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My middle child is my most challenging child. It is the way Dash was born. His personality seemed to be embedded, long before he arrived, two weeks earlier than scheduled. He was the loudest baby in the hospital. When the nurses took him to bathe him we could hear him coming back to us from way down the hall as the little wheeled bassinet seemed to rattle with his screams as they pushed him down the corridor. In pre-school his teachers suggested that we get his hearing testing, because when he spoke it was almost at a yell. His hearing was fine, but we are still, at close to age nine, reminding him that he does not need to yell when he talks to us because we are sitting right next to him.

He has always been an active, curious kid. He was verbal early on and even though his physical and mental skills seemed to both advance with ease, it was often obvious that his brain wanted to do things that his body wasn’t quite ready for. He would get frustrated easily and his perfectionist tendencies emerged and tantrums would often explode onto the scene for reason as simple as his tower of blocks falling down before he had built it as high as he wanted it. Many things come easy to Dash, but sometimes, when they are too easy, he just rushes through them to get them done. Or, in the opposite extreme, when there is something he is interested in, he can fixate on that interest almost to the point of obsession and wants everything about that interest to be perfect. Most recently he was asking us about the differences between millipedes and centipedes. He spent hours talking about these bugs and researching them on the internet and drawing diagrams of them and all their little legs.

Although he was very verbal early, he was also very slow to warm up in social situations. He didn’t want to play youth soccer, even though he watched his sister play, because, as he told us at age 5 “all the eyes, the millions of eyes” that would be watching him. In preschool he wanted to watch the other kids do activities, rather than join in himself. And there was no getting him to do something, if he had decided not to. He refused to jump into a pool of water or submerge his head for years, even with bribes of almost twenty dollars on the table and a parent sitting in the pool waiting for him. He was not going to do it, he didn’t want to, and there was not point in trying until Dash was good and ready to decide for himself that he would do it. Dash’s stubbornness was, and is, a common point of contention.

He missed the Kindergarten cut-off date by 23 days, and with the dates that the state of Indiana set up, Dash was 6 years old when he started kindergarten. This was a good thing for Dash, at the time because it had taken him almost two full years to get used to going to pre-school. We often called Dash my “Velcro child” because as I peeled him off of me, to hand him over to his pre-school teachers, it was as if you could actually hear and feel the strings that attached him to to his mother, ripping. Even though intellectually, he probably would have been fine, emotionally, he really did need that extra year of pre-school to learn how to navigate the social aspects of school.

As Dash nears his ninth birthday, this summer, he really has come a long way. He enjoys being around his friends, and is actually outgoing, in a goofy socially compensating way. He loves baseball and has enjoyed playing on a team for the last few years, even though there are quite a number of “eyes” watching him, and even got over his fear of water to become a proficient swimmer this year. He is part scientist, part artist, part bibliophile, part baseball fanatic, part die-hard White Sox’s fan, part Star Wars expert, part astronomer, part wanna-be astronaut. He has a lot of skills and interests that make him a fun and interesting kid to be around.

But, he still carries with him many personality traits that can drive me up the wall. He demands attention like fingernails on a chalkboard. His obsessions can become a little much, like the book that he is trying to get me to purchase him, even though I am not sure it is appropriate for an eight-year-old. The last two mornings he has immediately, upon waking asked me if I had figured out if he could get the book. This is also the first thing he has asked when he arrived home from school. Sometimes, he talks so much about his latests interests, that we have to play the “quiet game” with him, so that the other kids can get a word in edgewise. His stubbornness and his desire to always be right and have the last word, cause Dash and his father to butt heads way more often than I would like. He takes a long time to calm down when upset and can get to the point of no return fairly quickly when upset, and time in his room becomes necessary because there is no more logic or reasoning to be found. He is not a prolific eater, and although he does eat quite a bit now, the dinner table has never been his favorite place to be.

People like to say that his a typical middle child. In writing this piece I tried to find research that would back up this middle child phenomena. Interestingly enough, even though Adler has plenty of theories on children and birth order, nothing I read really supports the idea of the middle child being the most demanding of time and attention. Besides, did Dash know at birth, that six years later he would have a younger brother and that would make Dash the middle child? Probably not. Some of Dash’s personality traits have probably been shaped by his family, but most of these were evident from the time he was born.

I believe that parents and families have a hand in shaping their children’s lives. But, I also believe that this shaping comes from what they are given to work with in the beginning. Much of Dash’s personality arrived when he did. And, he can certainly find a way to use much of my energy. He is one of those kids, that reminds me that I have to keep looking at all the many positives that he has. It is one of my continued challenges, as a parent, to find the best way to parent Dash that helps him make use of his strengths and channel the rest of his abundant energy into a positive force in his life and the lives of others around him.

by In The Fast Lane

Photo graciously provided by fotografisch.at, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved