AsianScientist (Apr. 13, 2015) – Obsession in a child is a strange and wonderful thing to behold. In the last four years, my six year-old son Jordan’s all-consuming passions have ranged from volcanoes and The Lord of the Rings, to dinosaurs, fungi and cosmology.
When a topic captures his imagination, it does so completely. He exhausts all the books on the said topic at the library, sometimes twice or thrice over (the friendly staff at our local library know him by name). He watches anything he can find on the topic on YouTube and replays documentaries until he masters the David Attenborough-esque voiceover (I’m looking at you Planet Dinosaur).
And rather alarmingly, almost all his conversations revolve around the topic. An entire dinner’s worth of true or false questions about the Spinosaurus? We’ve been there.
Each time he latches on to a new obsession, my husband and I find ourselves grappling with a whole new lexicon. We become students again, learning alongside him so we can be part of his crazy conversations and projects. This week alone, I learnt all sorts of new words: thagomizer, neutrino, hypernova, Eta Carinae, magnetar.
Recently, he came home from school saying that while class was sometimes fun, it didn’t teach him “anything really important.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Like how to tell if a mushroom is deadly or how to build a space probe that can survive a singularity within a black hole,” he replied.
Righto. I pre-empted his next question (which was sure to be “So do I still have to go to school tomorrow?”) by saying that learning to read, write and work with numbers and patterns was essential to becoming a scientist. He accepted my thesis and walked away, temporarily satisfied.
Heaving a sigh of relief, it dawned on me then that there must be other parents out there who are going through the same thing: helping a highly-focused kid navigate waters filled with (what is in their mind) general flotsam while keeping them engaged in other aspects of life.
I thought it might be helpful to jot down a few things that have worked for us in this most unexpected journey we have found ourselves on:
I’m by nature a cup half-full kind of person. When I recognized early on that I had a self-directed learner on my hands, I decided to buckle up and go along for the ride. It’s meant spending time and showing interest in things I might not ordinarily have paid attention to, like paying for Jordan’s student membership to the Fungal Network of New Zealand (yes, it does exist) and reading the Smithsonian’s Guide to the Universe over The Chronicles of Narnia at bedtime.
Jordan’s current craze is cosmology, a vast topic that boggles the mind. He decided he wanted to make his own reference book and asked for my help. His book (really, a Keynote presentation) is now up to 59 pages and counting. The upside is that it occupies him for hours. The downside is that he needs my constant help to search for and save images, format his content and sometimes, help him spell out what he wants to say. I try my best to be accommodating and enthusiastic because it is obviously important to him and makes him happy.
If Jordan could have things his way, every weekend would center around fungal forays, the natural history section of the museum and watching documentaries about space. But sometimes, real-life errands get in the way. Like going to the supermarket, or as he would call it, “the noisiest, most annoying place on Earth.”
Setting thematic tasks has helped. “Jordan, can you help me find the ten freshest Portobello mushrooms and put them in the paper bag?” or “Can you find a way to minimize static electricity shocks when we touch the trolley?” and more recently, “Do you think static electricity exists in space?” That last question kept him quiet and occupied for more than five aisles (a new record!).
His obsessions have provided a useful segue into discussions about his personal life too. “Which of your classmates would you bring on a space mission?” yielded some insightful results.
Having a sibling with completely different interests poses some interesting challenges. In our case, Jordan’s younger brother Jonah is happy to tag along on his mushroom foraging escapades. But we make sure Jonah picks the family activity sometimes, which usually ends up in a trip to the duck pond or railway station.
Jordan has learnt that compromising and doing things you don’t necessarily want to do is part and parcel of “being in a family.” And an even more valuable lesson is that everyone has different passions and we should respect that.
As for Jonah, he is possibly the only two year-old in the world who has invented his own mushroom-inspired exclamation of delight. When he sees something amazing, he shouts “Oh my fungus!”. That’s one for the scrapbook!
This article is from a monthly column called Mushroom Mum. Click here to see the other articles in this series.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Bubble Fishh/Flickr/CC.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.
