Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How to Hothouse Your Kid

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Caricaturing a little, people have been suggesting it's hot-housing, i.e. undesirable, if

a) the child would learn whatever it is faster or more easily later. But almost everything is easier to learn later (languages maybe an exception), because you develop emotional maturity and learn how to learn in a deliberate way. It may be that reading is taught too early in our schools, but I don't think evidence that children who are only taught later learn faster is necessarily evidence of this. You have to start somewhere.

b) the child has any reluctance to do the work required. But doesn't everyone go through a process of learning that you don't dissolve if you do something that's hard work, maybe even to the point of being mildly unpleasant, and that sometimes the result is worth pushing through the hardness and unpleasantness for? I venture that very, very few professional musicians never had anyone insisting against at least mild resistance that they had to practise. Are academics different, or is there just a tradition of letting schools be the bad guys?

ETA noone's put my favourite irregular verb in this thread yet, have they? It goes:
I support
You push
He/she/it hothouses