Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Work on the strengths or the weakness?

I am just curious how other parents think about this topic.

My I have one child who is very strong verbally, and another who is stronger in math. We have spent time and resources encouraging each child in their strongest areas. But part of me is wondering if, now that they are getting older, perhaps we should be spending our resources working on their academic weaknesses.

Any thoughts on this?

I think it depends on whether the weaknesses are truly weak compared to age/grade peers, or whether they are just weak compared to the outlandish strengths.

Our DS9's weaknesses (social skills, writing, fiction reading) are truly weak, so we have always spent time shoring those up. We have spent time on strengths because they feel rewarding to him; but in terms of minutes per day, weaknesses get far more time. (We do try to make that time as enjoyable as possible too.)

We are seeing serious payoff in that the weak areas that he used to hate spending time on are becoming actively enjoyable for him.

DeeDee

I wish I had been encouraged in my weak areas rather than constantly celebrated in my strong ones.

With ds , we spend a lot of time on his strength.. math. That being said his homework (for kinder) has all been writing (his weakness). He absolutely HATES writing. His printing is very much age appropriate. His spelling is above average. I think its a good mix between what his teacher sends home and what we afterschool.

We spend a fair amount of time on remediating true weaknesses to get them to the point where they interfere as little as possible with ordinary functioning, but we aren't focused on some arbitrary standard of "being well-rounded". We don't want him to have any options he might want to seriously pursue closed prematurely because of poor skills or inadequate preparation, but we do want him to have the opportunity to really shine in areas where it is clear that he can excel.

We do work on weaknesses here as well. DS really dislikes writing, one because of comments on his handwriting which isn't so neat when hes trying to do something rapidly, and two because he struggles to get the large thoughts out of his head onto paper in the form they want them in school ( ie write a few details about x picture....instead of writing the boat is green, he wants to write the boat is painted a green color and is floating atop the ocean as the waves crash against it) Since writing seems to be such an important portion of school this year I have started doing a writing workbook with him on weekends and on nights he doesn't have homework to get him more into doing it in shorter amounts of time as they need to do at school. Because he is so far ahead in everything else, his lack of writing stands out a lot more than it would regularily and I don't want it to impede him in future options because you cannot get away from writing, so I feel its necessary to help him improve his skills.
We allow him to work on more advanced math on his own online and in his workbooks as he enjoys doing that in free time.

DS8 works on his relative weaknesses in school, but for outside activities and enrichment we focus on his strengths. We are lucky that his weaknesses are relative instead of having the potential to actually hold him back so far.

we go for the strengths. DS10 truly hates writing. I can't imagine using his free time to make him work on that. He knows his stuff, he just doesn't want to put it on paper. He has amazing vocabulary, spelling and grammar. IMO he doesn't have to be an A student in writing if it comes down to a grade.

I would love to just let the " school " do it but well...thats not going to happen, they will just complain instead. I do think writing is as important a skill as reading and math so I want to make sure my son even if he hates it can write properly. This means getting it from his head to paper. Without great writing skills education becomes harder and harder the higher you go.
I do not take a lot of his free time working on it, just enough that over time the improvement starts to show through.