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Sitting on the dock, glistening lake water dripping from his hair, he looks at the boy next to him.
"Do you have a favorite building, Toby?"
Toby looks off across the lake. He kicks his feet under the water as he responds to Pat's question.
"I like the John Hancock Building. It's in Boston. When you stand on the sidewalk looking up at it, it's like the biggest mirror in the world."
"A giant mirror? Cool! My favorite is the Eiffel Tower," Pat replies, "but, the Burj Khalifa is pretty cool, too. It's the tallest structure in the world right now. It's located in the UAE ... But, you can go to see the Hancock building any time you go to Boston!"
Later that night, he tells me how much fun he had with Toby and the other kids at the lake.
"I want to ask Toby about Fluff Sandwiches," he says. I ask if perhaps he wants to try a fluff sandwich, but he says that isn't it. "I just want him to tell me what they taste like."
These conversations could not have happened a year ago. Pat wouldn't have pondered what goes through the mind of another child; He wouldn't have asked Toby about his favorite building, and he would never have considered that another kid would be able to share his opinion on something, even something as banal as a fluff sandwich ... he couldn't put himself in a place where he'd stop and wonder what anyone thought or knew. He could only focus on his own thoughts.
Pat has never connected well with kids his age. He would often get so wrapped up in his own thoughts, and cognitively he simply couldn't understand that the other kids around him weren't thinking about the same things he was. He was awkward, simply listing off facts that he knew about his current favorite subject. This meant that a fellow four- or five-year-old would be subjected to a mini-lecture on the solar system, the Jurassic period or the skeletal system. They weren't interested -- he'd either bore them to the point that they walked away, or he'd move on to find an audience more inclined to listen to him prattle on.
This sort of discrepancy, between intellectual development and social or emotional development is known as Asynchronous Development. Simply put, all kids develop at different rates. Since we are multi-faceted human beings, some of our traits develop more quickly than others -- and that's true for everyone, not just the intellectually advanced. With gifted kids like Pat, that discrepancy tends to be greater -- it's not unusual to see them develop intellectually at a markedly different rate than they do socially and emotionally. For the uninitiated, it's confusing. The child has a vast font of knowledge and skills, but may be socially immature, and unable to navigate simple situations with their age-peers.
Last summer, we went to a neighbor's house for a barbecue. This neighbor has a son Pat's age -- he and Pat both went to kindergarten this year, but were in different classrooms. Billy was what most would consider a "typical" five-year-old. At the BBQ, while all the other kids were running around playing tag and other games, Pat sat on the driveway, sketching out an entire undersea eco-system with chalk. He tried to show it to Billy and the others, but they didn't want to stop their play to look at the drawing, nor were they interested in identifying all the sea creatures that he had included. They all just wanted to play tag.
I recall the pit in my stomach as I watched
