my DD (headstrong is an understatement) figured out that she could simply REFUSE to do anything that wasn't easy and pleasant and already at "expert" level.
What did you do?
Honestly? We abandoned child-led schooling. It was not working-- and it was very definitely
worsening the gaps in skills that had already made it very very difficult to find appropriate materials with which to educate her. So I guess if we had truly
believed in unschooling (at least the extreme form that some of my IRL friends and acquaintances use) we'd have not seen that as a significant problem. But for us, it seemed
very important that our DD learn to follow someone ELSE's tune, rather than calling it herself, which seems to come quite naturally to her. So for
her, it was an important lesson-- perhaps THE most important one of her young life-- and unschooling/completely child-led inquiry wasn't getting her there.
It was also closing her out of more appropriate opportunities because of _______ (fill-in-the-missing-skill). So sure, she could participate in a literature activity, but
could not write a coherent sentence like other third or fourth graders. Ergo, she wasn't a child who
should be included in a setting where that is an expectation.
Without the writing skills that she was
super-reluctant to develop, there's no way that she could have attended college at 12 or 13, though she'd otherwise have
needed that kind of instructional setting in OTHER ways.
Don't know if that makes sense-- what I'm saying is that for HG+ kids in particular, there is a real danger in letting them play exclusively to their own strengths. As Val indicated, it involves them not understanding how to play to their
weaknesses when called upon to do so. Their strengths are
so impressive that it's easy to shush that little voice that is whispering that maybe they should work on _____ (whatever they are avoiding).
There doesn't have to be pathology behind why a kid doesn't want to learn to write (or read, or memorize math facts, or, or, or)-- sometimes it just is less pleasant than the other many (endless, really) options at hand.
If parents insist, a headstrong child may well turn it into a power struggle-- which is what happened when we tried to do that as eclectic/child-led homeschoolers. DD very definitely felt that we were NOT the boss of her, and said so in every way imaginable.
Honestly, I
wanted to believe that an intrinsically motivated, high potential child with extraordinary reading ability COULD be homeschooled using exclusively child-led methods. I did. But those gaps and what they indicated for her when she was 4-6y older than she was at the time? Yeah-- I could see the writing on the wall, and I simply couldn't ignore that. My friends who are hard-core believers claim that it would have been fine-- but I've seen some college students for whom that is profoundly untrue.
