Delusions of Grandeur?

On the way home from the tournament yesterday, the boy said something that’s stuck with me.

I had witnessed, during the tournament, his sparring opponent was being tended to by the judges and some master belt instructors. The boy was waiting for the match to continue while the adults seemed to be tending to the other kid. I asked the boy what had happened.

He said that his opponent had started crying for some reason. After a pause, he continued “I guess sparring against an apprentice belt must have been pretty stressful.”

I paused for a moment. Without more information, my own guess was the poor kid was overwhelmed by the environment and needed to vent his frustrations. The boy had jumped right to something along the lines of “he was trembling in the awesomeness of my being. LET ALL WHO LOOK ON ME QUAKE IN THEIR UNDERWEAR!”

I actually pointed out that there might be other possibilities. The boy was having none of is though. “Yeah, but I was, like, 4 bet levels above him,” he said in his defense.

I didn’t push any further.

The boy has many moments like this where he greatly overestimates his own capabilities and competence. He has other moments where he fails to recognize that his comparisons that make him look so superior to the person he’s comparing himself to aren’t fair. For instance, with the lass learning addition and subtraction, the boy will often test her by giving her a… multiplication problem. Then, he’ll claim “it’s so easy” to her. All the while, I can remember when he was in tears because he couldn’t remember the answer to the problems he quizzes his sister with.

Most times, I or the Wife will do our level best to give the boy a check on his ego. So far, no matter how many times we’ve done it, he comes up swinging for another round at some point.

More and more, I’m coming to wonder if there’s much point to pushing back against him. As long as he isn’t putting people down, I’m not sure I see the harm anymore. I used to think that his perception of reality was blinkered and often times, like yesterday with his sparring opponent, I still do. But I also think it’s just more of the myopic world view kids his age have. Most of his friends have put on similar displays at one point or another in my presence. I often call their bluff, and they just laugh it off and continue on their way.

In other words, I’m thinking it’s just the age, and the boy is just putting his own peculiar spin on the it.