Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy what more can I do?

Accelerated material. I've given up on the school, frankly. I send them there for the social aspect.

We have a homework start time, and everything is very structured. I give them work that is different than what they are learning in school. For instance, I give DS9 JUMP math - very simplistic and parent friendly - but at a higher grade level. This way he is exposed to new material and is more engaged. For DD I create work based on what I think they should be doing at school and aren't.

It's sad... I started too late for DD11. I waited too long for the school to come through. She's very resistant and frozen by perfectionism, and plagued by the "if I can't snooze through it, I don't want to do it" mentality. DS9 on the other hand, puts his nose to the grindstone and sinks his teeth into whatever I give him. There may be hope for him, lol.

Like CCN, we waited too long and listened to people like the ones talking to our OP here in this thread--

in other words, we let DD stay in her comfort zone for the first seven years of her life without ever "pushing" her (challenging her) appropriately.

We're still reaping that particular whirlwind. My daughter learned precisely what another poster has stated-- that perfection IS the only worthy goal, because it SHOULD always be within reach. The only areas where she's been challenged have been (relative) weaknesses academically, and there aren't very many of them. Written expression is pretty much it, and so she has been held to that area of lowest performance. This strikes educators as crazy-talk, by the way, since my DD is a 14yo HS senior who will graduate very near the top of the class this spring. She believes that she is "okay" at most things, and "bad" at writing. FWIW. The truth is that she is at about the 90th-95th percentile in writing, and is astonishingly good at everything else. Among peers 3y older, I mean. I say that just so that you can get a sense of how WARPED her thinking is, here. She calls her national merit commendation (earned by scoring among the top 50,000 PSATs that year, on a not-very-good day when she was just 13yo) her "Badge of Shame." This is-- A Perfectionist. That starts with P and that rhymes with T, and that stands for Trouble...

Watching her perform academically is a lot like the atmosphere in a dugout during a perfect baseball game... oh sure, it's fun for the first few innings, but then they start THINKING about making a mistake... losing "perfection" which is almost within grasp... soon nobody is talking about the elephant in the room, but everyone is holding their breath with every move... I mean, how hard is PERFECT-- even for professional baseball players? VERY hard, and it's not because they aren't extraordinary and don't have mastery of what they do-- it's because to err is human, right? This is why after the start of the term, I'm okay with 100% up through the first couple of weeks, but after that, it gets too big. I *want* her to make a few mistakes just to get rid of the 100's. Take the pressure off and just let her do what she's going to do and earn her A's. Perfectionists do NOT see things in that light, however. They don't bask in their successes, they wallow in the failure of anything that falls-- even a little bit-- short. This is crippling.

Okay-- so what do I wish that we'd done differently?

A. Throw away all of the parenting advice that applies to merely 'bright' or even 'moderately gifted' children. It doesn't apply to DD.

B. Recognize the danger in "letting her just be" the brightest, etc. all the time-- that is a very different kind of pressure, but it's pressure just the same, and it's pressure that there is really no WAY to continue living up to year after year...

C. Focus on FAILURE-- and what it isn't. That is, it's not the end of the world, mistakes are seldom unrecoverable, they are inevitable, and they say nothing about our worth as people...

D. Get her doing HARD-ENOUGH extracurriculars soon enough. Music or martial arts are VERY good for teaching these skills.

E. Make it a habit to do things that you do NOT want to do, things that all of your efforts make you mediocre at-- but which simply make you HAPPY because you're into the process, not the results.

Oh-- and if you've been praising those worthless (because they don't represent effort/learning) 100%'s coming home?

STOP doing that.

Praise EFFORT-- preferably effort that leads to very small improvements over a long time. Effort that doesn't lead to perfection.

This is all great advice thank you. My DS at 6 is already showing signs of perfectionism. He's hard on himself when he can't do something (like figure out how to tie his shoes) he gets so mad at himself and frustrated. He has been taking piano lessons since he was 4, but unfortunately he seems to be a natural at that. His teacher is amazed at how quickly he picks it up. He seems to require little effort to do that as we'll. I do have him in martial arts and that's a challenge for him. Motor skills is the area he does not excel in, but the other stuff comes so easy. I would love ideas for academic enrichment. What do you guys use to go ahead of what they are teaching at school? Is Singapore any good?

Singapore is great-- but--

you should be aware that as the gap between what school offers and what your child needs GROWS (and it will-- it's just a matter of how rapidly), you'll be hunting harder and harder for a different school placement as the fit gets worse.

Many parents who don't have another good option wind up homeschooling, or doing something similar to it.

Honestly, I understand if you aren't ready (or able) to take that step, but if you're not, I'd be careful how much on-curriculum or even on-topic afterschooling/enrichment you do.

Personally, we've found it better to NOT afterschool/enrich things where my DD has to endure lower level instruction IN the classroom. Because if we do, we make that gap intolerable for her (as opposed to merely "bad").

Kids who are highly gifted + are a different animal here-- they learn in ways that are kind of jaw-dropping in terms of how LITTLE input they require, and how fast they can go through it.

At your DS' age, DD was plowing through a year of Singapore math in about 10-12 weeks. This is why by the time she was 7, she NEEDED to be doing pre-algebra, which the school absolutely would not consider in spite of her clear readiness. Well, they might have-- if it had only been math. But it wasn't.

Asynchrony is a real problem if you encourage the cognition/maturation gap to widen further. The world at large has a great deal of trouble dealing with kids under 10 who are ready for post-secondary instruction. Just something to be aware of.

I'd foster other extracurricular interests that he can sink his (considerable) teeth into-- robotics, chess, etc. Maybe branch out to a different instrument, or (since you said he's been taking lessons about 2y) see if you can wait that one out (I guarantee that he will eventually hit a wall where he'll feel like he's not making as much progress as he likes on as little practice as he prefers... BTDT), or maybe add a second artistic domain to explore.

He's a little young yet, but working with animals has been amazing for my DD. She can't rush it, she HAS to slow down, and she HAS to put in the time.

That strategy pays off handsomely down the road, too, as a healthy outlet for the frustrating experience of not really learning much at school.

Kids like this may never have a lot in the way of homework as they get older, so it's a good idea to have them start cultivating other healthy ways of filling their time.

Can you find a piano teacher that will go faster with him? Sounds like he could use more "push" in that domain. DD coasted her first three years, too, and I wish that I'd had a heart-to-heart with the teacher sooner.

"She assured me that he is being challenged in her classroom, though, and I should not assume that what I see coming home as homework is the same thing that they are doing in the classroom. She said that her lessons in the classroom are much more challenging (doesn't really make sense to me, but...ok). "

LOL. This is almost verbatim what DS6s math teacher said to us. He is in 1st at a regular school where they ability group and differentiate instruction (they rearrange classes for math), accelerate (complete the exact same curriculum but in 20% less time, and offer enrichment (enrichment is "gifted" problem packets from up to one grade ahead during the extra time).

In our school the kids are in this way kept from working to their ability, without unduly alarming the parents (ability grouping, differentiation, acceleration and enrichment are all such lovely sounding words that the parents seem almost uniformly thrilled to have their kids in the enrichment group). So by about 4th grade they are all on the same page, literally. It's a brilliantly executed system.

DS says he works as slowly as possible on his "gifted" problems because if he finishes one set he just gets another nearly identical one. It's a different type of challenge than we assume when we hear the word "challenge".

So what to do. We met with the teacher, and heard the nice phrase above about the lesson part being challenging. But in talking to DS he is not reporting it being the least bit enriching. A nice parent volunteer mentions to me that in fact he sometimes wanders aimlessly during work time, not something the teacher mentioned. The teacher does send home undone problem sets, which we don't return, and she does not mention it. So it seems we've come to a kind of understanding, one of a lack of expectation on both sides. To my mind, letting him daydream as much as possible is a good thing, because the alternative is demanding perfection at overly dull material. I am afraid of what we would get if we complained. Perhaps he could skip the first grade gifted problem sets and move to the second grade. And what would that solve? If he was multiple grades ahead and interested in math it would be different, I would go and battle. But he is sloppy, mildly obstinate, doesn't really want a single extra problem.

We are doing partial homeschool anyways, which gives us time. It also gives DS time to play with Lego and other building toys, which I consider good math foundation work.

At home, we are attempting to show DS a more interesting side of math. As he's been thinking that math consisted mainly of counting. We're doing Beast Academy 3rd grade which has a comic book style, really nice friendly format, but still we find the instruction parts long and repetitive, and he finds some of the problems intimidatingly visual-spatial. We wish there were more word problem type problems. But it's a good starting point for us. I think there's hope for DS to like math, yesterday for example he said he needed to know how to calculate how long it would take to walk over a rainbow.

So longer term our plan I guess is to get him to evenly master objectives from at least a couple of grades up and then see if having him be more obviously different helps to make it obvious he needs real differentiation.