Originally Posted by intparent
Madoosa, your experience matches what I have found. I find sibs harder to deal with on this issue than parents, personally, probably because of jealousy. I have learned over the years to not give the sibs too many details. For example, D has been attending Davidson THINK in the summer. When sibs or sibs-in-law ask what she is doing for the summer, we just say she is taking a couple of classes at a camp in Reno -- we skip the "college", "gifted", etc. parts of it smile If they ask for details, we tell them generally what the subjects are (but "math", not "calculus", etc.). It just works out better for us. I mean, they know she is different and smart -- it is obvious as soon as she opens her mouth. But we really don't talk about it much. And she has a good relationship with her cousins, so I guess it has worked out.

It's MISGUIDED Jealousy on the large part... consider that giftedness is somewhat genetic... means that your kids must have fairly smart parents (ie you) and since it is generally acclaimed that siblings are within 10 IQ points of each other - therefore your siblings should be fairly smart too and by extension their kids as well...

I say this for a good reason. My older brother has two gorgeous and IMO HG+ girls. But they both struggle through school - even though they both started a year early... the younger one (10) has a natural talent for drama, piano, violin, language... the older (11) is a natural sportswoman - the youngest ever South African to qualify for the water skiing world champs this year, and natural abilities for language etc etc. but no - they both hate school, are forced through homework and extra lessons to help with spelling and maths and and and. but since they struggle, they cannot be that clever apparently. And since Aiden is a kid who will sit and play chess with the 10 year old - he is just strange.

My experience tells me that it's misguided jealousy that stems from their own inability/interest/whatever to really see their kids and to understand that education does not have to be as horrible as they experienced it.


Mom to 3 gorgeous boys: Aiden (8), Nathan (7) and Dylan (4)