Parenting a challenging kid. Am I doing this right?

DonnaL
Tue, 22 Sep 2015 04:03:39 +0000

I used to think that my son was the only child in suburban New Jersey who couldn’t and wouldn’t learn how to swim or ride a bicycle. Complete meltdowns almost every time, and eventually he simply refused to try anymore. The same thing with the karate classes he went to when he was 7 that we thought would be good for him – he hated them, cried constantly, was made fun of by the other kids, and we ended up pulling him out. After that, it was a question of picking battles and no longer making him do extra-curricular and other things he hated simply because he was “supposed” to. Like the period from ages 5-7 when he refused to set foot in the kitchen of our house because he was afraid of something; he never did reveal what it was, and eventually got over it. We didn’t push it. (It’s painful even now to talk about the battles over his handwriting and his insistence on holding his pencil with his hand positioned practically upside down, and as a result writing so faintly almost nobody could read what he wrote. He had rather drastic delays in fine motor skill development – which I suspect he got from me – and I still have trouble reading his handwriting, but once he started being able to type things, it was all kind of academic.)

He’s 25 now, and still can’t ride a bicycle, and never really learned to swim (although he had to take a swim class to graduate from the U of Chicago, and at least learned to overcome his intense, panicky fear of the water somewhat), and he’s doing fine and is way more outgoing and sociable at this point with people of all ages (as opposed to early childhood when he could only make friends with adults and much older children, possibly because he was so verbally precocious) than I ever was. My admiration is boundless for how hard he worked, for years, at overcoming his social fears and difficulties – which may not have come from the same place as your son’s, but still made life hard for him – with the help of a therapist.

TL; DR: don’t worry too much about the bike-riding and the swimming and the handwriting and the karate! There are more important things.