Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments What happens to gifted kids who ...

I was a child who SHOULD have been accelerated and wasn't.



Unfortunately, this had the unintended consequence of making everything ELSE perfectionism-ripe. Yup, everything else was easy enough that it's pretty much 100%, 100%, 100%, 99%, 100%, 98%.

That has caused problems. In retrospect, we were right to be concerned about her maturity; particularly her executive function and her writing skills... but even so, a 3y acceleration was VERY conservative and it has resulted in some damage to our child.

I can't even begin to articulate such a thing elsewhere, it sounds so patently ridiculous on the face of it. But it's true. She has grown to LOATHE formal education because it is boring, repetitious, and basically only good for punishment-- never for intrinsic reward. Why? Because the ONLY authentic work she's ever had is in her areas of RELATIVE WEAKNESS, and the rest is ALL just busywork-- which eats up time she'd rather spend learning.


If I knew then what I know now? I'd have been "that parent" over SUBJECT acceleration ON TOP OF that 3y global acceleration. My DD should have been doing high school science and literature in early middle school. (9-10yo) I also think that we should have been VERY much more aggressive about math starting in 3rd grade. Heck, she'd already blazed through three years of Singapore in a year-- clearly standard pacing was a bad idea. I just don't know why that wasn't more obvious to us all at the time.

Maybe we just didn't really see the harm. {sigh}