Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Control of failure?

Jon, you sound like my DH.
He has a deep need for the approval of others, but his disdain for them is rather off-putting, when you get right down to it... which leads to periods of self-loathing, since obviously nobody likes him... even if they ARE all deeply flawed people, content to wallow in mediocrity and sloth...

Most people don't respond very well to being told that they are flawed but have room for improvement in areas A, B, and C, in accordance with his internal rubric. Surprising, I know.


If this is epigenetic, as I often suspect that it is, then our DD is probably doomed.

My own impulses are almost entirely inwardly directed, but severe, and DH's are about equally inwardly and outwardly directed. I'm neurotic to the point of self-destruction and he comes across as a cold, judgmental jerk. Great combo.

Fortunately for me it comes and goes, so I don't alienate everyone all of the time.

Plus, there are some thoughts that just don't need to be expressed, so as long as my inhibitions are in place, everyone's happy.

I just try to keep me on a short leash as best I can.

You guys are not making me feel all warm and fuzzy about the future, just now.

Sheesh.

-mich

Somewhere in here are the makings of a 1950's style filmstrip about the dangers of non-acceleration.

I was accelerated twice. It is not a cure-all by a far cry.

Precisely. DD is a frequent flyer-- 3X, and nowhere near what she apparently "needed" in terms of difficulty bump. My 13yo is taking a full slate of honors and AP classes this year with her junior and senior peers, volunteers, acts as a peer tutor, serves on the boards of a pair of agencies, plays piano, is involved in a high-time commitment extracurricular(1-2 hours a day), and STILL spends upwards of 10-20 hours a week on chatango and palling around with her compadres, who are 2-6 years older than she is. We allow that because... well... it beats the alternative of having an anxious, depressed child who is fixated ONLY on her grades.

She's still pretty fixated on her grades, actually. The B in AP physics is keeping her up at night and definitely making her "avoidant" in that area. (Everything else is double nines and up). Thank heavens she's found a peer group (unofficially it's the HG+ RPG gaming group).



ETA: It occurs to me, though, that being "insanely" (as opposed to 'slightly') overbooked and overscheduled has HELPED this enormously. She's so busy that she quite literally doesn't have a lot of spare minutes to indulge in this particular negative set of thoughts, and therefore (I'm hypothesizing, anyway), not much time to actually get mired in it to start with. Since that short-circuits the entire process, we can nip leanings in the bud pretty easily by just pointing out that she's wasting time that she doesn't have.

Her schedule would seem actually CRAZY to other parents of 13yo kids, though. It's like we've built the procrastination in for her this year or something.
Whatever works, right??

Oh my. I just realized that the impossible challenge of managing her medical issues is her very first ever, quantifiable, objective, non-optional challenge. There is a very direct link between her behavior and the results. She gets approval for decent ones, outright praise and admiration from a host of medical personnel for great ones, and rapid loss of freedom for bad ones (besides feeling physically awful, we have to make sure she is correctly dosing her meds). And everyone who knows anything about her condition is constantly saying it's impossible to be perfect here. There is no 100%, no top score. Nobody with her condition can quite make it, medically speaking, to the level of a normal person.

We will have to watch that this doesn't go from appropriate challenge to obsession.

In a bazillion ways, she's become an easier person to deal with since those first couple hard months of her diagnosis, even compared to a year before it. And here we thought it was just that she was physically in better shape.

Thank you all for such a clear description of my kid. Of all the problems I thought I didn't have to worry about, perfectionism topped the list. I'm getting a new appreciation for the term 'can of worms' but at least the lid is off now.

ljoy, my DD has lived all her life with a similarly-- er-- objective, punitive medical condition that basically REQUIRES perfection (or something close to it) and punishes failure in pretty dramatic fashion.

It's a hard thing to encourage that kind of perfectionism in ONE area, but discourage it in others. Even when it really is necessary in that one area-- obviously control of a chronic/brittle/unforgiving/life-threatening medical condition is something where perfectionism is necessary and pretty much NO amount of obsessive care is truly "excessive" care.

Of course, in my DD's case, her condition is one of pretty binary "not fail" and "epic fail" so that may well contribute to this world view. There is no "reward" for managing well. Other than preventing intubation or worse, I suppose. There are very definitely "punishments" aplenty for NOT doing so. She has experienced some of those punishements, by the way-- and often they aren't related to her efforts but are of the "crap happens" type, mostly. Perfect management doesn't lead to rewards-- just the avoidance of punishment-- and "perfect" here is truly not humanly possible. (Frankly, I've struggled with how not humanly possible it is, too, over the years. I'm good... but not always good ENOUGH, as experience has showed to spectacular effect on occasion.)

Hmm. Actually, this is incredibly helpful. We'd always assumed that the two things were quite distinct from one another and that her academic perfectionism was linked to something else... but maybe not as much as we'd thought. That parallel is fairly striking now that I state it in those terms.

*sympathy-empathy-hugs* So sorry. This one keeps me up nights, too.

People with diabetes are my most popular clients.

But most of them have diabesity.