Thursday, January 24, 2013

"I know you just called me odd"

This week I had to meet with Lily's school based therapist to go over her progress, etc.  At one point the therapist said, "We are clearly dealing with O.D.D (oppositional defiant disorder) here."  Lily looks at her with straight seriousness and goes, "I know you just called me odd."

This leads to today's discussion.  How do you tell your child that they are odd or weird or not good at something without crushing their hopes and dreams? For example, Brady believes he's going to grow up and go to Alabama and be the quarterback.  Now I'm torn here.  I know I'm supposed to nurture his dreams and encourage him to reach for the stars.  However, at the same time I know that this kid has pretty bad attention deficit and does not have the attention and fast thinking skills required to be the QB anywhere, much less Alabama.  How do I get around this problem?  I bought him a book about being a skilled kicker and a kicking tee for Christmas.  So now we are trying to encourage him to gravitate towards being a kicker instead of a QB.  Seems to be working so far.  However, this is just one of many things.  His latest obsession is hockey.  He also wants to be a geologist.  He keeps walking around in the field behind our house and finding crap that he thinks he's going to make money off of.  His list of hopes and dreams changes rapidly.  Never wavering from an Alabama football player though.  The kid is really not good though.  The only part he's good at is running and for some stupid reason the tackle football coaches always put him on the line instead of putting him back as a safety or something like I told them to do.  Brady always got creamed because he doesn't have the reaction time necessary to be on the line in tackle football.

So how do you tell your kid they aren't good at something?  Or do you just never say anything and let them continue to live in ignorance and just maybe figure it out on their own one day?  Maybe I should talk to Honey Boo Boo's mama because whoever told that woman that Honey Boo Boo was good enough to do beauty pageants was doing crack or something.  Crack is whack kids. Don't do drugs. 

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