Kid Classification

Z is turning 5 on the 24th and then graduating from Pre-K four days after that. I can't believe she's starting kindergarten in the fall. My baby girl is growing up!

Yesterday, I was struck with something that made me feel guilty toward my Z. Not that the cause of my guilt was in any way ill-intended.

Because she is the second child, our middle child, we experience almost all of our "firsts" with her older brother, C. Everything that C has done or accomplished since babyhood has been followed by a "Wow," as opposed to Z's accomplishments which are usually followed by an, "Oh yeah, I remember when C did that." Get what I'm saying? Not that we don't praise her outwardly in the same way. Of course we do. But it's just not the same as when you experience your first child doing something for the very first time. You kind of take your second, third, etc.'s development slightly for granted just because it's not new.

Z got the results back from her school's Bracken School Readiness Assessment (whatever the heck that is) yesterday. When her teacher handed me her print-out, I didn't quite understand what I was looking at. I mistakenly looked at the percentile rank, which read "98," and compared it to the standard scores classification and saw that she ranked smack dab within the "average." I thought, "That's OK. It's not like I've put much effort into her academics yet." So I said to her teacher, "Well, this is good. She's right in the average, so there's nothing to worry about, right?" Her teacher looked at me with an alarmed expression and said, "Oh, no! She's not average. Her standard score was 132. She's in the 98th percentile! She is very advanced." She then went on to tell me that Z had missed only 3 questions on the entire exam.

Huh.

So here's where I felt guilty -- I am guilty of "classifying" my children. I always think of C as "the creative, smart one," Z as "the linguistic, entertaining (and pretty) one," and though E isn't old enough to be properly classified yet, I actually think that he is going to be "the athletic one."

Isn't that horrible? I have been pigeonholing my kids! I mean, they can and will be everything and anything they want, right? So why do I think of them in these set, descriptive terms? In part, it's an attempt at understanding them and figuring out, in general, who they are. But it is not all of who they are. They are so much more and capable of so much more than those few words that I have in my mind to "classify" and describe them by.

The thing that really gets me is that when I heard Z's teacher, I was actually surprised. If it had been C's test results, I would have thought, "That makes sense." This is not to say that I have ever thought that Z wasn't "smart," too. I just don't think that I've given her as much credit as I have her big brother.

So it comes down to this: I need to stop pigeonholing my kids in my own mind. I need to be better about celebrating each of them as individuals. I need to be better about my own gender/birth order biases. I need to be better. I need to do better.

But by golly, I do love that girl. And I am so proud of her, 98th percentile or 8th.

Flashback
May 15, 2006
Excerpt

For a few days now, I've noticed that whenever Z asked me for something and I gave it to her, she said, "Thank you." Then, shortly after, she'd follow it up with, "A fishy ate it." I kept asking her why she was saying that and what fishy she was talking about, when it dawned on me this morning that she's been saying, "I appreciate it."