Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Stubbornly refusing to cooperate

Just curious if anyone else has seen this....

DS is older, 7 yo. He is a YS.

DD just turned 6 yo. She will not cooperate with any attempt to measure her intelligence, knowledge level, reading level, etc.

She flat out lies about what she does and doesn't know. She will give up without any effort if she perceives something is difficult (although she will nail it cold if you claim it is easy). If you catch her off her guard, she will amaze you with her vocabulary and her understanding of things.

One day, I caught her off her guard and she told me that if I knew she could read, then I wouldn't read to her anymore. She was 4 when she told me this. Just an example of how manipulative she can be.

Going hand in hand with the manipulation is imagination. She had a dozen imaginary friends at 2. She can play for hours with nothing more than her fingers (daddy finger, mommy finger, granny finger, etc). She literally taught her older brother how to imagine. She did jigsaw puzzles before he did, shaming him into catching up with her. One night, when we were watching Nova on PBS, she correctly identified from the tantalizing clues offered that the gamma rays coming from distant reaches of the universe were coming from black holes.

The same teacher had both kids in preschool and she swore she thought DD was smarter than DS.

Question is - has anyone seen a kid like this before? I assume that she probably is gifted - probably HG - and that someday she will settle down and cooperate enough that we can measure it and start to challenge her.

But for the moment - she simply refuses to cooperate, and I can't convince the school that she is anything other than a normal kid who just reads well for her age.

Hi Mary,

My first thought is to try and find out the motivations behind the behavior. You already have found out that your DD doesn't want to read to you, because she's worried you would no longer read to her. That's a good start. Maybe if she were assured that you would still read to her, even if she knew how to do it herself, then she might be willing to show off her true skills?

My 5 y/o DD did a somewhat similar thing for the first half of K this year. She went in knowing how to read quite well, but didn't want to read at school. At home, she was reading many of her brother's books (2nd grader level or higher). Also at home, any time we tried to read books to her, she would impatiently stop us and say she wanted to read the rest to us.

But at school, when the teacher asked DD to read to her (teacher wanted to assess her reading level), DD flat out refused. Later, when I asked her why she didn't want to read at school, she told me she thought the other kids would laugh at her if they knew she could read. It really made me sad that she was "dumbing down" her abilities when the truth was that the other kids would have thought it was cool that she could read. But her perception of the social situation was that she didn't want to be different.

It wasn't until about mid-year, when some of the other kids in the class started being able to read a little bit, and others were desperately wishing they could read, that she started showing her true abilities. Then when there was an all-school reading contest, she really took off! Suddenly at that point her competitive nature took over and she didn't care who knew she could read.

What I learned from the experience is that she does have an awareness of being "different" and has some anxiety about it, and that she is very motivated by competition.

One thing you could try with your daughter is while you're reading books to her, occasionally say the wrong word. Make it something a little silly, and see if she catches it and corrects you. I used to do this with my daughter and it told me a lot about what she knew. Like if a sentence was "Susie went to the store," I might say "Susie went to the moon." And DD would say, "Mom! That doesn't say moon!" I'd say "Are you sure? How do you know?" She'd say, "Because moon starts with M and that word starts with an S!" So then I might say, "Oh, I see... it must say 'Susie went to the STEPS!'" And she'd say "No, it's STORE! She went to the STORE!"

Another little trick I've used is reverse psychology of sorts. Don't know how it would work for your DD, but my DD hates to be told she can't do something. So I might say "I'm going to read a book to you, and I want to read it all by myself. So don't help me at all, okay?" After a page or two of me reading, she'd be begging me to please let her read just a little bit of it... and soon she'd be reading the whole thing to me.

Hope this helps.

Oh Mary!
So you were just testing us with tales of DS! ((smile and sympathy))

It does sound like dd is more gifted. and in a way, it's ok to celebrate that he is so aware socially. DS9 says "gifted in charisma"

Have you read Deb Ruf's Loosing our Minds? She tells how to estimate giftedness based on early landmarks such as puzzel interest, letter learning, and figuring out christmas, tooth fairy etc. I think she'd be a good one to talk things over with.

Do you have any schools that would allow dd to spend at least part of her day with people who she can be herself in front of?

We're looking at a very flexible independent school that, from what I hear, has many "extrodinarily gifted children" who are 3 or 4 grade levels above their age mates. The reason I want to consider this change is just so he doesn't have to "hide himself." over years of struggle, he has figured out how to befriend and enjoy his agemates, unfortunatly what that means is not fully being himself.

Reminds me of the old saying:
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?"

I'm nervous about changing from a somewhat workable situation, but as above, If not now, when?

Ah well... the imagination part causes problems. I have tried 'misreading' words to her. Then she takes over and has so much fun making up new stuff that she ends up not reading anything at all.

No way to get any accomodation at school because she refuses to do her own work and cooperate with testing. Last year's teacher honestly thought that she might have developmental delays of some sort - didn't even catch on a little bit that so much was just acting out to get attention.
However, we can hire a private tutor to work with her during school hours. We are going to try to fit in one hour a week starting this summer.

Even the tutor had trouble pegging her down. Said no doubt that she is reading at least at a beginning third grade level, but couldn't peg her down to tell if it was higher than that.

DD could tell the dif between a hexagon and octagon at 12 months - and called them by name. It was really amazing.

Ruf's levels of gifted isn't much help on DD though. She does have a lot of the level 3, 4, and 5 characteristics - but not enough to conclude that yes, she is level 3 or higher. Example, I have no idea when she stopped believing in the tooth fairy because even now she alternates tooth by tooth on wanting her money before bed and wanting the tooth fairy to leave it under her pillow. Besides DH is one of those folks who don't believe in lying to kids. Our kids were never told that there was a Santa Claus. yet, both did their best to believe anyway. Very backwards.

DS was at least easy to peg (once we got over the denial). DD - we haven't the foggiest.

We had her IQ tested. The psych has an extensive background with PG kids. Even she couldn't get a feel for DD. Very clear to her that she was playing dumb - but hard to quantify just how dumb is dumb.....

Let's put it this way though - the kids love Harry Potter and I agreed to let them listen to the books on tape. DD got more from it than DS. She understands every character and motivation and remembers every subplot and event. Granted, she couldn't pick the book up and read it, but she got as much from listening as DS did from reading. Probably more.

That just don't sound like a 'normal' child - it sounds 'gifted'. I just can't prove it with a number that will get her any accomodation.

Very frustrating.

Mary

Oh Mary!
Lately I'm frustrated with advocacy in the public school setting, but more hopeful about private. Is it within your means, financially and guts wise, to bring her to a local montessori school and try to pass her off as a tiny 9 year old with some disabilities? Sounds like it would tickle your dd's fancy, anyway.

I recently brought DS9 to our local montessori for the day on the basis that they evaluate him with their mixed age middle school - 6th through 8th. I just flat out refused to let him spend the day with his agemates in the 4th and 5th grade group. Now I'm waiting with high hopes to hear what their evaluation revealed.

fingers crossed,
Trinity

There is no local Montesorri school. Local options are religious private, college prep private, public schools, or homeschool.

Public: Did I tell you the story about the time I talked to the local gifted coordinator? She told me that if my kids really were gifted, I should start them on medication as young as possible since all gifted kids are ADHD.

Religious private: After 3 months in the kindergarten at the local school, my 5 yo son started hitting himself in the head, calling himself a bad person who ought to be killed, and other extremely negative behaviors. Tooks a year to get past that and he still reverts if too many things go wrong at one time. Needless to say, that isn't an option either.

College prep private: This is where we are now. Overall, they have been good with the kids. Among other perks, we have a private tutor working with the kids during the school day - and they don't have to make up classwork they missed when they were with the tutor. Not perfect, but nice....

The problem is that DD just won't cooperate and show her stuff in front of any official type people and therefore makes us look like liars when we talk about how smart she is.

You would think that with DS being officially sanctioned as PG, they might recognize that we aren't making this up..... But oh well....

Homeschool didn't work for us. DH stays at home and he and DS have personality problems when working too closely too many hours of the day.

Good luck on the montesorri school. I wish there were one here. One woman told me that if she had it all to do over again - if she couldn't do Montesorri, she would homeschool because she thought that those were the only two options that could really mee the needs of these kids.

Mary

Can you send DS to school and homeschool DD? I'm more worried about her than him. Is she a candidate for Stage and Screen? Then they provide the tutoring.

Can you catch her on video camera?

I don't think it's nice of her to be so inconsiderate of you. ((silly frown - do we reallly have to be the grown ups today?))

Can you at least carry around a card with the stats that show that sibs of PG kids have X% chance of being within 5 IQ points, Y% of being within 10, etc.

The public school sounds really bad. I'm glad we don't have a gifted co-ordinator to be mean to us! ((Humor alert again))

But seriously, is that story representitive of lots of problems at the public school, or just one weird story. Perhaps in means that the GT coordinator is kind of off the wall him/herself and will get along well with your dd?

The reason I ask is that your best bet may be having them in different school systems so that when she passes he it wouldn't be so embarrassing.

I honestly don't know what to tell ya' - except to post it to the Young Scholar PG parent's list so I can eagerly read the BTDT responces.

Love and More Love -
Trinity

I wonder if maybe she's afraid of something.Does she have a fear of making a mistake?When your dd is corrected on something,how does she react? During past testing did she ask the psychologist if she was correct/wrong?

This may not be the case at all.But maybe she needs to feel more comfortable with the tester.

The psych who tested her specifically mentioned that she was concerned about DD having a fear of getting things wrong. She thought that DD was giving silly answers at one point to avoid the risk of giving a serious answer and being wrong.

I might buy that if I didn't know her better....

Our local public school: the average score on the 5th grade achievement test was 4th grade equivalent..... We live in the sticks. Average education is high school drop out. I know it sounds like I am exagerrating or downgrading the locals, but no exagerration. And I dare say that - one reason the locals are like this is that the school system failed them too.

I figure that she will shine when she is ready - but just frustrating to have to wait.

On the flip side!!!!!! We are springing for an hour a week with the tutor who works with her brother. The tutor is doing something right because I am getting less resistance when I ask her to read to me, etc. Just a couple of weeks and I swear I can see a difference.

Maybe she will go back to school this fall and just blow them away!

Mary