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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My seven year old DD is bright and precocious. And she loves to be the smartest person in the room. It gets awkward sometimes.

She tries to get praise for how smart she is. 
Example: 
"I always finish my work the first in the class. I don't know why it takes everyone else so long!"

Or point out her accomplishments.
"Did you know I got the second highest score in math?"

"I am reading Macbeth" 
(I am sure she isn't understanding anything. She is advanced, but not that advanced.)

She also corrects adults around her enthusiastically. 
"You spelled that incorrectly."

I worry that she's missing social skills. 
[/quote]

Without reading through all the comments, maybe this is ASD or maybe this is a child who is socially immature and insecure and using their intelligence to bolster their ego. With the former, you would seek a diagnosis and get interventions and with the latter I would worry about your daughter turning children and adults off and aligning so much of her identity with being smart or perfect or the best that she forgoes taking risks or doing things where she might fail or not be the best. That type of attitude/orientation will catch up with her eventually. From what I’ve seen people like this underachieve because they take themselves out of situations where they feel like they are not the best starting at a young age and so don’t develop a tolerance for struggling and working hard to overcome a challenge and at the same time don’t develop a tolerance for not being the best.

Life is all about not being the best. Life is all about tolerating struggle and working hard to overcome challenges. You need to fail to be successful. Not like catastrophic failure, but rejection and failure are necessary parts of growth and as a parent you should encourage humility and awareness of others’ feelings/perspectives (empathy) but also tolerance for struggle and failure and a capacity for hard work. When your child brags to you about being the best say “that’s great…you work really hard. It’s important to do your best. I’m proud of you for that.” If they are saying things in front of peers you need to tell them to knock it off because they will make others’ feel bad and if they are struggling they wouldn’t want to hear someone else say it was easy (by the way, this is a conversation that is happening in my daughter’s prek class of 4 and 5 year olds, most of whom ‘know better’, so at 9 your child should definitely know better). The correcting adults thing - like if a teacher spells something incorrectly - I would probably not be opposed to (maybe it’s time for the adults to have humility!) but interrupting a teacher to correct grammar I would probably not be ok with. And interrupting a stranger to correct something - def not. It’s context dependent, so you need to help her understand appropriate contexts and if she’s struggling with that at 9 I could see why people but think ASD. [/quote]

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