Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Specialized Interest School

Hello all...I'm somewhat new to the forum but enjoy and am helped by it so much already! We just completed our DYS application and are awaiting the results. Our DD10 is absolutely consumed with being a doctor/surgeon and has been since she was 3...for the longest time I assumed it would be the first in a long line of interests/career aspirations but she has never even wavered lol . She has a 'lab' in the garage in which she will dissect anything she can get her hands on (mostly small animals/birds/reptiles from the neighborhood...for a long time we didn't let her do this because, really, its hard to explain to people that your sweet daughter is slicing into a robin that flew into the window earlier that day! We finally could hold her off no longer) and devours every science/anatomy book she can get her hands on.

Our area has a medical arts magnet school that is quite impressive and nationally recognized as one of the only (if not THE only) ones of its kind for middle school. As part of the enrollment process we completed testing and that is when we realized she was PG. We then tried to decide whether we should have her grade skipped in her private school or continue with the idea of the magnet school because of her interest in the subject matter. We have enrolled her in the magent school for the fall and are all tentatively excited about the upcoming school year.

Have any of you had experiences with a child hanging onto an interest like this? If so, did to continue with it into an actual career choice? Am I doing her a disservice to let her be so involved in one subject area too soon? We are extremely intentional to let her know it's okay to change her mind at any point about 'what she wants to
be', etc, but am concerned about the line between being supportive of what she loves and not making her feel that this is what I EXPECT from her. Any thought would be appreciated!

Yes, my dd13 is exactly that way. My dh was hesitant about encouraging our dd's interests when she was very young as well b/c he thought that they were unrealistic and/or dangerous. Mine will be 14 in a few months and is entering 10th grade in the fall.

I have old mommy and baby swim class cards on which the instructors noted that she was a "fish." She has been drawn to the water since she was a baby. At three, she wanted to be an underwater photographer of manatees. That later became a marine biologist with a specialty in manatees and other sirenians. That then became marine mammologist with, again, a specialty in sirenians. She's contemplating tide pool biology now b/c she really likes the pacific Northwest and feels like she might be happier there than Florida.

She's been a member of the Save the Manatee Club since age five, has contacted some of the schools she is interested in attending for undergrad school to discuss her high school class choices, and got open water SCUBA certified at age 12 (she's been diving with an indoor SCUBA Ranger program since she was 8, which was the youngest she could start).

I, obviously, cannot tell you if this has continued on to career yet b/c she's got a few more years of high school, but I'd be really surprised if her ultimate career choice isn't in this general field. I am also, probably obviously, going to say that I support your choice to let her pursue this passion b/c I've done the same.

With a child this driven and unusually directed, I think that it would be a disservice to try to sway her from her love.

eta: I just read part of your post to dd13 and told her that someone was posting about a kid like her with a long term passion. Dd says that it is "awesome" and that she hopes that she has a kid like that one day and that your dd is going to be this amazing surgeon who saves lives .

Wow! That's amazing. Thanks so much for sharing your story!! Helps me sleep better at night knowing someone else has come to the same general conclusions haha! Going to be a wild, fun ride seeing how these kiddos are going to make a mark on this world!! .

I was a child like this.

I was interested (okay, this is an understatement) in veterinary medicine from the time I could talk. (Seriously interested-- not the way some little girls go through a cutesy 'animal doctor' phase).

My parents weren't exactly sure what to do with me. Neither of them were in the least mathy/sciencey people. They kind of left me alone and let me enjoy the obsession, assuming (as noted above) that it would change with time.

Not really.

Well, I discovered genetics in middle school, so that altered things a bit. But I still worked at a prestigious animal hospital all through high school and later became a tech prior to leaving for college. I planned (at that time) to major in biology as an undergraduate and attend grad school for genetics. (I'm old enough that there were literally only about five places in the country that offered a full genetics program when I graduated from high school.)

When I took organic chemistry, however, I was HOOKED. Omigosh. It was beautiful. I loved the instrumentation, I loved the puzzle-solving aspects... I just LOVED it.

So I majored in chemistry. Too.

Okay, where am I going with this?

Even though my parents didn't really push me, they still retained that "our daughter, the aspiring veterinarian" as part of my identity, and it was part of my identity as a young woman. I was the kid that wanted to BE a veterinarian before I could SAY veterinarian (and I talked early, by the way). My employers thought that I should become a vet. I have the touch. Animals love me, and my surgical skills are fantastic. I have that "whisperer" thing with animals which really can't be taught, and did even as a tiny child.

It seemed like betraying my destiny when I opted to pursue neuropharmacology and bioanalytical chemistry for graduate school. Why did I do it? The intellectual stimulation was extreme in that field. In vet-med, okay, it was like drinking coffee. Better than water, certainly. In analytical chemistry, it was like my brain had access to rocket fuel-- it allowed me to truly test my brain and find out what it could REALLY do.

It was like thinking all along that I had a nice Mercedes and was going to drive it on the Autobahn, only to learn that, no... really my brain was a 12 cylinder Lamborghini and was starving for MORE.

As long as parents understand that some of the personal mythology of childhood creates its own gravitational pull on us as adults making career choices... then I think that it's fine to encourage those interests. But be sensitive to, and encourage, exploration beyond them, too. Maybe even INSIST upon it.

Understand that changing your destiny to follow your heart's desire isn't easy, and it gets even harder when you feel like you're changing everyone else's expectations, too.

Multipotentiality is really a curse in some ways. It means choosing to be HAPPY and in love with your occupation rather than 'most successful' or 'best fit for my abilities.'

I'll also add that I think encouraging kids like me into magnets that seem to suit their abilities is fine... BUT... not if it limits their ability to fully develop unrelated areas of potential.

That's something that my parents did really right, but only because they didn't know any other way. If I'd had a way to get into a STEM high school, I'd have been there, and it would have been sad in the end, if I'd missed out on some of the truly exceptional material I was exposed to in the social sciences and in English literature and composition during those three years.

For this reason, I'm not a fan of early specialization in a child with multipotentiality.

Development of multiple areas is too important to their ability to sustain work-life balance in the face of all that life throws down at us.

I'm not working in my field anymore (special needs parenting can do that in a heartbeat, by the way). But the other things that I had as areas of giftedness and the other potential that I took the time to develop (musical, social, and service/leadership) continue to give my life meaning and satisfaction.

That's a great perspective...and the possibility of her feeling like she is 'locked' into medicine just because that's what everyone has known she wanted to do forever is my number one reservation. In fact I worry about her feeling that I'm supportive 'enough' because I'm constantly ending my sentences regarding her future with "if that's what you end up deciding to do!!'".

Your perspective to the idea of multiplepotentiality will keep me watching to make sure we have balance in other areas as we progress with this...I feel like we're at a crossroads with her education since beginning the testing process in February. Before that, I'd never heard of DYS or the terms 'highly' or 'profoundly' gifted. I'm hoping (fingers crossed that our DYS acceptance letter will come this month- test scores are well within range) that questions like these are something a consultant can help us with! My biggest fallback thought when I get going around in circles is that nothing is permanent at this point! We can take her out just as quickly as we out her in if it seems to be too...anything.

Super appreciative of your thoughts and shared experience!! Keep them coming!

I'll add that my dd13 is very, very talented in writing and, in encouraging her interest in marine biology, we haven't excluded others. While she took two science classes in 9th grade and did two college summer science camps in June (this month) right after school got out, she also participated in honor choir and musical theatre in middle school. She's participated in, and won, regional writing contests and took (and is taking next year) pre-AP English courses. We encouraged her to just take one science class next year so she has time to do Mock Trial or some other extracurriculars.

Point being, honoring or encouraging extreme interests doesn't have to mean excluding all other aspects of life. They can be intertwined as well. Dd met with a scientist for a career day who wrote the intro to a textbook she had read on Florida manatee biology and anatomy who was, ironically, living in Colorado at the time. One of the things they discussed was the value of strong writing skills for scientists.

It's difficult to know if someone this young will become a doctor. It's a long, long road to become a physician- 4 years college (ideally a science major with top notch grades), 4 years medical school (which can be grueling), then more training. I did 8 years of training post-medical school, working over 80 hours a week, paid $35,000 a year.
Where I went, at Harvard Med, very few of the students had actually decided to become a physician at an early age. It's too early really to say.
Some subjects are interesting to study but don't lend themselves well to a career, and vice versa.

She definitely has other activities/interests (swim team, tumbling, chorus and art class) but its just a curiosity to me to see her so single minded over the years. What I'm hoping will happen at her school is her getting a sense of whether or not she will continue to have an interest in medicine after delvong into it in a structured environment. I'd rather her know in 9th or 10th grade that she might want to do something else than year three of pre-med! I'll be a lot more confident that she can go the distance with this road if she is still as in love with it after 7 years (there's also a high school wing of the school) of exposure. What I'm getting here is affirmation that letting her be as absorbed as she might choose to be right now might not be the best thing for her...gotta facilitate exposure to lots of areas while still feeding her passion of the moment.

That's exactly it.

Better to know sooner than later, true; but also better to not have completely painted yourself into just one corner to start with. That's where loving parents prod children to remain interested in other things, too, and to make time for those things.

FWIW, looking back into my childhood quirks, I can honestly say at this point in time that it was GLARINGLY apparent that my destiny lay in science of some kind. My parents didn't recognize that, because neither of them thought that way and so they didn't see it for what it was when I attempted to 'test' a pair of pet rodents as to: color preferences, learning, and memory at six years old. I was (completely intuitively) using controls for my variables in each case.

While I was a kid with very high potential in visual arts, in music, and in writing, I was a scientist. Hard-wired-- it was just how my brain processed the world and how I approached learning on an instinctive basis. I couldn't shut that off if I tried.

I see the same characteristics in my daughter, by the way. She has wanted to be an attorney (civil rights law) since she was six-- so the same kind of durable interest, basically. I don't make too much of it, other than to praise how well she knows herself (she loves to read-read-read and can read truly awe-inspiring volumes of information in very short periods of time, and her debating skills are exemplary, including persuasive writing and the ability to take either side-- even extemporaneously). Still; I wonder if her destiny isn't in science as well, and perhaps she just hasn't seen the subject that acts as the match to light that fire. She has all of the same signs as her dad and I both did as children. The same way of processing and discovery, the same intuitive grasp of the null hypothesis, etc.

It's interesting to watch kids like this as they develop.