Gifted Aspie children and interaction with adults

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I remember my mom pointing out that I prefered the company of adults when I was an infant. I hadn't thought about it myself.

I preferred conversing with adults because I had a mental age years beyond my chronological age. In elementary school, I would often talk to them about history (one of my special interests). I often read older college medical (anatomy and physiology, ect) and psychology textbooks in the 5th grade. In the first grade, I remember speaking to a classmate about the Milky Way galaxy and he repeatedly made the ignorant claim that it was only a candy bar.

When I was in primary school I used to talk to the teachers in the playground instead of other pupils most of the time.

These days I don't really talk to anyone except a few friends (my age) unless they talk to me first.

Although I don't remember it happening in primary school, I do know how annoying it is when you're discriminated against just because of age. NoctuernalQuilter from here has done it to me lots of times.

I know exactly what you mean. I always hated to be patronised by adults, and I didn't like it when adults patronised other kids, either. In my adolescence it became very important to me to be treated as an intellectual equal by intelligent, educated adults. By the time I got to university my social skills had developed enough that I was able to carry on decent conversations with my lecturers, and I preferred that to hanging around with my classmates.

Very bright children often do gravitate towards adults, and young aspies often find it easier to get on with older people, children and animals than with people their own age. Adolescents and young adults are a socially demanding bunch; older adults are more tolerant. When you're a bright, oddball child, adults will often be charmed by you when your peers find you WEEIIIRD, EW.

being an adolescent is a lot more difficult than being an adult, and this is one of the reasons why.

People don't listen to you as a kid. they let their experiences of other kids cloud their judgement of you, rather than seeing you as an individual. This has been a limiting factor for me for many year, continuing on through my twenties. It seems not to be much of an issue once I reached thirty or so. But even when i was in my mid twenties and i was teaching at the medical school and the students were at least as old as me, it was kind of weird.

The reason I don't buy the age=experience=wisdom thing is that there are different experiences one can have at different points in life. By the time I was 13 I had taken care of a child, raised animals and grown crops, hunted, fished, had a job, seen someone die, and had many other powerful life experiences. AND, i learned from the experiences of other people, including the adults and old people whose company i sought out.

MOREOVER, and more importantly, two people can go through the same experiences and not achieve the same level of wisdom or learning from them. This is only too evident when it is a negative (someone just won't learn from their experiences), but the opposite can also be true-- some people can learn a lot from their experiences, and gain a lot more maturity.

It annoys me when teachers sometimes look at my work and laugh at what I've wrote down.
I think some of my teachers don't take me seriously. Like once I said, 'It was proved on TV that things like un-plugging phone chargers, etc. wouldn't make a significant enough impact to stop significant changes happening soon' and she simply said, 'well, it would HAVE to'.
There's other possible examples of a teacher some what dismissing what I've said, probably due to my age.
There have also been times when teachers have under-estimated me. There's been a lot of times when I've had a problem with a computer, and in asking for help I was just asking for permission to fix it my self, but the teachers make a big fuss about it and bring in technicians(who can't actually fix it anyway -.-).
But, meh.
EMZ=]

Aurore mentioned condescension, which is something kids get from adults whether they're gifted or not, but there's something worse: I had a problem with being seen as eerie or spooky as a kid. Adults sometimes looked at me with fear in their eyes as though they were seeing something unnatural, and sometimes they'd unconsciously back away. I understood the quality I possessed that made them feel that way, but it didn't FEEL eerie to possess that quality -- it's only eerie when seen from the outside by an adult. Anyone else?

fin said:

as an undiagnosed child, i was generally perceived as bright and precocious.
by the adults i was around. to be fair, i was homeschooled, so the adults i
was around were bastions of intellect. i learned the food cycles of most mammals
and reptiles. the synopsis:
i had a very unusual upbringing, and while you had yours. the result is very different.