• Your 14-year-old college student suddenly announces, “wait, I've forgotten how to write the letter “m.”
• Consultant: he has to take this nasal spray -
9yo: I won’t put things up my nose.
Consultant: so, you’ll need to make a reward chart for him -
9yo: I don’t do things for rewards!
Consultant: … well, how do you get him to do what you want?!
Me: WELCOME TO MY WORLD, LADY
• You have to remind your 7-year-old to use the bathroom before she meets with a math PhD student to talk about 3D graphing and higher dimensional geometry and whatever else she is thinking about this week.
• The school office staff has your cell phone number memorized.
• You find yourself moderating a conversation on Easter candy, lie detectors, sociopathy, and the different degrees of murder. They were aged 6 through 13.
• Your kid answers "Name as many animals as you can" with "That's boring. I'm going to name as many Pokemon I can" and still scores above the age norms for the question.
• Your 4th grader outscores the middle schoolers on a standardized vocabulary test.
• Your kid's obsession is military history, and routinely comments on movies using the wrong weapons ("That's a German pistol, not Italian. It wasn't used in Italy until after WW2. This movie's props people are stupid").
• Your kid has befriended the most feared teacher in their high school and they talk philosophy while the other students finish their work.
• Your middle school student has continuously checked out the library's entire collection of DnD books for the past year and spends countless hours reading them, yet does not want to go to DnD after school club.
• Your 3-year-old's favorite animal is a pangolin, but because he has a speech delay you think he's saying "penguin" for months (despite him continually correcting you) until you find out there is an animal of that name after all.
• Your eighth grader delivers scathing detailed criticism of curriculum novels they've never read but can't spell "really".
• You make a rule "Don't ask questions while the car is in reverse" because the insightful complexity of the questions make your brain lock in up in the middle of a K-turn and you're stopped in the middle of the street for several seconds until the toddler in the car seat prompts "Well??"
• You teach your 9-year-old to play charades and his very first offering is, “Sir David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II” - which said kid refused to watch.
• Your kid gets a D in the class and a 5 on the AP exam. Twice.
• Your 7-year-old asks you how do we know that we exist if only others can see us and now you're both having an existential crisis.
• Your 6-year-old aces playing the organ before church (including cut-down versions of Ode to Joy, Enrique Granados' Rondalla Aragonesa, and the Largo from Dvorak's New World) - having started the organ 6 weeks earlier with no prior experience of keyboard instruments.
• Your kid gets complicated math problems right in his head, but gets the same problems wrong when he does them on paper; the psychologist testing him says she's literally never seen that happen.
• Your kid staged a communist revolution in 7th grade because "seating charts are tools of the bourgeoisie."
• You hear "mum, what does..." and just KNOW that you are about to have to google something.
• Your 4-year-old logistically figured out the truth of the tooth fairy and Santa Claus and thinks nothing but nonfiction is worth reading
• You teach your 4-year-old -- who taught herself how to write letters and who has been playing with word rhymes since age 2 -- how to play "Hangman". When it is her turn to choose the word and you have to guess, you see dashes for a two-word phrase. You guess "E" for obvious reasons. With the first word having an E (hint, not the first letter) combined with knowing that her current obsession is the whole world of encyclopedias, you figure that the phrase is "Encyclopedia Britannica".
Now the challenge.
You know she does not know how to accurately spell it, so you have to guess at the inventive spelling version of the words that she has in mind. Here is the final spelling: Nsiklopdya Britanika.
• You regularly buy wine as apology gifts for teachers, because your kid is the reason they drink.
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Many thanks to the parents who generously shared their stories here. Submissions were lightly edited for clarity.
