Hi all,

I was recently having a conversation with a Prof. who has taken an interest in my son. He wanted to know "Where he got it" (giftedness) and asked what I do (stay at home mom) and what my husband does (restaurant manager). After hearing my answers he said, "Oh, then he's a fluke". I didn't know how to reply to that, and was a little offended.

It only occured to me later that I could have mentioned that I was in the gifted program when I was a child. I guess I'd had it impressed so strongly upon me while I was growing up that one doesn't toot one's own horn that I'm always at a loss when someone asks that particular question.

So I'm curious... how do you answer that question? "Where does your DS/DD get it?"

well, that was rude of him. and judgemental. I'm not sure I'd let my child be around someone like that.

I understand it is possible for two people who are not gifted to have a gifted child, though I suspect at least one parent always is and no one ever knew...it does show a genetic tendancy I hear.

But I don't know what your and your DH's jobs have to do with anything. Just because I COULD be a microbiologist doesn't mean I want to work 80 hours a week outside the home, in a lab...I CHOSE to work around my children. I think raising them and helping them to succeed is the most important job I have.

I probably would have asked him what the heck he meant by that. Then he would have realized what a maroon and stammered...at least I hope...

Choice of profession and university attended are generally used as IQ proxies.

However, these days, the ability to fund a SAHMs comfortably is generally indicative of higher wealth and, therefore, as a proxy, higher IQ.

You give him a bawdy wink and tell him it was your mailman.

Ha! Yes, that was incredibly rude of him! I'm afraid I would have responded rather rudely, myself. Something sarcastic like, "yes, isn't it amazing, since the rest of us are idiots?"

As mentioned above, what you CAN do and what you do are not the same thing -- reminds me of a friend of mine who had a PhD in psychology, and preferred to work at the 7-11. He said it was a great place to study people.

the school of life has very valuable lessons to teach

Can't say I am impressed with most professors. Most have very little knowledge outside of their expertise and would fold in a heartbeat in a real world get it done environment. They live in a world of extreme certainty and nearly perfect information.

Quite the opposite of managers and senior executives who have to constantly measure and track and investigate and who must deal with people - who are very complex.

Larger restaurants with 100+ tables and 50+ staff are extremely complex entities. I doubt many professors could do it.

"No, he is a little boy. A fluke is a parasite who insinuates itself where it does not belong."

I would have asked him what he meant by that, but it wouldn't have been the first person I would have had to roll my eyes at later on for being a not so bright-bright person who sticks their foot in their mouth.
Assumptions happen all over the place though, I experience it regularily being a SAHM when dealing with public school educators. They assume they need to talk to me like I'm 10 so I'll understand, when really I hold several more degrees than they do

I think when your kid is outside the norm you get it no matter what. DH and I have "acceptable" professions for gifted people and went to prestigious colleges so people think we are obsessive tiger parents who have been flash carding their kid since birth, possibly even before. It's not that it's genetics or luck or a fluke, it's that we are mean, bad parents. I think it's any way they can explain how it's not their kid.

But rude is still rude. My father in law loves to couch rude in "I wasn't expecting that" as in, I wasn't expecting you to look so nice" (said to me on my wedding day), or I didn't expect you to be good with babies (when the first grandchild, my nephew preferred me to him). Personally I love to respond with the playing dumb deadpan sort of response, oh what do you mean? Although the fluke is parasite comment was good LOL!

DeHe

Well, that is incredibly rude!

I will say that, as a university professor myself, I can attest to the fact that most profs are severely lacking in social skills (not me of course! ;))and many come from privileged backgrounds with very little real world experience (although this is slightly less true than in previous eras). I had one prof in grad school who had attended that private university from kindergarten (they have a lab school) through PhD, then worked there his entire career and was close to retirement. The ultimate ivory tower experience. Seriously.

I would have said, "He got it from where all gifts come" and left it at that. I would not have answered the "so what do you do?" questions. If he pushed it with some sort of inane retort, I would have used the classic southern USA line of "well, bless your heart!" while batting my eyelashes.

Or just say "DNA, I thought you would know that" and then walk away.

I think in this case it was likely "a professor thing" just as LNEsMom pointed out upthread. My DH is an art professor and I am a SAHM. Many of his colleagues from other fields don't know quite what to make of me and I have had several be rather dismissive and rude at university events. Many more though seem to have a level of envy that I am able to be home with DD (more men than women I might add). In my experience a lot of professors can lack social skills and look for "evidence" to prove a theory in what the average person would view as a normal, everyday conversation. I probably would have answered with my actual opinion of where it came from. If he is interested in your son and you were labled gifted as a child that would fit his theory. Why a gifted parent chooses to be a SAHM would probably have led to more in-depth and perhaps meaningful discussion. It would have been great fun to enlighten him:)

I've gotten this before because I am "just a teacher." I'm quite certain that most adults could not survive a day in a middle school! I've learned to just roll with it and say something sarcastic or witty. My son's older now and he thinks it's funny so when people ask him how he got so smart he'll say "Zeus is my real father." That always makes me laugh... though it does make some adults walk away with puzzled looks!

I tend to go with, "I've asked myself that many times," but I've also said "Genetics". "He's not mine, I'm just his nanny," my favorite line when I don't know the person and don't care what they think!

LOL at the mailman comment!!!

I have a HG nephew who at 5 could beat me at chess 50% of the time, and I'm fairly good at chess. He was also in Odyssey of the Mind and travelled around the country for competitions.

But as a teen he went down the wrong path and got into drugs. He now has a part time job at Home Depot. You can't judge a book by its cover.

My sister-in-law is a geology professor and she has said things around me in the past that really bothered me but she never said anything about my son's intelligence being a fluke, possibly because she assumes that her brother's side of the family is where my son got his intelligence. I don't know what I would say if she said something like that. I have wondered in the past if she thought I couldn't possibly prepare my son well enough to get into a good college since I only have an associates degree in accounting that I earned while working full time. I was also a single parent when I earned that degree and I stopped going to school after getting only a two-year degree to devote more time to my daughter after working all day.

When my sister-in-law isn't working as a professor she is working toward earning more degrees while I am a stay-at-home mom, homeschooling my son. I wish I could have stayed home with my daughter.

I asked my husband what he thought about the professor's comment. He said maybe the professor didn't mean it the way it sounded. Maybe he meant that it is unusual to have a stay at home mom to nurture her son's intelligence. He has had a lot of practice deciphering his sister's comments and turning what she said into something positive. My husband is a supervisor with excellent people skills and innate social intelligence that some people just don't have. Just because someone is a professor doesn't necessarily mean they have this type of intelligence.

Sometimes I think my sister-in-law just says things without thinking about how the person she is speaking to will take what she just said. I have wondered if she doesn't care if she hurts someone's feelings or if she really isn't aware that is what she is doing. I don't know that I would ever want to take one of her classes. I have just avoided talking to her as much as possible--until just recently. She told me her kids felt like ACT prep was a waste of time and they didn't really need it and that when she took it years ago you just took the test without any kind of test prep and she did well. I also did well enough without any kind of test prep to get into the college I wanted. I could have gone back to college while acquiring a lot more debt, but that didn't seem so smart to me. The main reason I chose not to is because I really enjoy staying home and learning with my son and I don't care if anyone thinks about me.

Neither my husband nor I "present" as gifted--and i truly haven't a clue where we'd falll on the curve. When we had DD tested on the WISC, the psych asked about our educational backgrounds, childhoods, etc. He looked at her paperwork and just said, "sometimes it (giftedness) skips a generation.". We have laughed about that often since. Everytime she "bests" us, we quietly tell each other "sometimes it skips a generation"...

People are inherently obnoxious. At the same time, it was more likely to be a thoughtless comment. He may have been wondering whether you and your dh provided an enriched home environment. I think that your educational background and hobbies would have more bearing than your SAHM status. A single question may be interpreted multiple ways. I usually give people the benefit of the doubt and ask for clarification. If they are clearly making obnoxious stereotyping/generalization, then I would call them on it.

can I share..this reminds me of my brother meeting my DDs...

My brother measured over 140 on an IQ test when we were kids and has always had "issues". I'm actually concerned that DD8 will turn out like him, highly intelligent but slightly mean and contemptuous as a defense mechanism. He has a good job, but is pretty anti-social.

Anyway, when he finally is in the States on a visit, he meets the girls, I think Butter was about 4 and The Diva was just a baby. Whatever Butter shared must have been quite impressive because he said to me later, that my kids made him think maybe he should have some too. That they were "obvious proof of our genetic superiority and that if his had even 25% the same DNA, that would still make them better than average." Well, I'm sure that sounds rude to the outside observer, but, coming from him, that is a HUGE compliment, lol!

My DD is generally assumed to be adopted, so I rarely get those kind of questions. Instead, I get "where did you get her from?" or (only once, thankfully!) "I always wanted one of those."

I am not good at snappy comebacks, but it happened enough that my stock comeback was "The discount aisle at Walmart, but they only had the one."

AlexsMom, that made me lol.

People can sometimes say the oddest things. As a SAHM living (by accident - long story) in a very, very low SES area, I get frustrated by people talking to me as if I don't speak English and am probably drug-addled. Sometimes it takes all my restraint not to announce my degrees.

good question. I can understand being offended if someone said that too...especially in that way. I have all different answers to this question depending on who asks. Sometimes I joke and say it's from him watching baby einstein if it's someone that knows how sarcastic I am. But I actually usually answer that it was a fluke thing, some strange combo of genes...although not quite in those words. I don't put myself down or anything, but our DS is PG and is just so much different than us that it's quite unusual. Dh was in a gifted program and I was never tested but could be MG possibly. Who knows...but what I do know is that we are not PG.

lol, we joke about that too. We never had a psych say that though...that's pretty crazy. I remind myself though that so many people don't have the skills to tactfully say things and/or don't know when or how to just keep silent.

Hmmm... Thought provoking.

The following paragraph contains a general "you", responding to several posters in this thread not just one, and intended to be addressed at everyone including me


Suppose we were talking about some other characteristic than giftedness - red hair, or ADHD, or being very tall, or what you will - and a doctor, without having enquired about whether you used hair dye or self-medicated with caffeine or had suffered from childhood malnutrition, made an off-the-cuff comment such as "so, s/he didn't get it from you" or "sometimes it skips a generation". I hypothesise that, although it's conceivable that you might notice the doctor had made an incorrect leap of logic, you probably wouldn't go so far as to describe the comment as tactless, let alone be personally offended by it.

I remember, in other threads, many posters (I don't remember who) insisting that they really believed statements like "gifted isn't better, just different". I don't think that position is consistent with being offended when a doctor assumes, on too little evidence, that one isn't gifted oneself.

(And since I've been tempted by such comfortable statements myself, but I think I would be offended, I address this at myself as much as at anyone.)

Have you considered responding to them in Russian?

You raise an excellent point, Colinsmum. I for one am going to come out of the closet and admit that I do value giftedness. I think where we get into trouble is with the assumption that that means thinking gifted people are better people. In trying to avoid that, we somehow persuade ourselves that we ought not to find giftedness desirable.

Let's pull out the ever-useful analogy to athletic skill. Parents of athletic kids are allowed to take pleasure and pride in it. They don't accuse themselves of thinking their kids are better people.

And yes, it would be tactless and insulting for a professional (a coach, or a sports doctor) to remark, "I guess it skipped a generation, huh?"

So I'm going to come out and admit that not only do I love my daughter, I love her giftedness. If she were to suffer a brain injury and lose her intelligence, I would grieve that loss, even as I would continue to love her with every fiber of my being.

I think maybe we all feel a little bit brow-beaten into saying we believe that "gifted isn't better, it's just different." See, it's that word better that gets us into trouble. It's a loaded word. But I, for one, think giftedness is wonderful.

That's funny. When I wrote that post, I actually didn't mean to imply the psych was being tactless. We had just told him our personal and family history -- laid it out on the table so to speak. He was truly just stating a fact (at least what he knows to be true). I think he was just telling us that we could believe the information he was giving us about her, even though it might not seem likely to us.

I guess my post didn't really fit here, as he wasn't making assumptions about us based on exterior traits (things like job, SES, etc). I also don't have any "ownership" of the gifted label.

It was just one of those moments when you look at your spouse and think.. (like the Talking Heads Song)...how did we get here?

Colinsmum - I don�t think gifted people are better people; however, higher IQ makes for better opportunities.

OP reminds me of MIL's comments about DS when he was an infant. MIL often commented about how DS was smart like his uncle (DH�s brother). She basically discounted DH�s and my intelligence.

I personally wouldn't find that either tactless or insulting, but rather obviously true. My DD isn't athletically gifted in the global sense, but she's a very good swimmer. I've often commented that she clearly didn't get that from me, and would laugh and agree if one of her swim teachers said it must have skipped a generation. But I've got no self-worth tied up in the idea that I can swim, whereas I do have self-worth tied up in the idea that I'm smart.

That is true, CollinsMum, but as someone who almost precisely that too - my children are all blonde and I am dark brown - I AM getting tired of variations of "so how did you end up with blondies?" and am considering spinning a tale about how they were really the result of my DH secret family with a Scandinavian model or something

I don't know - its odd no matter what the specfic content of the comment.



No, but now you've tempted me...