Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion I am a hot housing helicopter parent?

The term "hothousing" bothers me a lot. It seems so judgmental, as though teaching your child something he doesn't want to do is somehow abusive. IMO, the pejorative use of this term derives out of insecurity and a lot of other uncomfortable facts (some can be controlled by us, and some can't). What's the alternative? Letting the kid do only what he wants? That sounds like a way to create a person who's at risk for only doing the stuff he likes or is easy for him. It also feeds into the (dangerous) myth that HG+ kids just love to learn and that it's always easy/fun for them. That's just not true. Learning arithmetic may be easy for these kids, but learning how to write good expository essays and do calculus is hard, even with an IQ of 160. The rewards come later.

I don't know where work ethic comes from and how it develops. I suspect that personality plays a big role. Growing up probably helps, too. I didn't have a huge work ethic when I was really young, but I work very hard now.

I'm fairly certain that forcing kids to work well outside their skill levels, consistently, doesn't create a work ethic so much as a strong feeling of resentment (with gifties, it also feeds the myth that school is always going to be easy).

Forcing my kids to change the kitty litter and help with the kitchen probably contributes to the development of a work ethic. They may hate those tasks now, but I hope they'll look back on them in 10 years and understand why they were so important.

Right now my eldest is in a school environment that's cognitively difficult. He's struggling in a soul-searching way for the first time. He's hit a wall, and is realizing that some subjects are very hard, and that he can't study for 10 minutes and get an A anymore. I suspect that he's overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge and the apparent impossibility of writing even a single essay or getting through the next midterm. School used to be so easy, and suddenly it presumably feels like an enemy to him. I was there once, too, and it's hard. The only way through it is to keep suffering through one essay and one problem set after another. He can't know that yet, because you can't know it until you're on the other side of it.

^ What she said. My princess is not having a lot of fun learning the lessons that most of her peers learned before the stakes were so high. For whatever that is worth, I mean.

I remind my DD that most of her classmates had to learn how to wrestle with understanding, and to work HARD at learning concepts, etc. when they were in algebra.

She clearly doesn't believe me-- she's AGHAST that anyone could find it that hard.

Calculus, though-- yeah, she's hit a wall. It has nothing to do with her ability or her foundation (which is probably better than most of her classmates)-- she simply doesn't know what to do in order to help herself. Like Val's oldest, she is learning what to do to help herself. She just is so new to doing that, it's as though her efforts are scattershot or even random. It's grossly inefficient, I'll say that for it. She also tends to resent guidance-- though sometimes we insist if we can SEE (knowing her, knowing the problem, knowing the options) that she needs to try something specific that she's unlikely to do voluntarily.

God help us if we had allowed this to transpire when she was 18yo and 2K miles away, though-- there's no way that she'd have made the transition. That might be personality-dependent.

This is key--

confronting the fact that one (suddenly) has to WORK for understanding is a serious challenge to one's worth and identity when it has never, EVER happened to you before.

It is very difficult to adopt or maintain a growth mindset when one has simply never had any data to support it.

Honestly, it's been a problem for her to GET the help that she needs outside of coming to us, too-- there is an assumption that she's having them on, see, when she says that she doesn't know how to study for a test, or use homework as a learning tool.

We had good reasons for not accelerating beyond what we chose for DD, but we're now reaping the dubious rewards of those choices and their imperfections.

Chores and other mandated activities should be for teaching "doing what isn't stimulating but is necessary for everyone's well-being" rather than school or academic (non-essential, basically) activities should.

School should be about supporting the development of a growth mindset. So what should parents do when it is clear that it isn't, and that nobody much gives a darn as long as our kids perform like top-notch Show Ponies?

I have no idea.

That's an excellent description of my entire college experience!

Scattershot and random.

Couple of thoughts:

First, worrying that other parents will judge you for pushing is just the flip side of pushing so that you'll be judged well by other parents. If your kid is different -- in any area -- you have got to deliberately ignore others' opinions in order to meet your child's needs.

Second, educators seem to be confused about the difference between a) having to do mindless and boring work for years on end without learning anything ever and b) having to learn to do things you don't want to do and work hard to reach goals. They are DIFFERENT. One is not the other. If the first one is somehow fine (according to them) why is the second hothousing? It's completely absurd.

Third, I had the opposite experience to FruityDragon. I worked hard and was a very good girl until middle school algebra. In algebra I was one of the top two students in my class. This other boy and I were in competition for the top grade, doing the homework perfectly in addition to extra challenge problems every night. The teacher would announce who was first every day. And one day it just occurred to me that this was bull$h!+. All I was doing was subjecting myself to the derision and endless teasing of my classmates and for what? I just didn't see the purpose. School was the worst possible combination of boring and difficult (lots of uninteresting busy work). And I just stopped. Stopped caring, stopped going to class, stopped worrying. Still graduated with an A average and about a dozen community college credits. But my work ethic was crap. That's not what I want for my daughter.

Totally agree with Val.

I would also add sometimes opportunities present themselves that you should take advantage of even if your child does not want to.

This ^^^^^^^^

Very nicely put indeed.

Thanks for articulating my exact thoughts far better than I could have!

I don't think everything has too be the child's idea. Ds7 has complained about maths being too easy since he started school but he would rather watch minecraft videos at home. I insist on about 10 minutes about 4 times a week maths, I insist he put his tablet away and play with lego or ride his bike. When he was 4 I insisted he do a term of ballet to improve his skills in listeningand following directions - he did another two terms by his own choice.

What parents in India will do for good grades
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/20/asia/india-cheating-parents-school-tests/index.html

A different perspective!

Yes Thank you.

That's exactly what happened to me. Spoiled, first born, HG, never enriched and treated like a princess. I had a blissful childhood free from any kind of strife. There are other advantages for sure, however... I generally only do what I feel like doing and I tend to ditch things as soon as they are too much work or too boring.

I want my kids to be able to see things through to completion and accomplish their goals, and that's not going to happen if I pat them on the head and indulge their every whim. Hot housing? Not a chance. Building life skills is more like it.

The thing is, these life skill learning opportunities are available for the NT kids in typical public education settings. For the clever kids we have to raise the bar in order to give them the same experience, and from the outside we look competitive and elitist which is not the case at all.

The "hothousing" topic is a difficult one. Here's one aspect I've been thinking about lately.

It feels like hothousing when the parent is, so to speak, "teaching to the test." When the child is being groomed very specifically to look good on certain narrow criteria and make it through the next hoop. It feels like hothousing when the goal is to push the kid into the next level of whatever, which they are in fact NOT really prepared for or suited for. It makes us feel bad for the kid, and it makes us frustrated that programs get watered down because of this kind of thing.

That's rather a different thing, I think, from insisting on challenge and progress and work ethic from a gifted kid, in matters of genuine intellectual interest or topics that are neccessary for what the kid wants to achieve (like accelerated math for a budding engineer).