Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy What really motivates parent activists

This was mentioned on the More Child Blog. It's a letter to the editor responding to a statement that parent activists tend to be limited to helping their own children.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...09020701677.html?wprss=rss_print/outlook

Hi Inky,

In many scenarios, a parent must take care of the entire family, work to pay bills, and spend more time tending to a gifted child who doesn't have adult maturity to deal with 30 hrs. a week in an existence that's futile to their development...an existences that disrespects who they are and doesn't care. Many of these children become emotionally disturbed and harder to manage. This tries an entire family. Where is the time to become activists for everyone? To say we must is to be completely ignorant of how consuming it is to raise children and to sustain a full marriage. The letter writer doesn't understand how some of us are bloodied and exhausted from bureaucratic brick walls in our communities, just to see one child receive justice. True, we do have more time later on in life. Hope I don't sound rabid.

San54, you don't sound rabid I had a different interpretation and didn't think the letter writer was implying that everyone should become activists or that we have to advocate for everyone. Instead she was defending parents who are activists when others cast aspersions on their intentions by saying "they are only trying to help their own child."

Especially with gifted issues, it is hard for activist parents to defend against being labelled elitist. Fortunately someone else's child doesn't have to lose in order for our children to "win" appropriate challenges in the classroom.

I think that in many cases, the children within our own families take up so much of our time that we don't have time to advocate for all. But in some cases it happens anyway. If you successfully advocate for say a multi grade skip in a district that has never done it before, you set a precedence for the next child that comes along. Hopefully those parents won't have to fight quite so hard.

The school my DS6 is in has been very honest with me regarding my son's "guinea pig" status. They've never done several of the things that they're doing with him but they are paying attention as to what works so that it can be implemented district wide. So in a way my son and I are advocating for the whole district.

My worry there is how much pressure it puts on that first family and what happens if it doesn't work out:

"Well, we tried it once and it failed [perhaps because of personality of the child or something totally unrelated to anyone else who might come along later], so we'll never try again."



We heard this in one educational situation, and though she allowed him in the class, I wish she hadn't. It turned out that she had decided sight-unseen that DS7 wasn't going to fit in her math class. Guess what? She was right!

He's now in a different math class in the exact same age range, and it's going swimmingly! The difference? The teacher hadn't ever had a bad experience with any other accelerated child.

Trailbreakers are WONDERFUL when they actually break trails; they're less nice for those who come after when things don't go well...

A problem that many of our families run into is that while they would like to 'support all children' or 'support all gifted child' the reality of LOG means that there are none or few children that would really benifit from the kinds of accomidations that an HG or PG child really needs. The actual needs of two PG children with identical IQ scores could be wildly dissimilar. What we need is a full crayon box of options that help all children, all gifted children, AND our own children. In a way, once the relevant Adults' eyes are open and the need is 'seen' finding programing to fit the need is a secondary issue.

A great example of this is when teachers test a child, and then seem to 'give up' if the child tests a grade or two above the grade that they are in and stop the test, announcing that the child is at 'X grade.' This happens all the time, not out of spite, but out of 'your won't see what you can't imagine.'

Kriston, it's sad that the 'recieving teacher' was so unreceptive, but I'll bet you a dollar that the reason the 'trailblazer' failed was that she had the same attitude before she met the 'trailblazer' as she did when you met her. Just a thought. It's the old question of 'association or causation,' yes?

Bottom line is that it's unfortunatly rare to have a good experience with a teacher who is 'against' having a child in her care. Ther are exceptions of course, and we were lucky enough to be one of them. Our DS12 had a teacher who, although she fairly bristled at the thought of DS being skipped into her class, worked very hard to teach him lots and lots of skills, attitudes, and material during two years at the private school. She never felt that the placement was 'a good thing' and her attitude was hard on him in certian ways - but he grew SO much from her! I sure wished that the situation would have been flexible enought that he could have had the skip with 'subject deceleration' in Language Arts only. ((sigh)) No perfect answers - that's for sure!

Love and More Love,
Grinty

That's absolutely a possibility. But it is also possible that the child was truly misplaced. The fact is, we don't know.

My point is that just as one successful skip doesn't guarantee that every skipped child will be happy and successful, neither does one failed skip--even a true failure and not just an assumption that it wouldn't work!--mean that all kids who come after wanting/needing skips will fail.

I guess I'm just saying that it's a double-edged sword if that sort of trailblazing is the only organized advocacy that we participate in. Those trails don't always lead the way we want them to go.

Granted, I'm not out there fighting the good fight right now, so I'm sort of a hypocrite about this. But when I am able to do more than just (barely!) keep my head above water, I do intend to do some more advocacy work. I think it's really important.

Last night I heard Dr. Sylvia Rimm talk and she said she started as a parent advocate which led to a career in psychology. She said there are quite a few of her colleagues that followed a similar path.

I see how it happens. After going through all the uncertainty and frustration to discover DD's school was using erroneous MAP data, I want changes so other parents won't go through the same.

I've always thought that a big problem undermining advocacy on behalf of gifted kids is the focus on the ones whose IQ scores are 2 or more standard deviations above the mean (2% of the population at most).

A better approach would be to focus on kids who are at least 1 standard deviation above the mean (16% of the population). On top of this group would be kids who don't meet this criteria but who clearly excel in one or more areas.

Most or all of the children in this larger group would benefit from acceleration to whatever degree would be appropriate. In light of accelerating many kids in one or more subjects, accelerating a very few by a whole grade or more would not seem so weird anymore.

We do this with athletes all the time when we accelerate them to the varsity team at a young age. No one thinks it's odd if some 13-year-old who can run 400 meters in 53 seconds races against (and beats) high school seniors. No one tells her to stop running while others catch up. We just cheer. And no one thinks it odd that she does math for 13-year-olds during the school day. This is another way of saying that we respect an athlete's asynchronous development.

Back in the 80s, advocates for disabled kids weren't restricted to parents of kids with IQs more than two standard deviations below the mean! If this had been the case, special needs groups never would have got out of the starting gates. IQ didn't even enter any of the discussions I heard. Rather, those parents took exactly the approach that I outlined above. They said, very bluntly "My kid isn't learning how to read, and what are you going to do about it???" They focused on individual needs of a reasonably large group of kids who were bright enough to do better and learn more. Sound familiar?

The parents of those kids got what the wanted, and the kids with very low IQs (more than 2 standard deviations...) also reaped huge benefits.

The same could happen with HG and PG kids if people start advocating for the bigger picture en masse...getting the parents of the very large number of bright kids on board would force a change.

Just my 2c.

Val

I'm cheering for you Val! This clearly would create a wonderful atmousphere, except when schools use it to say - we have a program and it works for every kid except yours. How can you tell us that your child is still bored with a single grade subject acceleration? And what about the kids who are reading at High School Level but writing at agemate level?

So I love this approach as one fabulous crayon in the box, but still want schools to have a whole palate of options to use flexibly for individual children,KWIM? I would add to this great idea a few others:

A nationally recognised online educational program that is free, universally accepted, and totally 'go at your own pace.'

Self contained classrooms where PG kids can learn with other PG agemates.

Generous use of cheap accomidations to let kids with LDs and bottlenecks fly!

One room school house classrooms where the teacher can teach the same unit to kids who are abstract thinking on the same level, but have different 'output' abilities based on physical maturity. So a High School teacher might teach the novel 'The Giver' to 'smart' 9th graders, and grant a 9th-grade grades to the folks who write 10 page papers at the ninth grade level, and 5th-grade grades to younger folks who are only able to write 10 paragraph papers at the 5th grade level.

And I'm sure there are more inexpensive ways to fill up that crayon box!