gratified3: I appreciate your efforts to clarify for me. For my part, I hope what follows is clearer, but if it isn't, I probably won't try again. I think this is the 3rd time I've explained/justified myself, and if it's not better by now, it probably is just not going to improve...
Where I come from, saying that someone has "a different parenting philosophy" is just about the nastiest way to slam a fellow parent that there is. It's a highly judgmental comment, usually made in a holier-than-thou tone, and it's not even remotely nice.
Apparently that's not what you meant. But in the context of the rest of your post, that's how it sounded to me. Even your last post sounds like you're making a *lot* of incorrect assumptions about my family and my parenting. (One case in point: DS6 isn't an only child, as you imply. I just don't know if DS3 is GT or not yet, so I don't post about him a lot here. He may be GT with an LD--yet another reason for early ID!--or he may be ND. We dunno.) These assumptions you're making about me/us seem to be an important part of our problem here.
I repeat: my parenting philosophy doesn't seem to me to be any different from yours based on what you've written. The things you describe doing with your kids, I do/have always done with mine, too. I, too, set my kids loose at the library. But our library has two distinct areas: the kids' room and the adult section. If I only set them loose in the children's room--as I have always done, because why would an MG kid need anything else?--and never in the adult section, then they will never know that the adult room is an option for them. I've closed off opportunities to them because of MY assumptions. If DS6 wanted to get an adult book, I'd reply with a wholehearted yes. (I don't censor books.) But if he doesn't ever even SEE the adult books, how could he know to ask?
That's very much what happened at home, too.
So you see, it's not about a parenting philosophy. It's about my assumptions about his abilities and how those assumptions closed off opportunities. I'm not a "helicopter parent" AT ALL, as I explained already. I certainly encourage my kids to play by themselves and offer them little guidance. I have always followed their lead on what interests them. That stuff is not what I regret. I regret not giving DS6 more opportunities for challenge that were appropriate to his abilities, which were much higher than I recognized.
I still stand by my statement that early ID is best for these kids pretty much without exception. But I think you're reading that statement far too narrowly. I would argue that your kids *WERE* ID'd early--by you! Early ID doesn't necessarily mean testing--that's the whole point of this thread, right? We were exploring what else could we do to ID HG+ besides testing? I never said I believe in early *testing*. I flat-out said I do NOT believe in early testing. I don't think an IQ score at age 3 tells us any more than you think it does. But I do think that knowing how a child learns and what he needs is vital to his development at any age.
For us, DS6 was pegged (by us) as *GT* practically from birth. But he was not ID'd as *HG+*, and I do think that distinction would have been helpful to know sooner, through some means, because there's a significant difference between the needs of HG+ kids and those of MG or plain GT kids, a point I think you made yourself in another thread about your very own children.
I don't like most blanket statements about HG+ kids either. I certainly would argue against anyone who said that public school is unworkable for all HG+ kids! But if you don't realize that a kid is HG+ and that HG+ kid more self-sufficient and easygoing than most HG+ kids (as DS6 is), then my experience demonstrates that it's hard to meet that child's needs, no matter what his age.
That's where I'm coming from. Thanks.
