"Thomas didn't want to try things he wouldn't be successful at," his father says. "Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn't, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, 'I'm not good at this.'
I've got one of these kids too.
The Optimistic Child also deals with this issue, and includes results of school experiments in which some children were used as the control group and others had the importance of effort drummed into them, with positive results.
I have a different perspective on this phenomenon. For me, it seems possible or even likely that shutting down when something gets hard can be a by-product of the school environment, rather than knowing or having been told that you're bright.
Many gifted kids get by in school with little or no effort because grade-level work is too easy for them. At the same time, ND kids have to struggle frequently to learn the same things. The result is that many gifted kids never develop problem-solving skills that ND kids develop as a matter of course.
The result is that when these gifted kids finally encounter a challenging subject, they have no skills for approaching it. They assume that they aren't as bright as they though because if they were, this would be easy too. After all, everything has always been easy, right? So if they were
really smart, algebra/geometry/Moby Dick/etc. would be easy too, right?
In this context, the conclusions that you can draw from studies like the ones described in
The Optimistic Child become more nuanced.
Val
