Every kid is different. My first is very smart and my now 3y 2m seems more neurotypical. However she has her strengths my first didn't have most important of which is perseverance. So, when it's all said and done she may go further than my older one who tends to give up as soon as something isn't going his way.

My (smart, developmentally appropriate) five year old gets confused about days of the week!

Your kid sounds totally normal. I would not be concerned about that stuff.

My 10 year old sometimes struggles with days of the week!

I get the concern, my oldest is just really truly gifted. It's sometimes hard to see just how smart my youngest is because my only other data point was his sister. I used to think he was pretty slow. But he's not, he is really quite smart. I have no idea why he keeps forgetting about the days of the week. Maybe because I homeschooled him for a while and I didn't do that thing where I write down the date on the board every day?

DD is not quite 3.5 yet, but what you describe sounds normal if I'm projecting her abilities (or the lack thereof )

Ask your school if they can do an Ages and Stages or similar assessment.

I would focus on your energy and questions to others that know your kid. If they are in preschool, ask your teacher how he appears compared to other kids and take their lead as they see a lot of kids the same age over many years. Same with friends with similar aged kids, or babysitters, etc. And ask your pediatrician.

My kid was a whiz at puzzles at 2 but sometimes in preschool stopped understanding how they worked. I think she just memorized all her puzzles at two and could do them super fast on her own, but as she entered preschool and started learning there was a way to do them, suddenly she was confused by the abstract nature of that strategy and she was bad at puzzles for a long time and would ask for help even with a puzzle she'd had for years and I'd seen her do many times on her own. Then she started to understand the strategy and now (at 5) she's pretty good at puzzles again, though still not the total whiz she was at 2.

Days of the week have also been sort of hit or miss. She knew them and knew about "home days" being Sat/Sun when she was three, but she'd also OFTEN get confused or just forget which day was next. Sometimes she'd do this thing where she'd assert that it was a different day (say it was Tuesday on a Friday) and would not budge on it. I think it was a joke to her but she took it seriously? It could be frustrating if she didn't want to follow the schedule for the actual day and kept insisting it was a different day. I really think a lot of this was just being a 3 yo and testing boundaries and exploring how stubborn she could be.

What I've learned is that early child development is really not about learning specific things. Even when kids memorize these extensive facts on things, they wind up losing like 90% of that knowledge as they develop further because their brain starts to "cull" all the stuff they've memorized to focus on the stuff that is most important to their survival and day to day life. So they lose the names of all the dinosaurs in favor of a complex understanding of how friendship works. Or they forget and then have to relearn something like the season or the months of the year because they originally learned it without true understanding and context, so it doesn't stick the first time.

All normal.

Anonymous wrote:Your 3.5 yr old sounds totally normal. Comparing your children can lead to a lifetime of resentment.

Not comparing them in a competitive way - more just both wanting to act if this atypical but also not wanting to open a Pandora’s box of assessments and interventions etc if it is typical. I feel like I made both mistakes with my first - waited to long to act and then allowed normal things to get pathologized because if you evaluate anyone enough you’re going to find more and more things a little different about them

Your 3.5 yr old sounds totally normal. Comparing your children can lead to a lifetime of resentment.

I have a 3.5 year old and that is all normal. I also have two older kids so have been through normal 3.5 year old several times.

My 3.5 year old likes puzzles but can’t do it alone yet (20-25 pieces). He knows there are days for school and days we don’t go to school but he asks for clarification where in the week we are. He can sit and play alone for 30 minutes at a time but prefers to play with older siblings. He likes to watch the iPad (sue me) and has been potty trained over a year. He also likes to be read to. He melts down every now and again but seems to have better emotional regulation than even 6 months ago.

Pretty normal stuff.

Anonymous wrote:Op here - the examples I have are to highlight a couple things that seem like they should be easy to understand and hold on to the logic of by now (order of days, simple rules for puzzle pieces etc), not that I’m in a particular panic over puzzles in and of itself

Rules and abstract thinking are really hard concepts and kids take a while to get there

Just love both your children. I promise #2 will understand the days of the week eventually. He has lots of his own genius to show and many years ahead.

My very bright 6 year old couldn't do puzzles at 3.5 or even at 4.5. Just not interested in paying attention to how it works. My youngest is almost 3.5 and also struggles with puzzles, but it really good at drawing, dressing herself, helping cook. I really wouldnt worry about it. Your kiddo sounds totally on point fir his age.

Op here - the examples I have are to highlight a couple things that seem like they should be easy to understand and hold on to the logic of by now (order of days, simple rules for puzzle pieces etc), not that I’m in a particular panic over puzzles in and of itself

My oldest is both highly gifted and was extremely determined to learn and understand the world. By 3.5 he’d long since mastered days of the week and had already done deep dives on volcanos, space, geology etc and had no trouble doing 500 piece puzzles

Not a brag (he has his own issues!) just explaining bc I don’t have context if my middle child is more typical of a 3.5yo or if he’s worryingly behind

He can hold coherent conversations with long sentences, topic changes and can count items to 20 etc. He loooooves vehicles and does not have the same drive to learn and figure things out that his older brother does. He cannot however grasp the concepts of the days of the week - he understands there are days and knows the days of week songs, but can’t put together that Saturday is always after Friday and that we don’t have school / work on Saturday. He also struggles so much with even simple 20 piece puzzles - he doesn’t understand the straight edges go on the outside, that corner would go in a corner etc. Even if I tell him exactly where a piece goes, he’ll try to put it in incorrectly with no logic to how he’s positioning it.

We had a fairly traumatic experience with my first of not seeing some issues that were fairly minor in the grand scheme of things and then once they were on the radar, massively sent us down this black hole of specialists etc and ended up over correcting. Because of that I worry both about under reacting and over reactive to if my 3.5yo is typical to other 3.5yos