Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Do you friendship problems in you gifted teens?

Tell her to decide what she wants to learn and learn that, using school as a resource and other resources as appropriate; tell her to judge her own success by her own measures and not pay too much attention to external measures like school marks. (Pragmatic exceptions allowed for where marks have consequences that matter, but she should regard these explicitly pragmatically, not as a measure of herself.) It's OK to decide to put less than full effort into something if it frees effort for something more important (even if that's writing bad poetry, within reason!)

HowlerKarma articulated something some posts back that I'd never seen articulated other than by me: in my terms, the poisonousness of believing both:
1) if you have to work at it, it doesn't count (because you can't compare with the people who can do it easily);
2) if you don't have to work at it, it doesn't count (because you should be doing something harder)
I was taught both these things fairly explicitly and with full conviction, one by each parent! With hindsight, it's shocking how many years it took me to see what was going on...

Ah, yes, exactly. I got both of these with full conviction from the same parent, and didn't notice the contradiction.

Yes, me, too. That combination is a TERRIBLE burden-- I know. My parents LIKED my high achievement, so even though they probably knew that something was amiss... they were reluctant to "discourage" me from taking such a responsible attitude toward school-- so I internalized that the high achievement was all that was of value about myself, and when I couldn't keep doing it (in light of the crippling burden of perfectionism, noted above) then I was officially... worthless. Parents of teen girls do NOT want to know the rest of that story.



My last bit of advice for now--

discuss OPENLY that "best" is a subjective term. The only definition which matters is situational and internalized. EXTERNAL validations are merely ancillary. Period. They may indicate to us where we have learning to do, or have reached mastery... or they may mean little.

But they aren't about our self-worth. EVER.

Make room for something other than those external benchmarks. Let your DD know that it's OKAY to feel anxious about withdrawal from that drug of choice (approval/awards) but that you're worried about how much of herself she's investing in school-- and how little in other things that also matter.



Those other things that matter are habits for a lifetime-- healthy habits that keep us grounded, tied to our inner selves, and ready to tackle problems as they arise.

Agree completely and could not have expressed it half as well.

Some parts of this thread reminded me of The Simpsons

This is from season three

Bart: You make me sick, Homer! You're the one who told me I could be the best at anything if I just put my mind to it!
Homer: Well, now that you're a little bit older, I can tell you that's a crock! No matter how good you are at something, there's always about a million people better than you.
Bart: Gotcha. Can't win, don't try.

Perfectionism is a trying master. Howlerkarma's suggestions are completely on point. I would add one further approach if I were in your shoes: ensuring that your daughter sees you and your husband verbalizing a healthy acceptance of imperfection in your own achievements-- and failures. Being conscious of your own thought process and modelling healthy self-talk for your daughter will be a tremendous help for her in recalibrating her definition of success as an intrinsic reward.

I would also caution you to be scrupulous in minimizing the ways in which your encouragement could be misconstrued. For example, at my grade 10 or 11 graduation, I didn't have the highest average, though I won most of the subject awards in my courses. I recall my father being indignant at the process (on my behalf, at being so close) and interpreting his comment as disapproval. In reality, the top GPA holder took none of the hard math or science courses, which I so enjoyed, and my dad disliked that GPA was blind to course difficulty and diversity. I didn't understand his motivations at the time. Fortunately, I'm not prone to extreme perfectionism, so I was "just" hurt that he let a perceived failure overshadow many successes.