fine (those are stages to move through afterall, not goals or static plateaus until the next one).
Reiterating age to people helps. They are twelve now and we are the same height, and folk think they're older (goth emo punk fashion doesn't help). They are verbally acute and astute enough to be able to talk to about it, and we did when they were young too.
(I hit puberty at mach 5, at 8, and was done and dusted and adult sized at 12, and it was very very bad so making sure my kid had space to be a kid, but also knew that those expectations of maturity were wrong was instinctive to me)
posted by geek anachronism at 6:22 PM on June 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
Reiterating age to people helps. They are twelve now and we are the same height, and folk think they're older (goth emo punk fashion doesn't help). They are verbally acute and astute enough to be able to talk to about it, and we did when they were young too.
(I hit puberty at mach 5, at 8, and was done and dusted and adult sized at 12, and it was very very bad so making sure my kid had space to be a kid, but also knew that those expectations of maturity were wrong was instinctive to me)
posted by geek anachronism at 6:22 PM on June 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
I’m not a parent Needing advice or with advice to give, but I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who’s participated in this thread. It’s really helped me process some of my childhood trauma, helping me realize that some of the really bad things that happened to me were just the result of people assuming I was old enough to handle them when I wasn’t.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:28 PM on June 9, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:28 PM on June 9, 2022 [4 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by cooker girl at 4:45 PM on June 6, 2022 [1 favorite]