Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Advice/tips for encouraging gifted child

My 5-year old daughter is profoundly gifted. She gives up on work very easily and gets extremely frustrated when someone tries to teach her or push her to keep trying. Looking for advice on how to encourage and prevent "meltdowns". THX!!

Quote:www.sengifted.org

"The Gifted Child: Super Achiever or Underachiever -- Parents and Teachers Make the Difference.

The early environments which foster giftedness in children can also make them vulnerable to feeling extreme pressures. The praise and power which cultivate a positive learning environment may become "too much of a good thing." Gifted children may internalize highly competitive pressures to be brilliant, perfect, extraordinarily creative, beautiful, and/or popular. The pressures that gifted children internalize can lead to motivation or may also cause them to learn defensive patterns which lead to underachievement. Families and schools can help gifted children to cope with these pressures by providing realistic challenges and guidance. Schools which provide for the needs of gifted children will encourage them to make a commitment to their education and a contribution to society. They can learn to feel good about their personal accomplishments and about themselves."

-Dr. Sylvia Rimm, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine

end quote.

I agree, which is why I cut and pasted it. HTH

Good question, by the way.

You should probably also look for _Living With Intensity: Understanding the Sensitivity, Excitability, and the Emotional Development of Gifted Children, Adolescents, and Adults_ by Daniels and Piechowski

What kinds of tasks is she getting frustrated with?

You may also enjoy reading Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. She writes about how our parental responses to a child's efforts effect them and recommends praising effort rather than results. There's a lot more in the book and I found it very helpful.

Dr. Rimm has a good point, but since she is always aimed at the optimally gifted kids, it's important to remember that for PGlets, the horrible tantrums can be the result of 'too little challenge for too long' as well. How is a parent to know?

Of course it's good to remember to praise 'character' instead of 'inborn gift' - so when the casual observer says: "Smart as a whip, eh?"
We respond: "Yes, We are very proud that she is an active explorer of her world" or
"Yes, I love that she is so inquisitive"

But Rimm admits about 6/7th of the way through her very good book, Why smart kids... that the parents can do everything right and there will still be this problem for the very few unusually gifted kids who are so far above age level expectations that they just get no chance to excersize the learning muscles at school. That seems to be the more usual case around here.

So instead of trying to encourage without tantrums - try:
1) set up the school/daycare environment so that challenge is a natural part of the day (yes, easier said than done)
2) Practice providing that warm encouragement and breath through the tantrums...welcome them, as they are necessary as she faces challenge for the first time. Try to do this somewhere out of any judgmental eye. Realize that it takes time for both of you to get used to this, so start small.
3) Spend most of the time doing things she is already interested in. It's ok to weave in her challenge areas, but she'll learn fastest if she is feeling loved and having fun at least some of the time. If you need ideas for this post her particular interests and challenges here and we'll give suggestions.
4) Try to think outside the box - any learning challenge is a good learning challenge.
5) Remember that time with you is the most reinforcing thing in the world. If needed, you can pretend to be intensely interested in an activity and ignore her while you do it until she joins you. Figure out what the other reinforcers are for her - gifties often have an unusual sense of what they will work for.

Hugs - remember, at age 5 you have less to undo than she would at age 12 or 18. It doesn't last forever!

Smiles,
Grinity

I heartily second the suggestion of reading Carol Dweck, though the book I read and liked was Self-theories - I posted about it and there was a little discussion in this thread.

A related (in my mind at least) book I read much earlier which had a profound effect on how I think about these issues is Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. The message here is that, counterintuitively, praise (perhaps even for effort) may be just the wrong thing, because it is an evaluation of the child by the parent, and giving it encourages dependence on other people's evaluations. What we want is for our children to rely on their own evaluations of how they're meeting their own goals, and to do this it is better (he says) to show interest and love, but avoid evaluation, even positive evaluation, as much as possible. Controversial, but spoke very strongly to me.

This is what we've noticed with Mr W. If its something we want to get him to do and do it a lot, we do it with him. We've also worked on positive self talk.

It got kind of funny this weekend when we went bowling. Mr W weighs just over 30 pounds but HAD to carry the bowling ball by himself. He'd pick it up in both hands and shuffle to the lanes, saying, "Its big and its heavy and I can do it." over and over until he got it released. He did it 50 times in two hours.

LOL

Lately he has taken to praising us, "You can do it Daddy!"

We've also noticed a big change in him now that he is in with kids 1-2 years older than he is. He has to work a bit harder to keep up and has peers he can interact with and he has to step up to the plate every day to compete with them.

For example, in the past, he would get upset when other kids would bump into him at the playground or grab his stuff. Now he bumps right back and grabs his stuff back without a peep.

Thank you for your response. She gets frustrated over tasks that she has not mastered yet; such as writing lower case letters. She can write the letters, but not "perfectly" and so she gets very frustrated and doesn't want to do any of it. My husband and I do not push her to be "perfect". We just want her to try. Now that she has homework assignments we are finding this a bit difficult at times. We don't know the best way to encourage without her feeling like we're pushing her too hard. We are new to the "giftedness" behaviors and are looking for advice from those who have been there and have found things that worked well for them. Thank You!

DS6 is much the same way and used to throw a fit nearly every time he drew a picture or wrote a sentence at home and at school. We're fortunate in that he had a fantastic teacher who recognized this as perfectionism and emphasized that what she wanted was a "sloppy copy" and that DS could make a perfect copy for himself later on if he wanted to. DS of course never got around to making the perfect copy. At home, we emphasize doing things just "good enough" rather than doing one's best. Just creating a category (good enough) in between perfect and terrible seemed to help a lot. I've also always encouraged DS to draw with pen so he had to learn to live with his mistakes--incorporate them into the picture or just let them go and move on. He's gotten much better in the last year or so and now draws for hours without getting upset.

I have personally found that the writing paper that comes with 'Handwriting without Tears' has a magical transforming effect on me and on DS. I can't explain it, but it soothed something that just seemed wrong about regular lined paper - even the school paper with the dashes in the middle.

I also like their technique asking the child to drawing a little smiley face under the letter on the line that she likes the best. I asked my son to draw the smiley face under my line of letters first, so that he had to closely examine them as see that not all of them were perfect.

If you register, you can print out some of their lined paper from your printer, with words to copy of your choice - for free.

Handwriting is difficult, because it doesn't matter how well one understands what to do - on must spend a certian amount of time practicing - and it's sort of boring to practice to that level. Boring but nescessary. So if she loves, 'tounge twisters' for example, or puns, or Shel Silverstien Poems, you can program in interesting words to copy, and she can maybe take an interest in making a book of her favorites.

It's not easy, but it's possible!
Best Wishes,
Grinity

Good tip! We did get the books, but didn't shell out for the pricey paper. Any tips for getting my kid to leave a space in between words?

Jen21 - my kiddo was the same with his writing, getting frustrated when things didn't look how he wanted. He refused to take any advice or instruction from us parents before school. We left it to the teacher at kindergarten to teach writing. DS7 is still pretty bad at handwriting, but he's getting better. You can now recognize letters! (Though all the words squished together makes reading it a bit tricky.)

So, not really advice other than saying that sometimes with perfectionists, letting a teacher handle some situations (like handwriting, which is normally taught in kindergarten anyway), worked for us. Also HWT did help too. Mostly I think DS7 just needed to be developmentally ready for handwriting. And he needs lots of practice.

I have Wyatt draw a space in between words. _.

DS 6 also hates to struggle even the slightest bit. He likes "already knowing". This has been a problem since he was 3. He is not good at everything but he seems most vulnerable to tantrums over academic work. I think this is an area where he learns quite fast and a concept quickly become easy. I've realized that if I want him to keep on experiencing real learning I have to be on my toes because he will struggle with a new thing for only a few days before he needs another thing to keep him challenged. If I let him go at his schoo'sl pace where a concept is taught for a month or more than he will have spent too much time not practicing being challenged and will have a major melt down when the next hard task crops up.

Jen,

There is a very simple childrens book called "ISH" that had an amazing effect on my then 5 yo perfectionist. I can't remember who the writer is but if you look it up on google it will come up. It's somewhere around 9-12 dollars and worth every penny!

The book is about not letting others dictate the standard by which your work is judged. We must have read it 40 times. I was completely at a loss as to how to make my son stop beating himself up, refusing and screaming tantrums when something wasn't perfect. This made a HUGE difference.

Just looked it up. Peter Reynolds is the Author and the book is $8.23 on Amazon,

Thanks shari, My DD does a bit to much erasing. I think I'll get that one.