So I had an interesting conversation with my middle schooler recently about growing up with giftedness and intellectual intensity and what it means for middle school and high school. Long story short he asked a question that, while I came up with the "right" answer for him, I am not sure I truly know the answer. For those moms who passed down their gifted and intellectual intensity gene..what do you do as an adult that fuels your giftedness and intellectual intensity while also balancing the time and energy needs of the curriculum development, teaching, driving etc. that your intellectually intense and gifted child(ren) need?

Read

Volunteer

Music, both playing and listening

Homeschool.

All of the above (advocate, read, volunteer, music) plus research (about giftedness, etc) games, sports, puzzles. I'll admit, I like it when the gifted teacher gives the girls a new logic puzzle or sheet of perplexors to figure out because I like working them out too.

I still enjoy learning new things and now I can learn new things along-side my daughters. In the last year, we've taken up geology and entomology as a family. DD10 has always loved fossils, rocks, and insects, and DD8 has followed in her footsteps. Now we are taking a more educational approach to their obsession. They have learned that it takes effort and some research to actually figure out what the pretty rock is and how it was formed, or which family an insect belongs to, etc. I took a ton of science classes in college for my minor (including geology), but at that time I was more interested in biology and botany. So I've learned a thing or two since we started these projects. DH just sort of rolls with it, but boy-howdy you should have seen how excited he was when he found his first shark tooth (Ptychodus mortoni)!

A lot, by most people's definition of this term.

I'm a classic Jill-of-All-Trades. But both of my parents were like this as well, so it doesn't seem odd to me until my friends comment on it with surprise.

I help to run a message board (much like this one), read voraciously, listen to and play music, knit, sew, and spin, (and I design my own patterns as well), garden, volunteer, homeschool, etc. etc.

I'm a scientist and am creating a free online tool for diagnosing rare diseases. It uses a novel algorithm.

I also do math and theoretical physics on my own time.

I like Sci-Fi, too.

Oh I forgot...not only do I read, but I volunteer in the school library....and because I am not on the clock, I have the ability to stop and read a picture book if it catches my eye...and scan longer books...usually I am looking to see if my son might like the chapter book and the picture books are because I love children's lit...ds9 rarely reads picture books anymore.

I'm studying another graduate degree, starting a business, and taking care of DS full-time. In the last year, I've designed a national strategy around breastfeeding and human donor milk that could ensure that all Canadian very low birth weight babies have access to human milk cost free.

I've also written a children's book about a toddler who nurses, as our culture is heavily anti-full term breastfeeding. I'm going to donate half the proceeds to LLL and Dr. Jack Newman's International Breastfeeding Center, to provide free lactation consulting to low income families. I'm looking for a cause-motivated illustrator to partner with.

So, in a nutshell, social entrepreneurship.

Since
(1) the curricula and pacing in American schools are often unsuitable for both gifted and normal kids, necessitating afterschooling
(2) elite college admissions is opaque and subjective
(3) college financial aid formulas are complicated

gifted parents in the U.S. are "blessed" with many intellectual puzzles to solve in educating their children .

For example, there is an entire non-fluffy book "The Early Admissions Game: Joining the Elite" devoted to where your children should apply early (early fall rather than December) to college to maximize admissions chances. The cover of the book has chess pieces, suggesting that this game is complicated, just like chess, and the text discusses probabilistic models that can guide the decision. Cool, I like chess and probability problems. It's arguably unfair to make the system so complicated, but the complex system has been created who say they are more devoted to fairness than I am.

Balance? What's that?

For years, the "time and energy needs" of learning everything I could about giftedness and making sure my son was in a good place education-wise was the single best outlet for my own giftedness/intensity. This was an incredibly enriching process and period for me, teaching me volumes about myself and my own educational experience, among other things.

However, my son is in a near-perfect school situation, so there's little for me to do in terms of advocacy for him, and I have only one real-life friend with whom I can safely discuss my passion for gifted issues, so I kind of feel like I'm reaching the limits of what I can do with this line of exploration, unless I become active in gifted advocacy at the local or national level, which I occasionally consider.

I've tried to direct some of my energy and drive elsewhere, with reading, writing, traveling and volunteering (both on my own and with DS), but I don't have any intellectual pursuits in my life right now that are nearly as exciting or fulfilling as those first few years of discovering this forum and all-things-gifted. So, in short, I'm not dealing well at the moment, feeling very bored and restless, looking for the next big thing.

Gifties can be very good at finding ideas to explore or puzzles to solve. Have you thought about taking one or more courses in a field you're interested in but never pursued? Is there a writer's group near you? Writer's groups can be very good for stimulating the imagination and getting pen to paper.

I have listened to some of The Great Courses on CD. Just finished an evening continuing education course this week. Haven't tried a writing group, but I've considered them. I'm thinking I might need a "cause" more than anything. Just taking in information isn't enough to shake the feeling of idleness...

gifted parents in the U.S. are "blessed" with many intellectual puzzles to solve in educating their children .
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So True ! This my full time job !

homeschool ... and always trying to come up with new ways of reaching out to our little Autistic "genius" and his emotionally intense brother

I build things. Furniture, lego sets, houses and gardens in Minecraft (oh yeah, I went there. . . LOL).

Not enough. See Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration. I am still in the dis-integration part. Hoping to go back to school in the fall.

Near-constant advocacy (by necessity more than by choice) and an intellectually demanding "part-time" job.

And I'm in a book club.

I'd love to get another graduate degree (the original one was in business and decision science) but even if I found a way to finance it, which at this point is only in my dreams, none of what I'd like to study is fully available online and that is the only way I could do it.

You could work on advocacy on gifted issues at the national level! Gifties everywhere could use the intelligent support of folks like you!!

Great responses everyone, thank you!

MsFriz…I think I may be in a similar situation from you. I have always had to research, problem solve etc. all the educational aspects for everyone--while its not perfect, I feel like I know what I need to know for my kids. So what's next?

I work for a major corporation, currently in a position which is new to me and the division, lightly resourced and thus taking up a lot of my intellectual and emotional energy. It's one of the few jobs I've held that have sustained my interest being the initial learning period, perhaps because there is always more to learn/do/try/revise.

Beyond that, I read (rather, listen to books between work and home), research various topics (whatever isn't making sense to me at the moment) and crash into bed after a few hours with the kids each evening.

Someday, perhaps there may be more to me...

This is such an important question because you know that if the next generation produces a child, the whole scenario plays out again.

Your gifted son should think about how a future partner and hypothetical child would work out these gifted issues.

The highly gifted parent has to be interactive with the highly gifted child. There is no one else to fill that need.

It is a waiting game until the gifted child is old enough to be with the other gifted children in their town, region, country.

Our child is still young, so we are both very hands on.

Gifted people are in every field, just at a high level. The gifted parents pursue every passion, talent, gift, they have and encourage their child to do the same.

Gifted parents advocate all the time and watch to make sure the child does not get too confused being in situations geared for the average-IQ child.

There are always a lot of questions being asked. We are always balancing our goals with our day-to-day choices.

We have verbal giftedness, too, so there is much discussion and debate.

We take in every bit of information we can from all available sources.

The gifted people are always busy and are usually moving / talking very quickly.

That's great to discuss with your child, because the choice of having a life partner or not is a major decision. Thinking about how a gifted family makes it all work is very interesting to say the least.

Gifted people are in every field, just at a high level. The gifted parents pursue every passion, talent, gift, they have and encourage their child to do the same.

Gifted parents advocate all the time and watch to make sure the child does not get too confused being in situations geared for the average-IQ child.

There are always a lot of questions being asked. We are always balancing our goals with our day-to-day choices.

We have verbal giftedness, too, so there is much discussion and debate.

We take in every bit of information we can from all available sources.

The gifted people are always busy and are usually moving / talking very quickly.

That's great to discuss with your child, because the choice of having a life partner or not is a major decision. Thinking about how a gifted family makes it all work is very interesting to say the least. [/quote]

Gifted people are also at low levels too. Those who were failed by the education system often end up with problems that limit their options. They are then is not as good position to support their children and so on.

A father answering here. As your children get older, they can discuss things with you at an adult level, and reading material you select for them may interest you as well. Since my 10yo is an avid programmer who wants an Apple computer (maybe this summer), I bought the biography of Steve Jobs by Isaacson. We both read it and have discussed it, and now we are both reading a biography of Bill Gates by Manes and Andrews.

Adding onto Bostonian's observations-- ANY area of passion may turn out to be a shared (innate? nurtured? hard to say) interest with a HG+ child and parent pair.

In our household, between DD and I this is social justice and ethics/moral relativism, as well as metaphysics, for lack of a more concise term.

With her dad, the conversations are just as intense-- but on different subjects. Physics, optics, zombies, Monty Python,, bees, materials science and engineering; not necessarily in any particular order.

It's been lovely to have someone to SHARE some really out there and unusual intellectual passions with as DD has gotten into adult thinking and reasoning. She's always been thinking about this stuff, though-- so I'm not sure that those conversations were all that less intriguing for her being only 4-7yo. She always made me think about things in novel and surprising ways. As an adult, in fact, I found her musings to be capable of getting me to see things that I had heretofore overlooked completely simply because her perspective is so unusual. She sees things that others don't-- and maybe can't. It's great.

Those are what I call her "PG moments"-- like wondering at four if people are reading disabled if they don't follow posted rules... or is it 'ethically impaired' and if so-- are they really "bad" if they are truly impaired, or is that more like a disability... through her first in depth exposure to Romeo & Juliet, which seemed dysfunctional and a story (mostly) about a very spoilt and manipulative girl, maybe a cautionary tale for adolescents to listen to their parents (because she wasn't yet old enough to understand the 'pull' of first love)... right up to this past week's example with the AP stats problem referencing Duke TIP statistics.

Her observations are usually truth-tested and rather insightful. Just-- unusual.

So being her parent is interesting. SHE is interesting, intellectually speaking. I've been around enough other children now to understand better that I'm mostly bored to tears by children under 15 or so, but DD is different. I used to think that was simply because she's mine-- but she actually seems to be that interesting to other adults, as well.

She observes things and asks interesting and non-trivial questions.

This is a great thread and I love hearing all the parent answers (moms and dads)!

I've got a great career that I enjoy and that challenges me intellectually and socially. I am currently studying for an important certification exam and it's more memorization than I've done since high school! I can feel my brain stretching.

I also read a lot, both fiction and non, and DD and I have an occasional book club (we'll read the same book and then discuss). Last time it was her turn to pick (A Mysterious Benedict Society book -- easy read, but a lot there to dig into) and next up I get to choose (Watership Down). I have a BA in English, so these conversations let me sneak in various literary analysis techniques and schools of critical theory.

Before I had DD I wrote a book of my own and found it a publisher. It was nonfiction and not a huge bestseller, but it was a great experience.

And I have a list of hobbies that use my hands and exercise my more feminine side: knitting, spinning, baking, making soap, and so on.

I'm reporting out from the pre-school parent perspective, so it's a bit different. At this point we both have intellectually stimulating (and highly analytic) careers that luckily, give us great flexibility.

So, when we aren't working we read, watch documentaries, go to museums, play board games, design science experiments for out DD4, we write fiction together, we both will take random classes for certifications or degrees or just via coursera (or the like) to learn new things. Since DD4 is an only child we involve her in A LOT of these activities (and what we can't we do after bed-time).

We travel, we cook, we spend time with our friends who are similarly minded and our DD4 gets to play with their older kids. They all seem to learn from each other, which is really cool!

I'm sure these things will change as she starts to bore with her parents incessant need to watch Discovery Channel movies with her, and read excerpts from books we dub "science for the masses", but we integrate teaching into the every day. We take an interest in her interests and learn more to accommodate (I really did not know anything about dinosaurs until DD took an interest and I started reading DH's paleontology texts).

I'm not sure how this model will hold up in middle school and beyond, but I'm hoping she appreciates having parents who understand what it's like to be different than everyone else your age!