Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Parenting arms race article

Well, to be fair, most faculty here support public schools, too. But they want their kids to be valedictorian there, and NMF's.

In a class of 300-400, both (public) high schools regularly produce a few DOZEN national merit semi-finalists annually here. None of the private schools is anywhere near that kind of performance standard. We've gone the online route mostly because it doesn't require the time obligation that the local public schools would, and allows DD to be her chronological age for more of each day. Less on the massive (but not so meaningful) homework load. Least-worst. Well, everyone here gets that one.



But yes, it's a lot of crushing expectation for the kids who are bright-through-MG. They'll also pretty much do or say anything to make it so that their own kids are always in the "top" group. Whatever it happens to be. Which means that nobody that runs youth activities here can AFFORD to give the HG+ kids the appropriate openings/opportunities, or they'll be inundated with requests for "exceptions" for a lot of other kids who don't really legitimately need/qualify for them.

As noted, I see a lot of the familiar in this article about McLean. It irritates me as the parent of an HG+ kid who gets told "NO, because if I'll do it for you... "

but it also worries me for the MG kids that my DD is friends with-- whose parents are about fifty-fifty in terms of Tiger Parenting, and the ones that are seriously riding that particular train are more than willing to CUT my kid's accomplishments down to size, pump her (or us) for information about "how to get that for my kid" and/or pressure their own kids to perform like my (PG) DD. Naturally, MG friends whose parents expect PG performance from them as a result of knowing my DD aren't too thrilled by that outcome, and my DD feels terribly guilty for being the (unwilling) tool to make their lives less pleasant.

I see them, and so does my DH. I have had this conversation with a number of faculty here who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid, but wow, do their kids get pressure from school administrators and the entire culture. In a small department where I worked when DD was young, there are SIX young ladies who have/will graduate in the space of 24 months. DD is the youngest of them. ALL of them are GT, and two are very clearly HG+-- recognize that all of these kids are from parents who are GT themselves, so that bit isn't surprising. All have earned national merit commendations, all will earn merit scholarships. Two of them are not really technically "faculty brats" at this point, but have parents in hi-tech. The MG among them have been mostly pretty well accommodated in the schools here (30% identification as GT, recall), and the HG+ ones... er, not-so-much, actually-- because they hit ceilings and there are real barriers surrounding accommodations (or even-- allowances) beyond that point. One of these children was consulting with a high school guidance counselor about college applications are the start of her junior year and was told 'Is this ALL??' when she showed off her soccer record, work with Special Olympics, and stellar (3.9uw) transcripts. REALLY. This is a family that has definitely chosen NOT to Tiger Parent, but the message that this lovely and very bright, decent child got from her high school guidance counselor was that she was a complete slacker and a loser in the college sweepstakes, for sure... WOW doesn't even cover it. And yes, her parents were livid when she came home in tears.



Two of those six children have had regional or national media attention, two others have had LOCAL media attention (including the one savaged in the anecdote above) and all of them are probably Ivy hopefuls (if they chose). I'd call that cohort the "top 10%" here. It's that kind of town. They would all six look like complete rock stars in a rural small town in a neighboring county, and here they aren't really THAT special. The top 15% or so of both public high schools are easily "elite" college material. Average SAT scores in that cohort are north of 2000 combined and ACT's are 30+.

Sounds like it'd be a great place for a HG+ cohort of kids, right? Like they'd be better able to find peers, etc, and all that. But it doesn't work that way now because of the competitive parenting-- the top 25% of the population is INSISTING that the ceiling be set at 100% for THEIR kids-- because those MG kids deserve a shot at Stanford, too, and if they look less able compared to the top 5% (as they would, if not for the ceiling-- this is clearly an enriched setting where HG kids are more like 1:250-ish or so, I think) then they won't get in. It's only by hiding the fact that there is a difference between MG and HG+ that it's okay when you live in a place like this.




The problem for me as a parent is that my DD doesn't know that there IS a place beyond the ceiling, because nobody will allow her to go there.

Oh boy yes, mine too. One gets a more caricature version of the argument at general-public sites like the UK's Mumsnet, where any thread touching on choosing between a state and a private option can be guaranteed to dissolve into it. I think the argument goes something like this:

- It ought to be the case that all children can get their needs met at a state school, [I'm with you...]

- My children are getting their needs tolerably well met at a state school. [OK, good for them and you]

- Therefore I have made the right decision in sending my children to a state school instead of an expensive private one/therefore I don't have to regret not being able to afford an expensive private school. [OK...]

- In fact, those signs I thought might be indications that my child's needs weren't being perfectly met at the state school? I was wrong about those, the state school is the best possible school for my child. [Post-purchase rationalisation/Confirmation bias]

- In fact, state schools do meet the needs of all children better than any other educational solution. [Availability/Confirmation bias]

- Although one reason someone might make a different school choice from mine is that their circumstances or their child's needs differ from mine, another is that they might have different values, in fact they might be morally inferior to me. [Mmm...]

- It's because they're morally inferior to me! [Fundamental attribution error]

- In fact, the state school would have fitted their child's needs just as well as it fits my child's needs. [Belief bias]

- And they sent their child to the expensive private school just out of snobbery/in order to get the child spoonfed to good grades/in order to make contacts that will give their child an unfair advantage over mine.

What makes you so sure that the kid who is elbowing your kid to hush is lower in ability? What makes you so sure that the kid asking the interesting questions is higher in ability?

I think you may be conflating ability with personality and intellectualism. I went to an extremely competitive high school with a lot of very smart kids. I was smart, but not the smartest kid there by any means. However, I WAS the kid with her hand in the air asking the annoying/interesting questions. Meanwhile, some of the kids who were on paper brighter than me (especially in math) were the ones rolling their eyes at me and asking if this was on the test. Shall we discuss who had the grades and numbers to get into Stanford and succeed big time? (Hint: not me.) Don't tell me those kids weren't smart. They were. They simply had a different attitude towards education.

Past a certain ability level, which I think is probably around IQ 120, I believe these differences have more to do with family culture than almost anything else. I was raised by intellectuals who valued debate, learning, and knowledge above money, achievement, and status. My own kids are being raised the same way. Yet there are kids in my DD's class who are being raised to value right answers and high achievement above all. Tiger cubs, shall we say. Are they less intelligent than she is? They are probably less creative and less divergent in their thinking, but this does not mean they are less intelligent. It's really another conversation altogether.

I think what a lot of us are really talking about here is the differences between kids (and adults) who care about learning, thinking, and ideas vs kids (and adults) who care about Achieving Paper Thingy and Shiny Object A. (Of course, school can suck that caring out of you.)

Interesting point, Ultramarina. It's certainly true that apathy can make even PG students ask those kinds of questions and tune out pretty thoroughly.

I guess I'm also operating from the subtext that the teachers operate in ways that indicate rather strongly to me (and to my DD) that most of her classmates can't handle some of the work as it is-- because they "modify" assignments (to soften standards) and offer "extra credit" all the time (though notably excluding the top students, who don't NEED retakes on tests, resubmissions on essays, and extra points for participating in class-- and for whom those things would regularly elevate them to 110% or higher performance), and because many of her classmates (though usually not the teachers) have trouble following along at the rate that she moves through a question/inquiry/argument-- she has to slow way down for the class, generally speaking.

Maybe I just expect too much from it, I don't know. Maybe the classmates ARE actually MG and we just have unrealistic expectations.

Sorry, I knew I wasn't being quite clear. It's not so much the public/private split as it is about the 'tude. So far these parents seem to be singing the "All children are gifted, no one's better than anyone else" song. We'll see if they change their tune when their kids get to high school.

As a side note, there may be large differences between universities, and between disciplines. I'm at a sort of second-tier-of-the-top-tier place, which tends to breed reverse-snobbism. Also, potentially lucrative fields like computer science may attract more status-seekers that obscure, difficult fields like linguistics.

Still, even if I'm living in a bubble here, my DD is going to be up against tiger-cubs from all over the country when she applies to college. I share your frustration about this issue. My own thought is to steer her towards the tiny SLACS. I think these tend to fly under the radar of the Tigers, who think "Harvard!" because they know the name.

I went to a tiny SLAC and had a mindblowing college experience. Not everyone there was PG or even HG, but the large majority were quirky people who cared deeply about learning stuff.

But maybe things have changed since my day.

By SLAC, you don't mean SLAC, do you?

Agree. It's easy to get into circular reasoning: PG looks like this, and these kids look like this, so these kids are PG, and it's good to be round these kids, so it's good to be round PG kids. For how many of the children you're talking about do you actually know an IQ number, HK? Come to that, don't I remember that you don't have one for your own DD? So these characteristics that you see her sharing to some extent with some, but not all, of her classmates, how do you know they are giftedness as defined by IQ? And does it matter?

Yes it matters.

(And I can use cut and paste here from another thread!)

The real problem seems to be that we need to figure out developmental arc over a lifetime, which I.Q. tests apparently can't do very well.

I suspect that such arcs are reasonably fixed, with some wiggle room, but not much.

The significance is the nature of the arc for the individual, not the score on a test on a particular day.

I also suspect that it's somewhat obvious and able to be seen, in the sense that you can tell how tall someone is.

So, I think we're trying to figure out how to deal with something that clearly exists but we don't know how to figure it out properly or exactly what it is we are looking for, but I.Q. tests kind of tell us *something* about it sometimes, so we will use those even though we know they don't really work that well.

Small Liberal Arts College, not Stanford Linear Accelerator.

How do you know they were smarter than you? Did you have IQ scores for these kids, or were you making an assumption based on achievement?


I agree that different attitudes about learning come from the family environment, but that doesn't change the fact that people with extremely high cognitive ability still think in a fundamentally different way than 99+% of other people, and that for many highly gifted students, an environment with other students of similar capabilities would be a huge benefit for them.

I think this fact is hard for many people to accept, as a couple of people have noted on this thread already. Think of it this way: how well would a student with an IQ of 120 relate intellectually to a special ed student with an IQ around 90? How happy would the bright kids be if their classes were filled with slow learners, and the teacher had to keep the discussion at a level suited to the slower-learning group?


Yes, that's a very important part of this conversation for me. But it still doesn't change the fact that people with very high cognitive ability think differently. ETA: IMO, this group includes highly creative people as well as high IQ people. But creativity is also a form cognitive ability (that admittedly isn't measured by IQ tests).