I'm curious how many have high achievement relatives who perhaps look upon an identified gifted family member with amusement (at best), or disdain (at worst)?

What conversations have you had within your family about both, if any.

Interesting question. Not so much of a high achiever family here. DH was adopted and his sisters were pretty much work really hard to get a C and B students. We get disdain from one sister and it has strained our relationship for sure. We don't really talk at all about DD. She flat out said when we went to eat with the whole family and DD was 2 and picked up the menu and read and ordered what she wanted "well I would rather have an average kid over a gifted kid anyday." She would say disparaging remarks about dd in front of her, and told me the only reason DD knew the things she did was "because you answer her questions." Well, yes I do, it's called be a parent. Now we live across the country from DH's relatives and haven't seen his sisters in almost 3 years. I can't imagine dealing with it all the time.

This is more of a problem with LOW achievement relatives, truthfully.

My paternal relatives have all been EXTREMELY supportive. Including the emeritus mathematics chair of a public university, who comments that my DD is "just like" my father, and shares my regret that he didn't have a chance to know her. The two of them could have shared SO much about how it is to view the world through a PG lens.

I don't think achievement ranking factors in for my family. Some of my family is really accepting and nurturing of Emily and her intelligence and will openly praise her and talk about it with me without making me feel defensive.

Some of my family defends their children to me without me even saying anything to instigate it and this makes it uncomfortable for me because I don't see this as a competition in any way shape or form.

I don't think I am gifted, but I think DH and I are both high achievers and the actual problem I have from being a high achiever who was never recognized as one, is that I had (have) a hard time determining whether or not DD is gifted because for along time, I just assumed every kid was like her and she was normal. When she got into school, I fully realized she was definitely not normal.

ha - i'll second that! DD5 is our only kid, so we appealed a lot to our parents when we had questions - and they said she's just like we were as kids. so we hummed along in our delusional bubble for years, simply enjoying our lively little bean without a care in the world. but this year she hit Jr. K., and i have to say it's been quite an education for me! (ha - if not for her.)

so our family is totally cool with her (exhausted, but cool.) it's friends of the family and the parents of her peers that are the hardest to work with. i try very hard to be as circumspect as possible, but everyone knows we have issues, so i do get a lot of judgment for going the extra mile for DD when the prevailing perception is that her intelligence should take care of itself.

Aren't you amazed by so-called parents who "dumb-down" their children like that?

When DS was just able to sit up in a shopping cart and look at something other than overhead lights, I would talk-talk-talk to him about what I was buying, pointing out prices, naming the product and saying if it was a protein, carbohydrate, etc.

When he was a toddler, he'd want to find all the emergency exits and ooh-and-ahh over them. He wanted to know what they were and I explained to him the whole thing.

Yes...I look at little ones in the stores and wonder why the parents act like they are brainless blobs. Even before I knew DS was gifted, I always treated him as if he were able to understand years beyond what the baby books said was possible.

Here's my long-winded experience:

I had this issue with my in-laws, though I wouldn't call them high-achieving per se (a GP and a lawyer turned home-maker), just professional class. The limited extent of DH's family's interaction is directed at propping up my father-in-law's cavernous inferiority complex. He's a legend in his own mind and has taught his family to be threatened by intelligence in others. Not pretty.

When my son first presented conspicuous signs of giftedness, like speaking in short phrases (like "read book" and "I love you") at 5 months, I was met with incredulity and outright scorn from my in-laws. I took a "water seeks its own level" approach and have let DS' precocity speak for itself while limiting our interactions. I just don't have the patience to suffer fools.

Suffice it to say, my in-laws have been blown away and forced to eat their words, though I think they *still* haven't adapted to the pace and level of interaction my son needs. They infantilize.

---
For example, when playing with some trains with DS, a broken piece had to be removed from the set.

MIL said, "The train has an owie and has to go to the doctor."

*DS looks at her, perplexed*

I corrected her, "No. The axle on the locomotive is broken. It's being decommissioned and needs to be hauled to the roundhouse to be repaired by a mechanic; in this case, Mummy."

---
Another example: my mother-in-law visited us briefly this week and was having trouble opening a collapsing seat that we keep in a storage closet. DS18mo figured out the mechanism and set up her chair for her, never before having seen it. I noticed her diction was more elevated after that...
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So, I guess to sum up my experiences, I speak to my son like a peer and assume he can do and understand anything with sufficient explanation. My in-laws tend to infantilize him, but I think they're genuinely trying to meet him at his level and just need to let go of their insecurities.

There's still an undertone of his being a "pet" or fascination to them, so I'm cautious to ensure their messaging never crosses over to "we love you because you're X or because you do X." That was the messaging my DH heard as a child, and it has been the root of considerable anguish for him throughout his life. In our house, the rule is that love is unconditional, and I expect extended family and friends to honour that code.

I have to crack the whip and tell people to stop quizzing him most visits, though I'm experimenting with a few ground-rule reminders at the beginning of visits. I want my son to value his mind and find joy in lifelong learning, but not be constrained by a self-limiting view of himself as being "only" intelligent.

Frankly, I'm relatively new at this parenting game, so I could probably benefit from *your* advice, Ametrine.

Yes! A child's mind is so receptive and inquisitive. It's a real disservice to any child-- gifted or otherwise--not to offer an immersive, engaging environment. I wish more people understood that deprivation of intellectual stimulation is the mental equivalent of withholding food to children. They need all-encompassing nourishment and nurturing. Aargh!!

I'll get off my soap box now...

I'll third that

In our family there isn't any kind of disdain re: the gifted vs. high achievers. I think this is partially because some are both (not me - I'm a gifted low achiever, lol). We all just kind of support each other and cheer each other on.

Just thinking this through, though:

If you look at the history of parenting, even parenting kids who turn out to contribute brilliantly to society, "all-encompassing nurturing" is extremely unusual. It's a trend of our time, but didn't exist much before now.

When I grew up it was normal to be turned loose to play outside for long periods; nobody thought my mother was failing to nurture me by not talking to me 15 hours a day. In some societies, they have the 6-year-olds doing a lot of housework and contributing to the family's sustenance by generating income or carrying water. I'm not sure that's the kind of nurture anybody here is practicing, but I don't think it's necessarily wrong either.

I totally agree about providing intellectual stimulation in principle, and I talk to my kids a ton; but I profoundly dislike what I see a lot of these days, the making of motherhood into a high-pressure, high-stakes enterprise that must be done a certain way.

DeeDee

I would say " all-encompassing nurturing", as I termed it, is as much about interpersonal interaction as it is about giving your child the skills to be self-sufficient in an age-appropriate way. To me, nurturing would include providing a diversity of environments and experiences that support exploration, like the one you enjoyed as a child. To that extent, I think many parents throughout time have used the approach I describe just by incorporating their children into day-to-day activities as active participants, rather than as passive bystanders.

I agree. Profoundly so.

I realized the other day, too, that as parents, we are-- even the best/most mindful of us-- preparing our children for adult roles that we can imagine them having.

Odds are stacked against us there-- dramatically so. They won't be doing what we imagined, by and large, and the fact is that the pressure in parenting "well" with multipotentiality in the picture is the stuff of which nervous breakdowns are made. Air traffic controlling has NOTHIN' on that.

I feel very blessed that whenever I poke my head into that particular rabbit hole, my DH kindly grabs me by the foot and hauls me back out again and delivers a wake-up call to my sheepish self.

Now, of course, having read Amy Chua's Tiger Mother memoir, I can sometimes shake MYSELF with "What are your dreams for Coco?"



Just noting that I have found this a helpful de-escalation technique.

IMMV.

This definitely worked for my brother in law and sister in law.

So, it is effective if you want to produce doctors or dentists.

Works unless you have children who decide to do something that you never envisioned. Either because they truly want to, because an option is available in two decades that simply wasn't imaginable when you were raising them, or because they'd rather eat broken glass than follow YOUR plan for their lives, I mean.

Not that anyone in my family is highly oppositional about autonomy, subversive, or maybe non-conformist or anything. LOL.


It could be that this is a quirk in my DH's family and mine, but the parentally dictated "life plan mapping" technique seems to be most successful with the high achieving sort of child, and increasingly less workable the higher one goes in LOG within our extended families. In fact, most of the EG/PG people in both families have taken positively unholy delight in shattering their parents' expectations in one way or another. It's possible that this is a genetic quirk related to self-determination. (Cue Sid Vicious singing "My Way.")

Any career advice has to be couched as a two-way conversation and it has to be ultimately respectful and non-emotional in the extreme. Pretty much ANYTHING that I want my DD to do and she thinks is not something that SHE wants to do, I have to use logic and her own self-interest as very transparent objectives on my part. Always have.

Preserving options so that SHE can choose, and pointing out her strengths and matches with different occupations/activities is a way different game than thinking that I'm driving the bus. KWIM?

It works with gifted underachievers with respect to self-interest.

"If you are a doctor, you only have to work three or four days a week."

Just apply enough external pressure to achieve the desired goal and once the program is completed, coasting through life can resume.

I was raised for a STEM career and ended up on Wall St, after sliding through engineering. Totally accidental. And I think my parents were not even aware there was such a thing as a career on Wall St or how to get there from a small city in Canada.

I keep telling DD that I am just keeping the options open for her. Maybe she won't need Chinese if she is a marine biologist. But if she is making deals around the world, it helps. If she wants to be president it helps knowing Chinese and spanish.

And cleaning toilets is an option too, but won't buy her a first class ticket anywhere.

Life plan mapping is enforcing the way she wants to live and how she can support it.

This is when having two introverted parents without many close friends comes in handy LOL No competition or crazy remarks. Both our families are great for the most part but I do have to be careful bc my DD and niece are the same age.

My husband has an aunt who taught school forever and comments that all kids catch up by 3rd grade and we don't need to fret about DS. Right. Whatever you say.

OMG -- if this socially-awkward introvert hears that one more time from a so-called expert, she is going to lose it!!!

That was my mom's favorite line. She mixed it up with "{DD} seems perfectly NORMAL to ME." (with a pointed glance at us to indicate that clearly the problem was us, and that if we'd just stop all that 'nonsense' that she could get on with being a happy and more normally developing 1yo... 2yo... 3 yo... 4 yo... 5 yo... well, maybe... 6yo.. yeah, okay, maybe homeschooling isn't ALWAYS bad... )

Understand that my mother was a career elementary educator. So she definitely adopted a fairly smug/superior tone over it all, too.

Reminds me of a Simpsons episode where Bart's teacher reassures his parents that he will turn around. He takes Homer to a movie many years later, ordering tickets for... "One senior and one Chief Justice of the Supreme Court."

ha - that would certainly be a wrench coming from one's own mother!

for me the hardest (so far?) was hearing it from my best friend's mother - she's an M.Ed prof at a very well-respected university - several of her students teach at my kid's school, one of them in her actual class. although... now i actually wish i'd had that conversation with her about 18 months sooner - might have saved us 30K.

Sadly, this is probably a pretty common attitude among the M.Ed. crowd. Education schools do NOT focus on (or often, even address at all) giftedness. This high level of cluelessness and denial about basic facts in educators' own field is rather Orwellian.

Given that my father was an Ed.D., this may explain his complete and absolute inability to understand me.

just... wow. i grew up in a family of educators, and it really boggles the mind that professionals who preach individualized education all day long can be this dogmatic. silly me, i always thought the point of academia was intellectual rigour, if not basic honesty.

Evidently not. No. The point of education for educators is to confirm one's professional biases. When necessary, it is perfectly acceptable to destroy counterexamples or shame them into conformity with the currently in vogue (or just fondly held) theory.

Cognitive dissonance is... icky. Ergo, whatever is causing this must be unnatural and blame needs to be assigned.

Back in the day, fellow psych undergrads who couldn't pass Statistics for Psychology inevitably switched to education majors.