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Feed A Fever:
An Old Mom's Tale
By Colleen Elam
What to do.... Your child has another fever. Just when you
were recovering from your fear of contamination from the bird feather
collection stored in her drawers and the collected bird nests in the
dining room centerpiece, her fever for feathered birds waned and a
fever for furry creatures waxed. Meanwhile, your other child is deep
into collecting bacteria from teeth and in a related but separate
experiment, growing bacteria in numerous jars containing teeth
soaking in saliva moistened foods. Every new interest is a fever.
Every endeavor is serious. At times there are several at once.
What to do? A sense of humor helps. So does a low sensitivity to
foul odors. Remind yourself that the normal world does exist -
somewhere out there. And in that world there are real people who
believe you are pushing your children to do these things! Ha!
Better yet, rest assured some skeptic will claim, "Certainly the
parents must have done that project on teeth 'cause no kid would
ever spend all that time on something like that!" Ho! Ho!
Passions Come and Passions Go
In reality, gifted children are on their own individual time/energy
cycles. They run full speed ahead then shift suddenly to
full stop. There is little, if anything, between. When they are in
full speed ahead there is NO stopping them. These kids can
go for long bouts without food or sleep or life neccessities. They
thrive for months on their passion. They have tunnel vision. They
seem possessed. They do not tolerate interference. Nothing else
matters but the current project. Nothing. They are driven. Self driven.
And woe to anyone or anything that stands in there way. Then,
without warning, they stop. Dead stop. Halt. They cannot be moved.
Period. Just as suddenly, the child is running down a new road of
wonder and discovery. There is no way to predict how long the new
passion will last or where it will lead or what will be pushed aside in
order to fulfill this new quest.
When they're hot, they're
HOT!
When they're not, they're NOT moving.
In both the full speed stage and the full stop stage,
gifted children are intense. Also, because they crave multiple
stimuli, they experience different stages of different passions
concurrently. This intensity, multiplicity and cyclic behavior begins in
infancy. (Did your baby ever sleep?) and continues throughout life.
The same characteristics of full speed mode and full stop
mode increase in severity as they are repeated throughout the
years.
So how does a rational adult live with such a creature? How does a
caring parent nurture this challenging child? The maxim to live by is:
Feed a fever!
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intensely intense