My husband and I are very concerned about our 10 year old son. He has several learning issues and he doesn't seem to enjoy or want many friends. He also is grumpy a great deal of the time. We don't know if we should be concerned about him - ie take him to counseling. Since he has been this way his whole life, I am wondering if it is just his natural personality. So I thought understanding his type might be useful. I have my own guess, but I would like to hear from others.
He has never enjoyed physical affection.
He is a great strategist. Even though he does poorly on most school work, he can beat adults at games like chess and Risk.
He is very skeptical about commercials and people telling him things in general. He tends to think that people are liars.
He complains about being bored constantly, but doesn't have any specific interests.
He enjoys camping/fishing type activities, board games and video games (he especially likes the games that have you build a medieval castle and village and then attack other castles).
He doesn't seem to have compassion or understanding of other people's feelings, but occasionally he will strongly defend someone who is being bullied or picked on or being treated unjustly.
He loves to argue/debate.
He tends to avoid any type of work, but will work really had to get a reward he wants or to get money to buy a video game.
He has a very strong reaction to smells and noise.
When he was a baby, the only thing that would calm him down was if I sang to him. He wasn't calmed down by rocking or being held like other babies.
Any thoughts?
I'd go with INTJ. No, his IQ isn't 90, but an IQ test actually has to be "interesting" to actually measure that. No 90-IQ kid is going to beat adults at chess.
I'd say he is very, very bored with school. So was I. School at that age, for me, was torture. I'd procrastinate on the homework. I'd get D's and C's in the
really boring classes like "Social Studies." Even the stuff that was interesting was only marginally so. Math was still mechanical memorization. Science was "Oh, look, cool, dinosaurs," and regurgitating scientific "facts." Then there was the social aspect, where no one at that age was anything like me, so ostracization was the order of the day.
And what happened to me? I grew up and got a Ph.D. in physics.
Most of the "problems" you note are a result of being a very smart kid who has little in common with his peers, and not even that much in common with the adults in his life. He's stuck trying to figure everything out for himself, because
no one in his life can explain things to him in
his terms.
(I was lucky that my parents were N's, INFJ mom, INTP dad, but even then, they didn't really get me all the time, and were worried just as you are about your kid. My brother was a wild child who had to be reigned in with curfews and such, but in my case, when they learned I had a date for the prom in high school, they were so relieved that they helped pay for everything and weren't upset that I stayed out til 7 AM the next morning ...)
I wouldn't go with a diagnosis of asperger's, at least not yet. He seems perfectly capable of figuring things out, eventually, but he's only 10 years old. Most kids his age have the reassurance that there are others in the world that understand them. No one, except maybe a fellow NTJ or a wise NFP will really be able to connect with him in a way that "clicks."
I would suggest you try the route of books, because that's the one place I found solace. Books didn't talk down to me or pester me about not fitting in with the crowd. Books would explain things to me that other people just wouldn't (more likely couldn't) explain. I remember fondly books about the planets and stars, the weather, nuclear energy (yes, a kid's book, which gave me a good foundation in how a chain reaction works, around age 10). I also liked fiction if it were about something weird/fantastic, like aliens or telekinesis. I fondly remember Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time." I also enjoyed reading the manual to my programmable calculator ... which gave me a rudimentary understanding of trigonometry around age 9. [I couldn't do fancy math, but I knew that sin(angle) would tell me "how high" something is when it is going around in circles.]
Aim for books that you suspect might be "above" his level - they probably aren't. Let him choose the books: run by the section of the bookstore that has topics in which he has expressed interest and let him choose something cool. Or, even cheaper, if he asks one of those weird-ass questions (I know you didn't mention any, but I bet he does!), offer to look it up on wikipedia together. Mostly, just listen for anything he's interested in and encourage that exploration, so long as you deem it appropriate.
Let him be weird. I think he'll surprise you.
