I'd call it hothousing if: 1) it's your idea, not your dd's idea
Hmm... I don't know if I fully agree, just based on Madeinuk's comment about executive skills withering on the vine because everything is so easy (and many of them won't, without prompting, do difficult and low interest things "just because it's good for me")
Doing things that you have no interest in doing does not really help you develop a work ethic or executive functioning.
I think there is something else involved here.
The term "hothousing" bothers me a lot. It seems so judgmental, as though teaching your child something he doesn't want to do is somehow abusive. IMO, the pejorative use of this term derives out of insecurity and a lot of other uncomfortable facts (some can be controlled by us, and some can't). What's the alternative? Letting the kid do only what he wants? That sounds like a way to create a person who's at risk for only doing the stuff he likes or is easy for him. It also feeds into the (dangerous) myth that HG+ kids
just love to learn and that it's always easy/fun for them. That's just not true. Learning arithmetic may be easy for these kids, but learning how to write good expository essays and do calculus is hard, even with an IQ of 160. The rewards come later.
I don't know where work ethic comes from and how it develops. I suspect that personality plays a big role. Growing up probably helps, too. I didn't have a huge work ethic when I was really young, but I work very hard now.
I'm fairly certain that forcing kids to work well outside their skill levels, consistently, doesn't create a work ethic so much as a strong feeling of resentment (with gifties, it also feeds the myth that school is always going to be easy).
Forcing my kids to change the kitty litter and help with the kitchen probably contributes to the development of a work ethic. They may hate those tasks now, but I hope they'll look back on them in 10 years and understand why they were so important.
Right now my eldest is in a school environment that's cognitively difficult. He's struggling in a soul-searching way for the first time. He's hit a wall, and is realizing that some subjects are very hard, and that he can't study for 10 minutes and get an A anymore. I suspect that he's overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge and the apparent impossibility of writing even a single essay or getting through the next midterm. School used to be so easy, and suddenly it presumably feels like an enemy to him. I was there once, too, and it's hard. The only way through it is to keep suffering through one essay and one problem set after another. He can't know that yet, because you can't know it until you're on the other side of it.
