Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Do You Brag (Or Do Your Friends Think You Do?)

This blog pushed all of my buttons. Not only am I frustrated with people like this, but I'm downright pissed. Would you EVER talk that way about a parent who was relaying their experiences with a child on the other end of the spectrum?

I continually have to monitor any comment about my kids. We live in a small town and anything different is seen as suspect.

Why shouldn't I be able to share the milestones of my children's lives just because they're gifted?

It's very frustrating and isolating to not talk about or share the ups and downs of raising gifted children. I limit my discussions of DD & DS's achievements to other parents who have gifted children. Luckily, I can talk to my parents as while I was TAG my sister is off the charts HG, so they do get it. But my in-laws don't and most of my dh's family are educators! It becomes a competition because the favorite grandchild is capable of being a high achiever (not sure about gifted) but he's lazy. So any mention of what's going on with our kids - DD attends a private prep school and DS skipped 6th grade - is met with disbelief and derision.

In some cases, yes (e.g., a random conversation at the park). But there are cases that are pretty clear-cut: a blog that consistently updates the world on my-incredibly-gifted-child is vulgar and bragging, whether the gift is for academics or sports or whatever. So is calling the newspaper constantly because Junior threw the winning pass again or whatever.

Honestly, I think reactions like Ms. Slaton's come from insecurities and the fact that people who are cognitively gifted have advantages that other people don't have. If you're a gifted athlete and you get injured (common problem), your career may be over and you may not have a lot of other options. Outside of brain injuries, gifted people have seemingly endless options.

This doesn't mean that we have to hide our abilities, but it also doesn't mean that people should just shout them out constantly. This kind of high-profile bragging just makes it harder for everyone. Remember, I'm only talking about people who look for any excuse to announce Junior's latest accomplishment, not people who are responding on-topic in a conversation or trying to advocate for their kids!

Yes, me too. Here's an experience I've had, talking to a friend who has a child older than mine, and I dare say I'm not the only one: at some point, I realised that I could be read as doing one-up-man-ship, because we'd had multiple conversations in which she reported something her child had done, and I responded about mine doing something similar too. Of course, since she was talking about recent accomplishments and my child was younger, this often implied that mine had done this thing younger than hers... I didn't mean consciously to be pointing out that my child was advanced compared with hers, and I see no reason to believe that I meant it subconsciously, either. I frankly just don't have the social processing power to evaluate in real time how something I say is going to be perceived by someone when added to everything I've said in the past and bearing in mind their probable state of mind. It's all I can do to make sure that what I say is both relevant to the conversation and true. Generally if someone gives an example of X from their experience, giving an example of X from yours is safe - so, pitfall.

Ha! It's a no win because if you hold back Information they think you are doing so sympatheticly as to not hurt their feelings. And they are insulted that you feel like you need to hide.

The problem is that more intellectual ability is better, so a parent of a normally developing child is always at risk of taking your intent to be presentation of your child as superior (which they are in a key respect, no way around it). Due to the gap, we may have to spend a little time and effort to be tactful to make sure someone understands that we're not trying to lord it over them.

I think that the reason people aren't so touchy about athletic prowess is that it's easy to rationalize away any differences without affecting one's feelings about one's child. Intelligence is seen as static by most people, whereas athletic prowess is always in large part the result of tremendous amounts of physical labor. Athletic prowess tends to be limited to the first 2-3 decades of life, and thus has a limited potential payoff, whereas high intelligence generally lasts until old age. Developing athletic ability takes a big time commitment and sometimes money commitment on the part of a parent (whereas the common conception of the gifted may not see it the same way even if true), and a parent might feel that their child could be a high athletic achiever too, except that they've made other choices, perhaps to focus on academics... no parent who wants their child to be successful would ever trade away intelligence for some other goal.

Parental intellectual competitiveness by proxy is understandable, because people want the best for their children, and the ones most focused on that often don't want to consider that their children are limited in any way. Children with naturally high abilities threaten those parents' conceptions about their children. This is a scenario that will be repeated forever, or until we are all gene-tuned cyborgs with incomparable abilities. In the meantime I think it's best to work on self- and other-perception in order to keep feathers as unruffled as possible, without making apologies for who we are.

I'll have to disagree with you here. The top athletes are born with certain advantages... height, mass, higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, etc. These are advantages that no amount of hard work can overcome, because someone born with these attributes who also works hard will win every time.

What makes sports so different from intellect is this:

- Sports performance and ability are easily measured from one person to the other. People argue with the results of an IQ test all the time, but nobody argues with the scoreboard.

- Sports can be non-threatening, because if your child will not be competing, then that child's performance does not impact your child. So if someone else's kid is seven feet, and yours is five, it doesn't matter that the other kid can dunk without leaving the ground, because your kid is going to go do something else. That "something else" probably involves going to college and pursuing a good job, which puts that child in competition with just about everyone else who isn't seven feet tall.

- Being bad at sports is not considered a tragic flaw. Being bad at thinking is. As a result, the overwhelming majority of people like to think of themselves as above-average in intelligence, and they don't want a reminder when they're not.

We're not in disagreement on this.

Why do you think a lack of high intelligence is seen as a tragic flaw? I think that's a good way of putting it, and the best I can come up with is that it has implications for professional success. Maybe it's that intelligence goes to the heart of who you are every waking (and sleeping) moment, whereas sports is something you do that doesn't change who you're seen to be as a person?

I've been thinking about how talking about your gifted kid could make other people feel bad or inadequate. As Iucounu said, people don't want to think that their kids are limited in some way, and if someone mentions that Joey skipped two grades or started reading when he was two, it can remind others about something they can't give their kids.

Put another way, a very wealthy person might stay quiet when other people are talking about how they're going to pay for college. In this case, the person is being polite. S/he has something the others don't, and keeping quiet in this situation avoids making them feel bad or inadequate. Speaking up would just remind them about something they might already feel rotten about.

So in this context, I can see that keeping quiet about giftedness is appropriate (most obviously if the talk is about a child with developmental delays, but even if everyone else is just average-ish).

A friend and I met for lunch yesterday at a cafe the next town over. We were discussing the difficulties of parenting gifted kids and advocating for them in a hostile, uninterested school district.

Since the cafe isn't big and we live in a small community, we were talking in low tones. I noticed that we received numerous nasty glances from the table next to ours.

Sometimes people just want to be angry about something.

I'd answer that final question with an affirmative. I'd also expand on that by pointing out how physical abilities have fairly limited application... whereas intelligence affects EVERYTHING.

It even affects sports performance, though sometimes being too smart can hurt, too.