What is immature for a 4-year-old?

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Apparently when I was 4 someone wrote down that my behaviour was "immature". I don't know how that can be. I wasn't delayed in any milestones, and I could speak well (wasn't behind my peers on anything like that). I may of had tantrums, but that can be quite normal for 4-year-olds. Some grow out of it, some don't, but it's still rather expected, because 4 is still a very young age. I didn't have a pacifier, and I did love my teddy but I've known children older than that to take a soft toy out with them.

I don't get what I could be doing at 4 that was considered immature. In behaviour-wise, what is immature for a child of 4?

My honest answer....nothing is immature for a four years old child....

I think it might depend upon the context a bit, as to who it was that wrote you were immature and in what situation. There are 5 areas of childhood development which I have been learning about for a course for supporting teaching. These are: social, physical, intellectual, communication and emotional. Your behaviour is affected by all of these aspects. A child aged 2 or 3 will spend a lot of time mimicking what they see and hear and doing role-play (pretending to be a parent, doctor of fireman). Aged 3-5 they start to become more complex, learning to share and take turns, understanding more abstract and complex ideas like time, cause and effect, and can follow a string of instructions. A 3 year old might say "foots" but a 5 year old will say "feet." By age 5 they are starting to gain a bit of independence, being able to dress themselves for example, and also starting to notice the feelings of others.
When we hear about someone having "immature" behaviour you think of an older person behaving like a child, but actually there is a lot of change and development which happens in the early years, and a delay in any one of these areas might have been labelled as immature. From a the point of view of a professional looking at child development, it doesn't necessarily mean anything or wrong or a negative judgement, because all children develop different aspects at different rates. Sometimes it just means that this area needs a bit of extra attention or support.

Uh what you read about yourself in your old school report when you said you were autistic as f**k. That was immaturity but autism is a developmental disorder.

Then there are kids who are just immature who don't have any disorders but they are just behind their peers and then they catch up. My son was one of these kids. He couldn't wait his turn, couldn't sit still, couldn't wait in long lines, he couldn't stay in a group and follow directions but other kids his age could and these are 3 and 4 year olds I'm talking about. I was told this was all normal and I would say "obviously not because other kids in his class can do these things at school and he is having troubles in all of these." Plus he had a hard time playing with other kids so he needed an aide and early intervention in school to function in class. I couldn't even take him out because he would be whining and grabbing everything and always wanting to run around and would scream if I try to hold him and cry when I had him in the shopping cart to keep him with me. I would just get overwhelmed from him so I kept him home all the time. No one could convince me this was all normal because I saw other kids his own age acting better and even my brothers acted better at that age so I thought my son had something like ADHD. But no he was just immature the doctor said but said he is hyper and has attention issues. He acts better now and I can now take him in public so he probably was immature. it's a matter of comparing a four year old to other four years olds and seeing how much better the other four year olds act than a four year old you are looking at. So this is an example of immaturity right here in a four year old. They have a hard time functioning but yet they aren't considered impaired even though it is affecting them in school and at home so where to draw the line for impairment or difficult personality and just immaturity is very confusing. They both look the same to me because they both have a hard time functioning.

I was too immature for kindergarten apparently and had to go attend K1 before 1st grade.

I was too immature for first grade so ended up repeating kindergarten first, which in turn made it so I was typically a year or two older than my classmates.

I don't have any paperwork just what my mother had told me about the situation. Apparently it had nothing to do with school work, just inappropriate interaction with other kids that would hinder their ability to learn.

Depending on what you'd call mature. I could be either Insanely immature for my age or really mature for my age. It all depends.

At, a Private school I failed a test for kingergarten. It was all stuff like walk on one foot. Things that had nothing to do, with it. Infact, the 1st teacher failed me on purpose. She didn't like that my siblings we're disabled with Autism or ADHD. I just went to a different school for kingergarten. She hated me. She was a real jerk to me. I was laughing when I my splinter skills kicked in. At third grade I was reading at high school level. Once, my desk was well, completely unorganized and she dumped my entire desk out and made me pick it all up. Let me say that the Kindergarten test is BS. Anyone with ADHD, or Autism would fail it. The school their was trash. You could get expelled for forgeting your homework 15 times..

In 2nd grade I recall my teacher asking the students to raise their hand if there was a personal computer in their household and there might have been 3 students total in a class of around 30. When I was 12 I use to create odd creations that served no purpose, my teacher at the time made a comment that I reminded her of Rube Goldberg. At that time you couldn't just Google anything and if you had a computer, you had to somehow find phone numbers for Bulletin Board Systems. I have always wondered if that was a backhanded comment because I wasn't interested in what school had to offer other than the sciences and history. If you wanted to research something you had to go to the public library and I had problems reading. I was pushed through the public school system like trash. While I was a poor student, thankfully I am an autodidact, so I have been able to educate myself in areas of curiosity.

I remember being in third grade and my whole math class was given a survey about computers and most of them were about personal use. I was one of the few kids who had a computer at home. We had an old DOS computer from 1992 and my dad had a Gateway2000 with Windows 3.1 for his business he got in 1993 and he had two of them. Our third grade teacher had to tell everyone in class that if they don't have a computer at home, just answer about the computers they use in class. Then by middle school, almost everyone had one at home. But when I was in 6th grade, my little brother had to do homework for his second grade class and it was some counting thing. He had to go by how many items we have in our home so when he got to the number five, he was going to do computers and we had five of them by then. My mom told him to not use computers because she didn't want his teacher to think we were crazy. I thought my mom was just being paranoid but it must have been uncommon then to have that many computers.

It is entirely possible I am misremembering and it was 3rd grade. Though it would have been in the mid 80's. Our class had a single Macintosh that was shared between 4 classes so kids didn't get much time using it. At that time I was one of the lucky few to raise a hand, we had a Commodore 64 and a Coleco Adam. We also had an Atari 2600 but that is neither here nor there. It wasn't till I was in middle school till we had a proper desktop.

I remember pretty much every classroom had a computer when I was in the 3rd grade and this was 1994-95. I remember being in 5th grade and my teacher decided to have a bunch of desks put in his classroom and he put in all these computers on the side wall on the desks and they were school property of course. So it was like we had our own computer lab and we were the only classroom with all these computers. We mostly used them for school work and used them before school for games. I also remember in 5th and 6th grade more kids were starting to get a computer at home because they were saying their parents got one. Late 90's was around the time when people were starting to get them because they were becoming cheaper. 1996 was the first year my school got internet but we all needed our parents permission to use it there so we all had to have them sign a form we brought home and we had this ID we were given with our picture and we had to set it on top of the monitor when using the internet. It's not like that anymore I don't think but back then it was when it was new and it would take a few minutes for a page to load but back then this was awesome. We didn't have forums like this then. Just message boards. The internet was nothing like it is now. We didn't have social network or things like youtube or other websites where you could upload videos. We didn't even have wikipedia. That came out when I was in high school and there wasn't much on it then. The internet was starting to become now when I was in high school but you didn't get viruses then from websites until around 2002 so we had to get a virus program and they barely worked because they always got outdated and you had to keep buying new versions. Now you can buy it and it updates itself and you have a yearly subscription to it. Myspace and Facebook were the earliest social network sites that came out in my senior year and 2000 was around the time kids were starting to carry cell phones so it was becoming today then. Playstation 2 and Dreamcast were the earliest consoles you could go online with but you needed a phone jack. Wi fi had just started a year after I graduated but you had to go to McDonalds for it and more places were starting to carry it like my work for example so I have played Mario Kart DS there on break so that was around 2005 and 2006. We also had a computer lab when I was in the 5th grade. Before then we didn't have one and then the library had them too on one side. On average our classrooms had two computers and we even had old ones from the 1980's and my dad gave his old computer to the school. I even remember we had two in the hallway and they were older ones. My school had Apple and old DOS computers. But 5th grade was around the time when we got more computers in the building and they were all Apple. In my middle school and high school we had Windows and this was in another school district because we had moved.

For a 4-year-old, how is anything immature?

I don't think there should be a line drawn between immaturity and maturity in young children under the age of 8, because all children are different so some of their behaviour can be down to personality. I understand the development in a 4-year-old being different to a 2-year-old, for example, speech development. But actual behaviour in itself, like leaping off sofas or having a tantrum because of not wanting to leave the park early, is not uncommon in a 4-year-old. Some children grow out of tantrums by then, but some don't, and it doesn't mean that the ones that don't are immature. They are just more prone to tantrums than others. If a child is 8 and hasn't grown out of tantrums, then maybe you could say immature, but not at 4. I did have tantrums right up to my teenage years when I couldn't get what I wanted. It probably looked immature the older I got.

But is it ''embarrassing'' to others if a 4-year-old has difficulties waiting quietly in a waiting-room? I had trouble sitting still, and I used to climb about on my dad's knee and on the chairs, run up and down the hallway, and sometimes cry because waiting in any waiting-room was difficult. But I've known 4-year-olds to have trouble sitting still and can be noisy and irritating. Most children have learnt to cope with waiting by age 6, although sadly I did still misbehave at 6 when waiting in waiting-rooms, until I got to about 8 or 9. But, say, a 7-year-old having difficulties sitting still is still less embarrassing than a 12-year-old being unable to sit still. I did have ADHD, although I was never diagnosed until this year.

People are judgy of parents about their kids and when you see other 3-4 year olds well behaved and your child is never like that, of course it's hard to deal with it and I have anxiety so when I have no control of a situation, I get anxious and then I can't focus and concentrate and then I start displaying rude behavior myself because my focus is on myself trying to stay calm from having a meltdown because of the anxiety my kid is putting on me. So that is why I always left him at home and never took him alone out in public. I had to have someone with me. Then you start thinking your kid has something if they always have their moments. All kids have moments but the difference is special needs kids have them way more often than normal kids and most people are not going to understand because they will say this is normal stuff but you know as a parent "no this isn't normal, my kid does this all the time." Then other parents are like "Oh yeah I can relate, it is hard when my kid does this" and you know they are not talking about so the same degree as you, especially if you have problems yourself and you are sure they are not struggling to the same degree as you. But even other aspies don't always understand either just like normal humans.

Many doctors won't diagnose ADHD in a child younger than age seven because each kid matures at their own pace and they will be hesitant to put that label on a small child just because they are way more active than most kids their age and more impulsive and have more attention issues than most kids their age and can't wait in long lines like most kids their own age and have more tantrums. I have seen toddlers wait well in long lines and my son never lasted five minutes while the other toddlers seemed to have longer attention spans of waiting. Even trying to keep our son entertained didn't work while other parents were able to keep their toddlers entertained. This is how I knew the difference about my child and that he was different. Even my nephew acted better than him and he is ten months younger than he is so how can anyone say my son's behavior was normal? It's trivializing the problem and showing lack of understanding. Yes this is immaturity if other kids acted better than this at my son's age. This was all the time I am talking about to a point I couldn't even be out alone with him because of my own issues. But yet I have no problems with my daughter and she acts better than my son did at this age and she is only two and I can also wait in lines with her without a problem. I can take her out alone without a problem and still be calm. She can also play quietly and not needing to be loud and she doesn't need to run around and be hyper and having to jump on things and she listens a lot better. She is only loud and also hyper when she plays with my son because he gets her riled up and she copies him. Then that goes away when she isn't with my son. See the difference with maturity? My daughter is more mature than my son at this age.