Asynchronous Development in Math Kids

Happy Friday, Friends!

Today’s reflection focuses on asynchronous development in academically accelerated math kids.

Someone once described it to us as what happens when

Your kid can do high school algebra...but still eats Play-Doh

Although our kids never ate Play-Doh, that quote stayed with us for years and gave us an early glimpse of what it means when a kid is advanced in one area but not “more grown up” in all areas.

It means that you, as a parent/guardian or adult, will have to navigate a complex web of cognitive, emotional, and social timelines that may be unfamiliar to other people’s children.

Asynchronous Development means that a child’s capabilities develop at different rates.

For some kids, it appears as a gap between emotional maturity and academic ability.

For others, it’s a mix of academic spikes: excelling far ahead in one subject, while still working through basics in another.

For some kids, it can be a mixture of both.

For still other kids, it can be all of the above mixed in with a myriad of neurodevelopmental disorders.

However, until your child starts advancing (or falling behind) in various areas of their life, you won’t actually know.

We actually noticed this first with one of our kids’ book reading.

They loved to be read to, and once they started reading, we quickly ran out of “age-grade” appropriate books and had to start asking our local librarian for books for higher grades.

This approach worked for a few grades until the books began addressing social, emotional, and sexuality-related themes that middle school books often tackle nowadays.

Our early elementary school-aged kid was not ready for that.

Then came math, and the same thing happened.

Math understanding came easily, but tying shoes did not.

One of our kids hit high school algebra while still working on tying their shoes.

Which made it (makes it) super confusing as a parent to parent the kid because on the one hand, you’re dealing with someone who can do things many years above their “real age” but on the other hand, you’re dealing with someone who is their real age.

Do you treat the kid as an elementary school kid mastering how to tie their shoes, or do you treat the kid like a late middle-schooler/early high schooler taking high school algebra?

On the one hand, what an excellent first-world problem.

On the other hand, depending on the mood your kid is in, it’s tough to meet them where they are. Either you’re talking down to them (which they hate) or you’re putting too much pressure on them to act older than they really are (which they hate).

The hardest thing we found is that it’s very easy to forget the kid is still a kid when you spend a lot of time working on material that’s much more academically advanced.

The kid is the kid; they are going to be who they are and do what they do.

While our kids have age-appropriate emotional development, they are math kids.

So it falls on us to make it okay and normalize that at 9 years old, they have the emotional skills of a 9-year-old, regardless of how accelerated they are.

And at 11 years old, they have the emotional skills of an 11-year-old, again, regardless of how accelerated they are.

So, we have tried our best (and sometimes pulled our proverbial hair out) when one of our kids, for example, understands exponential growth but not sarcasm.

At school, it’s also tough because either the teacher expects emotional maturity to match ability or expects ability to match emotional maturity.

Some teachers catch on, but in larger classrooms, the kids can sometimes get lost.

Even worse, adults and teachers can talk to the kid both up and down in the same conversation.

This is one of the biggest complaints that our kids have about various adults they’ve met in their lives - that adults don’t understand them and that they do too much baby talk to them.

Asynchronous development, especially in an academic setting, makes it challenging to find the right peers.

Emotionally, the kids in the grade will roughly be at the same place.

However, the specific interests of our/your kids are likely to be wildly out of place with those of the other kids.

Kids their age won’t be able to follow the conversation about what our kids are excited about.

Likewise, older kids will mainly see our kids as “the little kid” and won’t interact with them either.

So, it can be hard at recess or social time when our kids want to discuss the advanced subjects they are learning at home, while the other kids still prefer to talk about age-appropriate topics.

Even worse, teachers may not see it and push for social interactions that leave kids worse off.

Especially when they’re very young, they may not yet understand social cues and might engage in what’s known as “Word-vomit overshare” about their current topic of interest without realizing that other kids’ eyes have glazed over, and they may want to stop talking to them.

You never know what to expect as an adult.

One minute you have a precocious little person telling you about the math of nuclear reactors, and the next moment they are melting down because you said they could read for 5 minutes, but it was actually 3 minutes (because of course they were watching the clock like a hawk).

There is a large amount of mental gear-shifting required for parents as you adjust on the fly to whatever is going on inside your kids’ heads.

We’ve learned to ask ourselves whether we’re talking to their brain or their heart.

We’ve also found ourselves saying to each other, “We have to remember they are 7” (or 8, or 9, or 10, or 11, ...).

Because it was baffling for someone to say all the sentences we had to say within a short time of each other.

A parent shared with us that they had recently said:

“Yes, you can stay up late reading Gödel Escher Bach...but first you need to brush your teeth and put your clothes *in* the hamper, not *next to* the hamper.”

And the remarkable thing about asynchronous development is that the gap doesn’t even remain constant either.

Each part of the kids’ lives advances at different rates, and sometimes slows down, and sometimes speeds up, and so you can never be quite sure what you’re dealing with as the adult(s) in the house.

Specifically in Math, even advanced understanding of areas comes asynchronously.

Sometimes, their understanding comes effortlessly, and they are able to do no wrong.

Other weeks, it’s a slog from the get-go, and they struggle to make headway into the material without a large amount of repetition.

For one kid, they had to stop forward progress for a week or two to solidify the use of parentheses.

Up until then, they had been going through Algebra I at top speed, and then they hit the parentheses speed bump and came to a complete stop.

We had to print out worksheet after worksheet of very basic sample problems to help them work through their understanding of what happened when, why, and how.

They got it and sped up again, only to hit a “negative” in front of parentheses and come to a complete stop once again.

They eventually got it, and more worksheets were provided. It was fascinating to watch what made sense to them and what didn’t.

Even more strange, our other kid had no problem with parentheses and sailed through the same topics easily. (They did struggle on different topics the other one had gotten so it was fascinating trying to figure out where they were going to struggle)

It reminded us that even in the same subject, each kid will hit different walls at different times.

Just because the kid is good at math doesn’t mean they are good at everything.

However, in the moment, it doesn’t always feel that way to the child and the parent.

We’ve definitely struggled watching their skills develop at different rates.

As parents, we were very concerned when one of our kids reached high school geometry, but still didn’t know the names of all 12 months of the year.

We’ve also seen our kids struggle with trying new activities because math has come easily for them so far, so when something else is difficult, they have at times given up too soon.

Other parents we’ve spoken to have shared similar stories of their kids resisting doing new things unless they can do them perfectly, or actively avoiding challenges out of fear of failure.

In the worst cases, and this is mainly seen in math competitions, we’ve seen kids who dropped out of math completely because their parents put so much pressure on them to perform that the kids started to conflate their worth with their performance.

The nice thing about asynchronous development, though, with one or two spikey areas, is that the rest of the development areas have to be worked on just like any other normal kid.

So the kids get a chance to “learn to grind” with writing, executive functioning, sports, social skills, and subjects they may not like as much.

For our family, sports have been a focus for that reason, as the bar for excellence is incredibly high and you can work on it for years (whether to be competitive or just for the love of the game).

Especially in sports where it’s easy to quantify things, the idea of normalizing mistakes and learning as an open-ended process makes things very concrete.

For instance, the best hitter in Major League Baseball has a batting average of around 0.330.

This means that he hits 1 out of every 3 at-bats in which he participates.

Or, putting it in more mistake-language terms, he fails 2 out of every 3 times he goes to bat.

And that’s the best professional baseball player!

The biggest thing was being aware of asynchronous development so that we could work with them to best meet them where they were at that moment in time.

The second thing was to remind them (and ourselves) that they are right on time and to focus on themselves, rather than comparing themselves to others (and never ever ever compare one sibling’s development to another sibling’s development).

The third, and this is more of a day-to-day focus, is to ensure we always celebrate effort, not achievement.

Fourth, it is to meet them where they are and to pause and work on skills without judgment when they get stuck (whether in academic subjects or social-emotional subjects).

Lastly, it is to give them permission to be little and big at the same time.

At the end of the day, they have very little control over their development, so it’s best to enjoy the process and always celebrate new accomplishments and milestones.

That’s all for today :) For more Kids Who Love Math treats, check out our archives.

Stay Mathy!

Talk soon,
Sebastian

PS. What part of asynchronous development has surprised you most?