I saw the Public versus Private thread turning into a hot housing thread so thought that I would try to spin up this thread because a) it is something I worry about, b) because it may help to keep the original thread on track and c) because I find it hard to imagine that others would not be interested in this topic alone.

I saw the second guessing comment in the public vs private thread and it struck a chord with me. I tend to over think and second guess things constantly/periodically, doesn't everyone that isn't a zealot?

I agree with a lot of what Ultramarina and HowlerKarma have said wrt this. I also vividly remember a post by Dude in which he mentioned mentally bringing himself back from a precipice over this.

I my own case, I have a pretty bright daughter that I try to create life enriching opportunities for to the best of my limited ability. She is afterschooled in Maths - is this hot housing? I wonder because sometimes wrestle with this - shouldn't she be able to just through her school bag down when she gets home or should I keep her in her ZPD and avoid her learning that everything is easy so executive skills and study skills wither on the vine of her young life?

She also has 'an ear' and can pretty well tinker with a musical instrument like a recorder, xylophone or keyboard until she can make a passable tune. She also has taught herself to read music and usually just bangs out some stuff, just airs and improvisations for a few minutes on the piano to de-stress a bit when returning home from school. I do not have her in any piano lessons because ii am afraid to overcommit her time and take the fun away but by doing that am I a bad parent for not trying to help her develope an obvious aptitude?

Similarly, should I just allow her to 'work thing out on her own' and just deal with life not really relating to her age peers and barely a hand full of grade peers as something of an ugly duckling or should I try to find opportunities for her to mingle with other such ducklings and try to help her to believe that she will soar as a swan one day?

I had her take the Explore and the SCAT tests to try and qualify for some residential classes this summer - am I engineering her life too much or just being loving and supportive parent?

Surely I am not the only one here well into my umpteenth guesses never mind mere second guesses.

madeinuk, I am (I think) pretty much the polar opposite of a hot-house parent, so I usually don't weigh in on threads like this because I feel like it just sounds like I'm disagreeable lol! Really I'm not

Anyway, a few thoughts from here -


And really, isn't that what most parents do, just in different ways and from different points of view?


I'd call it hothousing if: 1) it's your idea, not your dd's idea and 2) you're doing it to keep ahead of some arbitrary grade level or achievement goal etc as opposed to doing it because your dd loves math and is simply interested in pursuing a personal passion. The exception to my arbitrary hot-housing definition is after-schooling in a subject such as math because a child is *behind* grade level and struggling.


Honestly, that's my goal for my kids - to be able to relax and have some fun. I think that we sometimes risk losing the best part of our children's intellect when we have them saddled down with constant tasks - even if the tasks are for good reasons. Most kids I know today (including my own) are so very scheduled - they are in school for most of the day, then have lessons and sports and clubs etc after school. When you add in homework, where's the time for just being a kid? To think outside the box, create, let your imagination run wild? To play with the neighbor kids? To just relax.


She sounds a lot like my ds - he takes piano lessons, but not traditional classical music etc type lessons - his teacher is a professional musician who composes, and she focuses his lessons on a teeny bit technique and the rest improv and composition. DS loves it!


I think a lot of gifted parents of gifted kids get really hung up on whether or not they should help their children develop strong skill sets. I also don't think those abilities and skill sets simply disappear as our children grow if they aren't in the forefront of being constantly nurtured. At some point, some day, our kids are going to find their own passions and as adults will no doubt fit those passions into their lives as best they can. I personally don't feel that it's going to make a difference 20 years down the road if my child won an award or a huge honor for studying music *if* he was put in the lessons by me simply because I felt he was talented. I feel that the lessons etc we choose for our children should be things that they can cultivate as an enjoyable pastime. And bonus if they are talented at it and earn high honors - that's great - as long as it's *their* success and they wanted it.


If she's unhappy, do everything you can to find her peers she can enjoy and relate to. I wouldn't necessarily expect them to *have* to be high IQ peers either. Maybe find a sport or an activity through her music etc. Something she'd enjoy. By the same token, having her try out a DYS meet-up etc isn't helicoptering if you let her give it a try and then don't push her into it if it turns out it's not her thing.


You're engineering opportunities - that's what most involved parents do and it's not hot-housing unless you're engineering in detail. By having her take the tests, you've opened up the door for her to attend residential courses. If she wants to go, now she can. If she doesn't want to go, you don't have to send her. If she doesn't want to go and you force her to go... that might verge on over-helicoptering.

FWIW, my ds has attended the CTY Intensive Studies residential camps and he loved it. So it is possible for a self-confessed no-time-for-hot-housing-mom to send their kids to camp

polarbear

I go through this too and forget that during the school holidays DD is a mare to deal with because she has no activities.

She is starting full time school next term and mow the big issue is whether she can carry on with her things or if she'll be too tired. Part of me thinks she should stop gymnastics as she is not improving but she freaked out when I told her and has started practising heaps more to get to where she wants to be. Soooo do I let her continue or force a break...

Anyway I'm sure all my friends think I'm hothousing but I know I'm not - she is always begging for more.

To some extent, soft skills like persistence and risk taking have to be modeled and inculcated more assertively in the gifted set because, frankly, so few challenging opportunities present themselves organically. If academics are the instrument of choice through which they are taught, then so be it. Most children are intrinsically motivated to learn these lessons in sports or extra-curriculars, or find challenge in routine curricula whereas, for many gifties, their passion is more academic.

I think of it this way: if my child had a motor disability that prevented walking, I would coach him until the point of zero marginal benefit to get his skills up to speed. Likewise, I would see myself as depriving my son of necessary soft skills if I didn't ensure he had at least one academic outlet that was challenging. Let me be clear: the academics (or whatever) themselves would be secondary to the goal of learning resilience.

I am, quite frankly, scared of what an "appropriate" challenge will look like as DS gets older. He is a black hole of hunger for information. I fear my brain is turning into a sponge that fills and subsequently empties itself into DS' head. Anything less than a breakneck pace is met with a behavioral regression, so I guess that's an answer-- follow the child until diminishing returns set in (or you collapse, the latter probably first.)

ETA: other potential constraints = you run out of time or money for more activities.

Look at the situation that the neurotypical kid faces:

* School is likely to be just hard enough. If the child shows some aptitude in a subject, they can usually access enough challenge or differentiation within their class to keep them happy. The parent never has to worry "is this too easy?" or "is this too hard?" The parent cares about the child's education, prompts them to complete projects and homework, and helps them as necessary.

* Enrichment is provided because of a perceived general benefit (he's in soccer and takes piano because it's good for him). While the child can have input, the parent can also dictate in order to create a more well-rounded individual. There's no expectation that the child will be great, but that's OK.

* An area of talent (music, sports, etc.) is usually nurtured. The child could be good, so the parent may encourage and push the child to work hard (coach says he's great for his age, we're talking about going out for the competitive team).

In the cases above, the parent wouldn't be judged harshly. They would be considered to be normal caring parents (yeah, I didn't like piano lessons either, but it's good for 'em to have some music background). No one minds that the parent cares about their child's academic progress. And hey if he's good at soccer, he should try hard -- maybe get a scholarship!

Now, let's look at the child who is struggling with a LD:

* School is going to require ongoing monitoring and management. Advocacy must be performed, accommodations must be made, the parent must continuously ask "is this too hard", "is this too easy?" They have to marshal resources to help their child be happy and successful in school. The parent cares about the child's education, prompts them to complete projects and homework, and helps them as necessary.

* Enrichment may be necessary for the child to reach their potential. Various therapies and tutoring may be needed. This puts additional pressure on the child and parent but it's important for the child's success and happiness.

* Areas of talent are absolutely pursued. The child receives encouragement and opportunities to reach their potential (she's always struggled in school but she dances like an angel, we hope to send her to an arts high school).

The parent in this scenario, far from being considered a hothouse or helicopter parent, is praised for doing everything that they can do help their child. No one minds that the parent cares about their child's academic progress and is willing to put additional time and effort into that goal.

Now consider a child with a high LOG:

* School is going to require ongoing monitoring and management. Advocacy must be performed, accommodations must be made, the parent must continuously ask "is this too hard", "is this too easy?" They have to marshal resources to help their child be happy and successful in school. The parent cares about the child's education, prompts them to complete projects and homework, and helps them as necessary.

* Enrichment may be necessary for the child to reach their potential. Afterschooling, tutoring, academic camps and classes may be needed. This puts additional pressure on the child and parent but it's important for the child's success and happiness.

* Areas of talent are weighed and prioritized and some of them are absolutely pursued. The child receives encouragement and opportunities to reach their potential. However they may not be able to pursue all their talent areas, so choices must be made (she's a talented pianist, but really loves painting more and is studying with a local artist, plus her swimming schedule means she does't have time for everything she wants to do).

This parent is a terrible hothousing helicopter parent. Shame on them for pressuring their poor child, robbing them of their precious childhood! Boo hiss!

OK, I know this is terribly stereotypical (and doesn't even touch on the challenges parents of 2e kids face).

Our benchmark is longterm happiness. If what we're doing will make her happier in the long run (since, like any child, there are times when she'd rather goof off than do homework in the short run) then we feel OK with it. Coasting cause you're smart... not so good for the happiness.

Well...since you asked, I'll maunder on a bit.

The US has problems that create a gifted education gap. One problem is the conflation of high achievement with giftedness. Another one is that competition for college slots and good jobs is increasing. The result is that "top" colleges tend to look for high achievers, and parents and high schools naturally try to produce them. So we get a situation where everyone is supposed to look highly gifted. We also get an arms race: once upon a time, we had a limited number of older high school kids achieving like college kids via AP classes. Then AP got too popular and the stakes got raised, and now we have differential equations classes in high school and science fairs or internships or what-have-you in which teenagers look like graduate students or postdocs. We have spelling bees in which 12-year-olds memorize words they will never, ever use, like synecdoche and ingluvies. Focusing on spelling rules and Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit roots isn't good enough anymore (even though it may be way, way more beneficial to the kid). No, today's winners have to study the dictionary for 4-6 hours a day, every day because that's what winners do . Welcome to the new childhood. And no, a person with an IQ of 150 will not be competitive while studying for 60 minutes a day.

Plus, we get test prep for kindergarten and damaging pseudo-philosophies like Amy Chua's being taken seriously by too many people, many of whom are probably terrified that their kids will "fail" (i.e. get Bs or Cs, which means the same thing these days as far as college admissions are concerned). We also get things like algebra-for-many in 7th grade, which is presumably a response to algebra-for-all-or-most in 8th grade.

It's not about learning. It's about winning.

So the parents of extremely intelligent children can get stuck in a trap. We're trying to do the best for our kids, but are making decisions in a whirlpool made of conflicting messages, half-truths (or lies), and the loudspeakers of fear, dialed up to full volume.

It's hard enough to make good decisions that will affect a child's future, regardless. For the HG+ crowd, the difficulty is compounded by schools that frequently refuse to recognize high levels giftedness and see high achievement wrung out of studying all summer and every weekend as being its equivalent. In other words, the schools don't generally provide appropriate alternatives for HG+ kids and we're stuck. Here's another division worksheet, Lisa. There, I differentiated.

This leaves us making least-worst decisions on behalf of our kids (e.g. grade skips, subject acceleration, after-/homeschooling, etc). If schools organized themselves so that kids could go at their own pace, the problem wouldn't be as bad. But they don't. If they hired math specialists who truly understood both the subject and how to teach it, the problem wouldn't be as bad. But they don't. If we got away from industrial metrics like scores on high-stakes tests, the problem wouldn't be so bad. But we don't. If the colleges would reform their admissions practices and stop trying to push down their percentages of admitted students...etc.

So, of course you're second-guessing. It means that you're paying attention and that you care. We're all stuck in a situation that's designed not around learning about important ideas and how they fit together, but around 1) multiple choice tests that evaluate the teachers rather than the kids taking them, and 2) winning the college admissions race.

What Val said. Also-- what Ivy and Aquinas both said, too. We're living the consequences of not having achieved getting our DD into her proximal zone of development academically. It's been ugly, let me tell you. This is a child that has never done "homework" or actually "studied" anything. Passively picking it up was enough-- even for AP coursework, and even at 12-14yo. Well, the sudden transformation in her life circumstances has been-- um-- unpleasant, to say the least. She also lacks emotional coping skills for something which has proven to be SUCH an insult to her self-concept. This is no joking matter.

I know that we were (often) termed helicopter parents, and I'm equally certain that we were seen as relentless hot-housers, to boot. We weren't doing a cyberschool because we wanted to PUSH our kid faster, by any means. We were doing it so that we could (hopefully) keep things "even" enough for the next level-- and make sure that gaps didn't go unaddressed even if she COULD kinda compensate for them, mostly unnoticed by anyone but us. So if that is hothousing ("No, honey-- those are NOT what I call "notes" from that chapter. Please try again.")-- I'm guilty.

My standards were always higher than the school's-- but I had my reasons, as noted above. I had a good idea what was coming in college. It was clear as day that the people running secondary these days DO NOT.



More generally:


There aren't even colleges that are intended for high potential and deep thinking anymore-- that's what we're seeing, anyway.

Sure, there are opportunities to get into a research track early-- if you are one of The Winner's Circle, that is. Meaning-- high achieving, even relative to the college cohort you're a member of.



I've noticed that my DD's college courses are not about understanding anymore-- nope. They're about VOLUME, baby... that way the strivers have a way of "working harder" their way to possible achievement right alongside the genuinely high LOG...



um-- well, no, actually, since that ISN'T, in point of fact how many people at high LOG manifest that high ability in the first place.

Oh, bother. I guess that means that it ISN'T really suitable for "gifted" students after all. But we have put it in reach for those who are willing to sell their souls for a little more black market adderall. So it's all good.



My daughter cannot count on being able to do what we (and she) call "well" on exams merely by very thoroughly understanding, say.... philosophy. Nope. Now she has to spend a long time MEMORIZING 100 dates and terms verbatim in the hope of culling enough brownie points with memorization.


In other words, I'm really, really glad that I listened to Jon at least enough to not tell her that "college will be Better! Different, you'll see!" because-- it isn't.


College is the new high school. Only, new and improved, with additional performance and time pressure, and more complexity than any of us recalls as students.

Welcome to hell.

I'm sorry to sound kind of bleak here, but I tend to think that it is wiser to be pragmatic.

College is not (any longer) necessarily going to be "all that" for a truly gifted student.

Many of their peers are going to be hot-housed kids (or Tigerkids, or something along those lines), and relatively few of them are there for anything but the-- um-- WINNING.

So with that in mind, make sure that your kids have a good-- GOOD-- set of coping skills, excellent impulse control, and self-efficacy in place. Make sure that they have time-management and stress-management skills like an air-traffic controller.

Make sure that they don't expect post-secondary to be "all about LEARNING!!" because it isn't necessarily so.

It's about acing exams, checking the right boxes, getting the right people to notice you at the right time, getting signatures, completing the right number of meaningless tasks (right, wrong, or otherwise), and racking up the proper credentials along the way to a (presumably) golden ticket.

DD has been horrified by how many of her classmates (even honors students) simply do. not. care. if they retain ANYTHING after a final exam in a course. It makes her sad-- and lonely.

I don't know if this is the particular institution that she's at (though it has a very good reputation as a public research institution) or what, but this has been mind-boggling to me. It's the young adult version of Val's spelling bee description.

It sounds like the only way to win this game is by not playing it.

But then, what does that look like?

Reflecting about the difficulty of achieving adequate challenge for the most outlying of the outliers: I'm not the PG member of my family, so admission to a competitive STEM grad program did finally teach me (sort of) some work/study skills. But my PG sib never did encounter an educational setting where study skills were necessary, even radically accelerated +8 years. (My mom to PG sib: "Don't you need to study for (PhD) qual(iying exam)s for tomorrow?" Sib, 20 minutes later: "All done, Mom." Aces them, of course.)

I think the issues with needless volume (aka, busywork) were probably less with STEM subjects back then...I hope they still are! Otherwise, my conceptual, non-memorizing children will be equally disappointed with college.

Yes, yes, yes!

I sound incredibly cynical, and this is a tad of an over generalization, but university is one big anti-intellectual orgy these days. I say this having done grad school at a top-10 global university. Want to think outside the classroom's narrow scope? Better not step on Professor Insecure's toes or disagree with the tunnel vision with which he's wasted the last three decades of his life in some meaningless dalliance in minutiae. Want to get a research grant? Practice your grovelling skills and buy some knee pads! Don't forget that your thesis has to be inextricably linked to the Guvment's Ideogical Whim du Jour and must be beneficial on a narrowly defined cost-benefit framework derived by people who have no perceptible appreciation for the subject you practice in.

Challenges and fulfillment are largely self-created. (Yes, I'm an internal locus of control kind of gal, TYVM.) Everything I've ever done of any value has come from within, and that takes grit and courage. DS isn't going to learn any of that playing intellectual mental masturbation in a room full of people who think he's "being met at his level" by being given an extra digit to add. He's not someone else's social experiment to mess up, he's my child, who deserves the opportunity to fail and build character in an environment with an appropriate parental safety net. There's no value in his sitting in some dismal office 20 years down the road, doing the same white collar sausage factory garbage day in and day out, resenting the world, never having tested himself or done anything meaningful.

Whew. Do I trust "the system" to help my child build character? A resounding 4-letter-word no, hence my interventionist ethos.

I have no idea-- the problem is still that STEM requires this way and pretty much no other.

But we are thinking about what other options look like.

It's soul-crushing-- and we certainly didn't expect that, having been faculty ourselves. I'm hopeful that maybe it's just the lower division/gen ed coursework. But I'm keeping my mouth shut on that score, tyvm. I'm not making this child any more promises about "it gets better when _____" because I quite simply don't even recognize some of what I thought I truly knew.

It's kind of surreal.


PS-- for anyone that thinks that I'm exaggerating some of this, my daughter has spent the last 72 hours memorizing the phrases that shall pay from a 300 page HEALTH textbook, including such "gems" as the number of calories present in 1g of each of several "essential nutrients" (a list which includes ethanol, let me hasten to add), etc. etc. Do you know how to define the following acronyms? FIIT, SMART, FIRST, EMDR. Do you know the five steps to behavioral change? Can you give examples of General Adaptation Syndrome, explain the three hormones that are released as part of fight-or-flight responses, and explain the difference between essential body fat levels and healthy ones for both men and women?

This is a class that she and every other freshman on this campus is required to take in their first year. 90 multiple choice and/or matching and true-false questions, courtesy of Pearson's extensive test bank, I'm sure. You know, since they wrote that hash of a textbook, too. It has more different typefaces, photos of homogenous (smiling, model-thin, young, and distinctly WHITE) people, and BOLD, colorful text bubbles per square inch than a TIME layout does these days. Much of the information was outdated or inaccurate when it was "written" three years ago. And yet-- 40% of my daughter's grade in that course depends upon her facility in memorizing over two HUNDRED "factoids" that she has committed to memory with index cards laboriously produced. Have I mentioned that my child struggles with hand writing due to a probable connective tissue disorder? Her dad and I have quizzed her, helped her play a timed "game" with them in groups of 24 cards, etc. etc.




I hope it's enough. We're all like AEH's kids around here. WE don't (generally speaking) "memorize" our way out of anything rougher than a wet paper bag. We've been trying to make this fun by joking heavily about nutria ("Contraindicated" is sort of asking for this kind of definition, isn't it? As in "my nutria is a service animal") and cracking wise on the concept of dietary fiber... but really, this is awful. It wouldn't feel that way if it weren't for the fact that a lot of this is either unmitigated corporate-speak horse-derived fertilizer of the first order, and some of it is flatly WRONG-- not to mention just how much of it there is. It's astonishing, this kind of volume. I don't think I had this many notecards after a year of organic chemistry, or gross anatomy.

I know we're not hothousing now, because the one extracurricular DD10 is spending the most time on is the one we're pretty sure she'll never become famous for. Also, her coaches are pushing her, and we're gently asking them to chill out a bit.

But yeah, we've been down a road with DD where you could look ahead of her path and see something that looks a lot like greatness in the far distance, and no obstacles in between that are insurmountable by her.

Definitely make sure your kids are getting unscheduled, unstructured time every day, though. The lack is absolutely toxic to children. If they're not free-playing, that's an indication of hothousing.

True for adults, too. Play is essential for mental health.

This is where the nutria came into things. I won't mention some of the other jokes that have been made lately around here, as they are not fit for print. Suffice it to say that the choice was largely one of laughing or crying, and my family takes the attitude that NOTHING "isn't funny" and hey-- go big or go home.

Ahem.

But yeah-- I've thought of JonLaw often this week.

Adding a link to a post in Bostonian's thread on Differences between public and private schools which spawned this topic.

The thread from 2013 on How to Hothouse Your Kid, by KathrynH may also be of interest.

HowlerKarma, have you seen Quizlet? It's flashcards on computer basically. Download the App. My DD uses it. Great for factoid learning. There may already be a Quizlet set on what she needs or you create your own.

And big hugs HK. It sounds like a tough time. I can empathise, the sun isn't exactly shining here today. Googling new schools!

No, you are not a bad parent. It sounds like she has enough skills to enjoy music as a hobby and she isn't asking for formal lessons so I say don't open that expensive can of worms.

I am not positive, but I think I have happened, by chance, across at least two live interviews of the 'tiger mom' book author and her spouse on cable news outlets; the couple that I saw and heard are professors together at the same ivy league university. There is a main point about their theory that I think I heard over and over and to which I could not relate, but I think there is meaning in the distinction. To what I heard, they think it is tiger parenting when the actions of parent / students are coming from a place of insecurity and a feeling that if you don't do x, then y will not happen. For the GT / HG kids and parents, it might be more that their abilities are coming from and overflowing out of them from a place of confidence (more like, how are they reading those big words at such a young age when no one ever taught them?, why do they understand that scientific theory so young?). Higher order thinking comes naturally to the GT / HG children. I have never met anyone who could make a child have higher order thinking, so I have no idea how that dynamic would work. The example that I have heard used the most is forced practice of the instrument, the violin. Again, I have no idea how you would force practice. The personality type that I am most familiar with from all of my experiences is that the GT / HG children somehow from a very young age seem to reason, verbalize and argue like an adult and if they do not want to play or practice the violin, not only will the violin not be practiced, there will be a lengthy debate requiring water for your throat and tremendous patience because you are talking to a child but it feels like they are already of a member of Parliament or Congress. I have tried explaining to family, friends, neighbors our family dynamic. I have literally told family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, I am sorry I cannot do that right now I have to save my energy and voice for parenting this child. What I have concluded so far is that the experience is not common and you cannot worry about whether they are labeling you, they are probably not having the same experience. I hope that helps. I think sharing might be the way to help gifted families and I sincerely hope that there is even more support and understanding for people in the future.

Howler, don't kill me, but what are you objecting to--the content or the memorization? I feel like memorization is pretty typical in a lower-level intro course. These questions don't seem too hard to me, although nutrition/health (we're on the edges of my field here) dabbles in BS, it's true. I think it's weird that everyone has to take this course, though.

The exercise in caloric values is memorization without purpose. It's not like you're going to be using this information to calculate caloric values of an entire food. If you want to know, you test the food.

Presenting ethanol as a nutrient is a content problem... and a pretty severe one that any layperson could notice. It's probably not a good message to be confusing for college kids, either.

"Five steps to behavioral change" sounds a lot like received orthodoxy that crushes original though.

So many great comments, and I’m nodding and saying yes, that, yes, all the way through. And yet, I am still deep in the vacillating second-guessing zone, and pondering the strong message on the thread begun by greenlotus that if the kid didn’t ask for it and doesn’t want to do it, it’s hothousing.

It seems reasonable enough at face value, but where do you draw the line? Many of the kids on this board are very driven and intrinsically motivated. Others, including mine, not so much. Some days it seems like my job as a mother is defined as making them do things they don’t want to. DS is immature and ADHD-I, no executive function skills and little independent functioning/ responsibility. He has anxiety attacks when faced with something he doesn’t already know how to do. And he’s probably the least competitive kid on the planet. Of his own volition, DS would never go to school, bathe, clean his room, clear the table, turn off Minecraft or put down his book and sleep. He would never voluntarily do homework or practice his 10 minutes of piano, and would mostly avoid going out to play or any form of exercise. He would never try something hard, something new, or something out of his comfort zone (from what I can tell, the math he does at school misses that ZPD by at least 4 years, even before we started AoPS).

I hope to god I am not driven by awards or honours. Certainly there’s no explicit ones, as I am so paranoid of others' sensitivity to the whole gifted thing that I actually hide the AoPS books when friends come over. But I too was very struck by Dude’s 'precipice' comment, and my second guessing is driven by the question, am I doing this for him or for *me*? Deep down inside, am I getting off on the idea that my ten-year old does high school math, or am I doing this because, as Ivy asks, the long-term wellbeing of my kid really, truly requires high-level math, right now, even if after-schooling is the only way to get it? When he's twelve, twenty, forty, will he be really glad we did this or think I wreaked his childhood?

I would agree with polarbear that many skills can wait and blossom equally well later in life. They don't all need to be pursued right now, and certainly not in a competitive way. But this felt different for me: I was watching the math love, core to his soul, being utterly and actively destroyed, day after day. If we lock that cheetah in the elementary school box slurping up pablum for 15 years, what will happen when we suddenly toss him out in the (university) savannah and say “go get that gazelle!”? Will he leap to the chase - or crumble with terror and crawl under the nearest bush? With my DS, I suspect he’d high-tail it outta there, blame someone else for it being too hard, and find something else to do (like live in my basement playing video games). I am terrified that I will fail my child, and feel very responsible for making sure this is not his future.

Ideally, yes, we should open doors and get out of the way. However, some of the ‘accelerate or not’ threads have highlighted that while some kids will walk readily through those doors, others will always instinctively say no. I find it terribly hard to balance my children's right to make decisions about their own lives with my responsibility to over-rule them for their own good, based on my supposed greater knowledge, maturity, and understanding of (known) short-term pain vs (hoped-for) long-term gain.

And the line is completely different between my two kids. I haven't even mentioned DD8, who is her brother's polar opposite in this regard. She's independent, strong, motivated and, above all, resilient. She's straightforward-to-deal-with verbal MG, so hitting her ZPD is easy to achieve in everyday life and desired extra-curriculars. She has to work very hard on her dyslexia remediation, and she has fast recognized the link between that hard work to her new-found reading success. For her, the hothousing line is so easily drawn, in a radically different place. For her brother, the agonizing continues full swing.

I know that SMART has to do with setting goals

Something, Measurable, Something, something and something

Hail google...

Setting goals is easy but achieving them isn't. That's why setting SMART goals - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely - is the first step in making your goal a reality.


But see the first goal I would set would be not to memorize any acronym that I can google and find in less than three seconds (that long because I have a sluggish connection).

Why did I know about smart goals? My son took an online PE/health class for high school last summer and had a question when he was filling out his "wellness" plan that had to include smart goals.

SMART goals was a really popular acronym and philosophy even in the corporate world for awhile.... I've heard of it all over the place I'm relatively certain that IEP goals are supposed to be SMART goals and were referred to that way at the time my ds was going through the IEP process.

HK, I'm sorry you're disappointed in your dd's university experience so far. It sounds like what your dd is finding is due to being in a state school and in the core of first year classes that all freshmen are required to take - once she's in with her degree-track program and taking upper level classes things may be very different.. depending on the university program.

polarbear

Yeah-- this is where I caution others to not necessarily think of college as "the open savannah" for our cheetahs.

DD is finding college to be terribly difficult and not at all what she expected for several reasons:

a) There has been a distinct bait-and-switch in terms of "difficulty" at the post-secondary level-- in the very worst way for gifties, frankly-- it's shallow and miles-and-miles of VOLUME-- memorized. No questioning, no thinking, no analyzing-- just memorize.

b) Her classmates seem well-suited adapted to this set of expectations (which isn't a huge surprise to me given what I saw of secondary in this test-crazed, watered-down time)-- she is NOT because we thought it was frankly abusive to force her to spend hours and hours on "work" that added nothing more to her learning in her AP/dual enrollment coursework (which she was generally acing and then some)... we preferred that she use that unstructured time for being a child instead...


So she was promised an environment where she could really RUN, and it's proven to be the ultimate "enrichment" experience thus far. The pair of factors (and the fact that she seems to be one of the only people noticing, plus disability management in a very hostile setting for her) is driving anxiety to levels that we haven't seen since that awful, awful last year of middle school.

A word about quizlet-- it works a treat for some people. Sadly, DD isn't one of them. I'll also add that flashcards are not actually all that effective/efficient as a learning tool for a lot of students. It has to be more 'active' than that to actually work for many people. For DD, what works is hand writing the paired items, and then ORALLY working through them, timed.

It is hothousing if there is a journalist or blogger looking for an easy idea for some parent bashing.
Seriously, the chattering classes can go from bemoaning hothousing among the middle class to bemoaning that lower class kids never get to learn an instrument or play a sport. Whether it's the one or the other depends on who is to get bashed that day for doing too much (parents) or not doing enough (politicians).

DS8 is one of those kids who has to be pushed into everything, usually weekly. So I insist he goes to Judo, because it really helps his muscle tone coordination and confidence (I had to accept he just hated swim class too much, and because he has swim class every other week at school, I am confident he'll at least keep up his moderate skill and not drown) and insist he practice the violin - he does not want to practice, but wants to play, and he hates being among the worst in PE, so off to violin and Judo practice he goes. And I freely admit I subscribe to a "one music activity, one sport" philosophy. Is it hothousing?
DD4, on the other hand, wants to do everything her brother does and then some. So she goes to kiddie Judo, and swim class (or did until the life guard came out of her cubicle and said the screaming had to stop and what was wrong with my parenting anyway), and to early music education, and because she wants to learn violin too and her best friends mum was all gung-ho about organising a Suzuki class, off to violin class she goes now, too. Is it hot housing? She wants it all, even swimming, and we are currently working on the screaming part.

For my husband, it is hothousing whenever a kids schedule interferes with his plans for the day. If his plans for the day happen to involve some cool college level physics stuff to enjoy with DS8, that's fine.

It's my youngest who is over scheduled,p. He does PT twice a day with one parent each (and we should do it both twice a day, really). He sees a private PT weekly. He has PT twice weekly in preschool. He could do swimming in preschool (we have held out till the weather gets warmer). He goes to speech therapy weekly. We could and should do more (have gait orthotics prescribed and work with that, work more on standing, do more massage, work on speech daily...I am maxed out, and happy to just see him play with big sister. Am I slacking off?
Really, no one from the outside gets to determine what is and isn't hot housing. And if anyone did, I'd proudly declare my three little hothouse flowers, and I am their gardener and know what's best.
On the subtopic I have been reading with great interest about:
Is it true that there is NO space left even in post secondary that would be right for a PG kid like HK's? For DH (who is NOT in her league at all) I have always been thinking that if there was no program at a continental university to be found that would suit him, I might look across the channel towards the UK or even across the Atlantic towards the US. Fuelled by the trend that I observe as well that the volume in high school appears to be steadily cranking up and the intellectual level cranking down - admittedly from a very low level, since In most of the exam driven continental secondary and post secondary systems, no one cares how much work you do or even if you work at all as long as you make the grade (flip side: no one tells you what to work on to that grade, much). So, a system in which a kid might continue to be bored and at loose ends a lot of the time, and have to work hard to find their peeps - but certainly not having to work hard at anything else.
I have read up about colleges that have come up here, like Caltech or Reed, or Swarthmore - wouldn't these be the places to go, where a tiger kid or a hothouse kid or any kid for whom learning =working hard would just flounder, and others be able to actually spread their wings for the first time?

Unfortunately!

Imagine magazine (which one subscribes to or gets for qualifying for the Study of Exceptional Talent) has reviews of colleges "filled with the honest opinions of gifted students who attend or attended the featured school". Reviews from previous issues have been collected on a CD http://cty.jhu.edu/imagine/about/college_reviews.html . Having read the magazine for some time, I see that most of the reviews are positive.

That's a good resource, Bostonian.


I went to a college of this type. While I took a few survey courses that were factoid-heavy, it wasn't a lot, and I found many classes that were intellectutally exciting and not at all about rote anything. This was 20ish years ago and I am far from PG, so everyone else's MMV.

When I was in college, some survey classes required a lot of memorizing, and rightly so. Introductory biology springs to mind. That said, any good intro biology course should also be digging into the scientific method and what it means, so that students don't think that ALL of biology is about memorizing facts like "C bonds with G" and "the stages of the cell cycle are ...."

On the other hand, some introductory courses should NOT require memorization of any kind (e.g. anything in the humanities). As an example, the study of history is about seeing patterns in events and analyzing what was going on. Forcing students to memorize what year the Whiskey Rebellion happened in detracts from that goal. I majored in history, and never took a single exam that asked for a factoid. Most of my course grades were based on essays, and the few exams I took were based on essay questions. Ditto for English.

But of course, bubble tests are ever so much easier to grade. Especially if you administer them online.

You've answered your own question. Hothousers don't try and find balance, they don't second guess themselves, and they would certainly never ever consider the ZPD. Their mantra is more is better, always. If your child can do this, then they need more, no matter what.

Yes, it boils down to second guessing yourself. The closest a hothouser gets to second guessing themselves is worrying that they're not pushing their child hard enough.

Yes yes yes! I'm so sick of people saying that a child should never be made to work for anything academic. And that goes double for kids who sit at school for six hours a day vegetating. I am the product of that sort of schooling, and you do not want my work ethic. It took many years after school finished for me to figure out that if you didn't understand something instantly there was a way to figure it out. Why do our kids get thrown under the bus just because they're more difficult?

Maybe you were such a good history student that you absorbed a lot of facts without consciously trying to do so. But in a course on 20th century history, for example, it would be reasonable to expect students which countries were on the Allied and Axis sides, who the leaders of those countries were, what years various countries entered the war, etc. A factoid is "a brief or trivial item of news or information". Many facts are not factoids.

I think the video Roving Reporter: Canada is interesting, although we don't know how random the sample is. Harvard students, and students throughout the U.S., ought to know more stuff. (It troubles me more that Harvard students think various Canadian provinces are cities than that they don't know the capital of Canada.) But at least Harvard Graduates [can] Explain Seasons .

Thanks Bostonian - I will have remember to look that up in a few more years, hopefully they will keep it current going forwards.

When I was teaching less than 15 years ago, this was true, even at institutions of less 'prestige' than DD's current institution.

Times really have changed-- and at the risk of sounding a bit repetitive or as though I have a particular vendetta against it, I do hold Pearson accountable for a large amount of this change. They are behaving a bit like a strangler fig, which one at first might write off as a relatively innocuous epiphytic organism, maybe even a mutually beneficial symbiotic one-- until you realize that it is stealing the core values right out from under you, while that slick facade never slips for an instant.

This is why a college-level health class makes no mention of contraception or STD's, no discussion of adderall abuse or the burgeoning herion problem on college campuses, but DOES include ample doses of corporate-speak from "motivational seminars."

Val and I have both talked about these "automated" homework systems-- in chemistry and in mathematics. They are clunky and, from what I have seen in how students use them-- nearly useless in terms of actual student learning. But they've taken the place of meaningful practice in both subjects. Faculty are "experimenting" with those systems because enrollment numbers are driving it, along with pressure from-- well, from administrators, I guess. I understand the WHY of that quite well. Students have been conditioned (by secondary testing-testing-testing) to accept such shenanigans as normal SOP, and so few of them complain. On the other hand, when a few of them DO complain, and faculty actually ask-- WHOAHHHHHHH, the floodgates OPEN WIDE on the subject. DD's chemistry professor was astonished at the sheer scope of the messed-up that was MasteringChemistry. But he would never have known if I hadn't insisted that she complain about it. She wouldn't have if I hadn't told her that this was flatly MESSED UP-- as a student, she lacked the confidence to know that the answers were sometimes wrong, or that there were formatting errors that shouldn't be there. KWIM?

I don't actually remember studying much for any undergraduate course-- other than for memorization-heavy beasts like O-chem, botany, gross anatomy, etc. Everything else, there was little point-- you either had worked and UNDERSTOOD it, or you certainly weren't going to get there in an overnight cram-fest. I would not have been able to pass the classes that my DD has been in using that approach, one which she also excels at-- being able to rapidly REASON/derive her way to whatever she needs to solve problems on the fly.

It's no wonder to me that this is causing her some existential problems and anxiety.

Back to hothousing-- I don't really see it as hothousing if you aren't attempting to alter-- FORCE, actually-- the child's innate developmental arc.


I also admit that we DID hothouse some very specific skills-- executive skills, mostly.

I disagree. It's certainly possible to push your child in harmful ways while having some awareness that it's harmful. Whether the parent is aware of the harm they're causing or not is immaterial.

Well, since my name came up, I will make a comment. I have also agonized whether I was "hothousing". There were some pretty strong comments about my daughter's after school math class (which made me want to duck and cover) when I asked if she should continue or not. I have thought even more about after school classes since I posted the question. DD initially wanted this pre algebra math class but later did not want it. We had her continue because we felt she should stick with something she signed up for. But, after all the posts, we decided a compromise was in order. She wants more challenging math next year in middle school but doesn't like this particular math class so she agreed to take an assessment and use Khan Academy to help fill in the gaps before she takes the SSA test. Also, we use the summer to take classes that both DD's choose. I will say, like some others, that if a school did its job correctly, many of us wouldn't be micromanaging his/her child's schooling.
Another thing - I don't know what schools everyone is discussing, but I went back to grad school in the last few years and found it challenging/enlightening/supportive. Perhaps it's just undergrad that is so awful? My undergrad was very hands on but that was long ago.

HowlerKarma, I'm so sorry to hear your DD is having such a depressing experience in college. I would still like to believe, though, that you are wrong that all colleges are like this now. The best of the small liberal arts colleges, because they *are* small, are able to cling to their own vision of why intellectual pursuits are worth pursuing.

One aspect of the problem is the pressures on professors. Although I wouldn't want to go back to the bad old days of no accountability, we are all now a little too scared of having to justify our evaluations of student performance. A student unhappy with a grade, who believes that you have been unfair or biased or used impossible standards (like requiring them to actually *think*, instead of providing cook-book instructions for how to get an A), can drag you through the university's appeals process and suck up an entire term's worth of your productivity, even if they have no case. Multiple-choice exams for which you have provided "correct" answers during lecture are SO much easier, in terms of lack of blow-back.

You missed my point completely (and...ahem, managed to show that you don't understand how the humanities actually work).

We're talking about college-level classes. The point of a college education is (or these days, should be) to teach students how to THINK, not how to memorize things like the list of axis vs. allied powers. That stuff is way, way, way too trivial for a proper undergraduate class.

Students in a history class should be learning how to assess ideas, relate events and motivations, and put their own thoughts on paper in a coherent way. They should NOT be answering questions like "Which of the following was NOT an Axis power in 1944?" These questions create factoids out of information.

Said another way, you don't get to the part about analyzing the Maginot line without knowing who France was trying to protect itself from and why.

I agree, MegMeg. In part, this is a many-headed hydra that has been created because of "student empowerment" albeit in a misguided form-- and just as critically, burgeoning enrollment numbers, particularly at public institutions.

I went to a small public college (not at all selective, but STEM majors were pushed pretty hard), and my DH to a public research powerhouse, of substantial size even back in the day. While this current situation is alien to both of us, there are elements of it that feel familiar to him on that basis-- those are not (in general) the kinds of things that we and our DD are finding off-putting about this.


I think that we are the ones finding it depressing in an existential sense. We are definitely believers in higher ed as education-- not as "job training." This doesn't feel especially like education to either one of us. It feels like a processing step.

Off topic, but HK I recommend the following method for memorizing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

Apologies if you're familiar with it, but it works incredibly well and is actually kind of fun to implement (in comparison to flashcards -- yuck).

I'm terrible at memorizing (why bother when you can just figure stuff out when you need it?) but has to memorize copious amounts of not that useful data for a career certification I recently obtained. Fortunately, right before my 'bootcamp' class, I saw a special on memorization. This was the technique discussed and I used it to good effect to replicate a large interconnected flowchart and formulas for the exam.

I should point out that I also learned a lot of useful, career-applicable stuff too. Let's hope that your DD gets through this nasty and onto some good stuff soon.

This sort of thing is worse when the answers are:

a) Japan
b) Canada
c) Italy
d) Germany

And when nobody notices that both B and C are correct (Italy capitulated in 1943), it effectively makes the students dumber for having taken the class.

Meanwhile, Czechoslovakia was invaded in the year of... '38? '39? Who cares? As long as you know it was after the Anschluss and the Sudentenland, but before Poland, you've got the facts you need to understand how things developed.

And isn't that the point of dates, to put things in their proper sequence?

Duration, too.

And to know when thing X was happening at the same time as thing Y, but on a different continent.

They help with knowing eras, too.

Dates only seem to become important later, once you have an overall framework.

Score. That was precisely my point with that question.

A much better question would be "Discuss the events and the atmosphere in Italy that led to Italy's exit from the fighting. How did the armistice affect the nation as a whole?"

Unfortunately, though, you can't correct an essay with a Scantron machine.

What fraction of American college freshmen do you think know that it was to protect France from Germany, and that it failed near the beginning of World War II? If the percentage is small, I think it makes sense for college history classes to test for knowledge of facts like these. Ideally, well-prepared college students who know such facts will be able to start with more advanced history classes.

It makes more sense not to extract out the meaningful content of college courses as a way of compensating for the failings of the high schools and of the students themselves.

That essay question I made up is precisely the sort of question that should be appearing in introductory courses. As I said, the point is to learn how to see connections between historical events and write about your own ideas coherently, not to memorize the members of each team during World War II or the year that Czechoslovakia was invaded.

If your goal is to memorize a list of facts, all you need is a mass-market book or two and maybe an internet connection. You certainly don't need to pay a couple thousand dollars (or way more) to listen to an adjunct tell you what to memorize and when to take the online quiz.

The Maginot Line was covered in 9th grade World History in my day, and came up again in APUSH, so assuming these are successful high school students, the percentage should be somewhere in the high-90s.

And it wouldn't even be proper to say "it failed," rather, it would be proper to say, "The French failed to consider enemy alternatives to a frontal assault, to man the line itself properly, and to plan for reserve units behind it that could respond to contingencies." But that's the sort of thing you're supposed to learn in college.

Or, in the case of students who know better, it makes them horrified that the people in charge of teaching them higher order thinking seemingly don't.

This has been a recurring theme in my DD's life, by the way-- because she is a veteran of such questions, in seemingly every subject.

I've written about that problem at length in the bad homework question thread before. Some of them are seriously bad. Bad enough that they're kind of stupid, but worse still when more sophisticated understanding makes them HARDER to get "right." And this is the reality for an awful lot of these test-bank questions.

DD knows that any exam like this is probably going to have between 2-5% questions like that one. She can come back to them at the end and attempt to read the tea leaves, but she knows that she can only get them right about 70% of the time no matter what she does, because-- well, she's effectively trying to get into the head of whoever was writing the darned thing.


Bravo, btw, Dude, for constructing a glorious example of this kind of thing in action.

Another favorite that I've mentioned before is:

T/F Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein for Lord Byron.

DD spent forty minutes on this ONE question once in high school. It enraged her that she KNEW all of this deep, deep background about Lake Geneva, the year-without-a-summer, etc. etc. and yet she couldn't figure out if she was supposed to go with "dumb" or "dumber" on that question, which constituted 10% of her quiz score.

Well, I very rarely second-guess myself regarding my children's education/hobbies. It helps that at 11, they make a lot of the choices themselves. I do discuss and guide but generally do not force partly because it wouldn't work and just make everyone miserable. I don't care what other people think although to be fair I have never been accused of hot-housing. On the other hand, I am always prepared to switch gears if the situation warrants it. I think that as long as you are not so rigid and wedded to your concept/idea/schedule of what your DD must do/have/be, then you will be able to make necessary changes for her well-being.

I am sorry to hear about the difficulties finding peers. That has not been a big issue for us, mostly because my kids tend to gravitate towards peers with similar interests or certain charms/personalities rather than strictly by LOG. However, I will say that it has been good for DS to interact with other kids around his age who also score well on the AMC8/AMC10 through a regional math group. Perhaps consider competition math and regional math groups as a source of peers?

I agree - I did my humanities degree and the only subject I had to remember facts was for a geography unit. I did my thesis in Chinese politics and I still couldn't tell you what year the boxer rebellion happened. I can however talk for hours about WHY it happened and what the ramifications were/are.... but I did my degree 20 + years ago.

With regard to hot housing, helicopter parenting, there is a trend (?) that we have noticed in elementary school that might be worth sharing, in case it is happening elsewhere. There are some families (too many as far as we are concerned) that have the (female) parent working everyday in some capacity at the same school and in the same building as one or more of their children's classes. We were very surprised (we are not in the education field and we are not experts in human development), because we thought separation (parent from child) was healthy and necessary and, also, because neither of us ever had our parents at our schools. Children talk and turns out, in one instance, one of these students knew which teacher they were going to have in advance (three months in advance), when no one else had teacher information. We have never tried to pick our student's teacher and / or classmates (i.e., insisting that (best) friends have to be together in the same room always). I am actually worried about one student in particular because the parent comes across so strongly, it really is bizarre. Fingers-crossed, this will not happen going forward, it's creepy and not at all preparing the children for the real world that we are used to which is based on standing on your own merit.

The solution to this problem is to:

(1) Quickly recognize that you are dealing with a choice between "dumb" and "dumber".

(2) Guess, because there's no possible way to win, so you've already lost.

(3) Move on.

Um, that's basically how a lot of schools work.

And law firms.

We had no idea; neither of us can imagine why you would want a parent at your school; we are learning something new each day. I am glad you shared so that I am prepared in the fall for when the same parents end up once again in their child's educational building. Is it that they renegotiate each spring so that they can map where their children will be in the fall and then make sure (somehow) to get that specific assignment? Yikes.

For the original post, one more response that occurred to me. I heard a woman on National Public Radio speaking this week about how her father always made all of the decisions for her and then once he passed, she set about making her own choices, redirecting and being able to pursue her own interests.

I also heard a brief report this week (but I don't remember the source, possibly also NPR) in which they were discussing how universities try to find children that the school wants in their starting class, but the child's home situation might be such that the student is not able to connect with such a university and schools are trying to work on that issue.

My point is just to add more discussion points about the role of parents. Thanks for the interesting post.

Wesupportgifted, I hope my reply doesn't sound like I'm arguing with you - that's not my intent, just trying to offer up a different point of view.


I have quite a few friends who are teachers in our local school district. It's *not* unusual for perfectly normal, non-hot-housing, everyday parents to arrange to have their child in the school they teach in or to request to teach in their children's school and for the teachers I know it's no indication at all of being overly involved or invested in their children's lives. The people I know who do this do it for one very simple convenient reason - they avoid having to use before and after school child care.

A secondary reason (not as frequent, but happens) is that the school they teach at is thought to be a better school than their neighborhood school. While this may seem a bit like helicoptering, the intent is really not that different from parents who choose to enroll their children in charter schools or lottery schools or magnet programs etc - they are simply trying to find the best-fit school for their child, same as most of us here on this forum have tried.

We are at a private school, and several of the employees have their children enrolled at the school - again, it's convenient in terms of saving child care $ and time, and in the case of private school, tuition is sometimes discounted for employee's children.

Sometimes things that are different from what we expect and seem "creepy" actually have very reasonable explanations.



A couple of thoughts here - first, yes, children talk and occasionally... children talk about things they imagine or hope to be true rather than what's really true. I never automatically assume that something my elementary-school aged kids heard from another child about things that adults knew or said that sounded off was true until I'd had it verified through an adult source.

Second thought - this employee, if they did indeed actually request a certain teacher, most likely isn't the only parent who did. At the elementary schools we went to and others I know of in our area, there was one school that let parents request teachers for the next school years and parents *loved* having that option. At other schools, even though the school policy said you couldn't request teachers, many parents did anyway, and in some schools principals tried to help parents get the teacher they requested. I'm not sure this is helicoptering as much as it is human nature - to hope to get your child in the classroom you think will work out best for them.

Last thought - the employee probably did know before others knew. That's one thing that happens when you work at a school - you get to know the other employees, and sometimes you find out information ahead of when the non-employees find it out. That's doesn't mean that because you know the info ahead of time you were somehow doing something odd or underhanded going on.


Standing on your own merit is something I value highly and something I've done my best to pass on to my kids, but the reality is it's not everything that it takes to get ahead in the real world (and especially in the corporate world). Connections with other people matter, how you treat other people matter, networking matters. This really isn't a bad thing - it's part of being human.

polarbear

Don't you have a preference for workplaces? Maybe your school district works differently, hut in the places I've sent kids to school and been to school teachers don't float from year to year. They get a job at Lincoln Middle School teaching Spanish and tend to stay there for many years if they're doing a good job, they don't get sent over to Washington middle school the next year,then back to Lincoln for a couple of years, then off to Jefferson, etc. Same for kids, if you start at Lincoln you tend to stay there. In face, one district had a reorganisation of zones and they specifically grandfathered in any current students and siblings.

As I understand it, Wesupportgifted is talking about school volunteers.
Our elementaries do rely on a lot of parent volunteers, both in and out of the classroom. Most families do not volunteer every day, but many have 2 or more weekly roles such as math helper or library reshelving plus room parent, staff appreciation coordinator, etc. Without these volunteers, we couldn't afford the staff to run the school at the level we want.

It is possible, of course, that a volunteer asked for a particular classroom for their child and got it far in advance even though this was against policy. It's also possible that the child was mistaken, or that another policy was in play - at some schools, a child will automatically go to the same teacher that their older sibling had unless the parents request otherwise. I agree that it's best for kids to separate from parents and put up with imperfect classrooms, but we aren't always aware of all the issues - a child who is socially immature for age, or whose parent is dying, or has other severe stresses, may need to be sheltered for an extra year or two. If the staff is responsible, other families won't know who those students are.

Which is all to say: it's hard to identify the hothousing parent from the outside. To me, the distinction between 'concerned' and 'hothousing' is in the motivation - the well-being of the child vs. status or appearances.

OK, I totally missed that!

Re volunteers, our schools also rely heavily on parent volunteers. While some may be there to gain an inside advantage, the vast majority of parent volunteers I've known are there for the best of intentions - because they love working with kids, because they want to help the school, to do something that benefits the school as a whole. In turn, the students love having parents at school - not just their own parents and not because they need some kind of extra special attention - the kids love getting to know adults and knowing that another "big" person is interested in them and what they are doing.

Truth is, among the parents I've known, the parents who've requested special favors such as teacher choice etc are also the parents who are too busy to help out at school.

polarbear

I help out daily in the media center at my son's school. His accomplishments are his own as well as his shortcomings.

There is one media specialist for over 1100 kids. I think it is absurd that she doesn't have a paraprofessional to help her or a clerk. Back in the 90s 1100 kids would have had 2 media specialists and a clerk/paraprofessional working.

There are about 10 volunteers at our school on a daily basis and about another 5 on a weekly basis. They are trying to recruit volunteers to help in the lunchroom (which is in chaos trying to feed so many kids in 4 hours). Yeah sure having me there has its small advantages but they have received well over 300 hours of free labor from me this year alone. (The sign in computer computes the hours). Any other parent is welcome to volunteer too (those that aren't working two jobs). We don't even care if they speak English (which is why a majority of them are hesitant to volunteer).

Things may have changed but in my DD's elementary school the parent teacher helpers were run by what appeared to be an all-grown-up-but-still-a-bunch-of-Heathers-mummy-mafia.

They were a very insular bench and on the couple of occasions early on that I volunteered (I have pretty flexible working arrangements most days) I was pretty well ostracized and glared at.

I went originally because I believed in strong community involvement and support
but I realised that it was not about that in that particular instance pretty fast.

I realize that this varies from school district to school district but there was something of a sinister vibe there.

Yes, you need to join this institution in order to mediate between your child and the system.

If you choose to not join them, its like choosing not to vote and then complaining that the wrong person won.

This old thread may also be of interest: Remind me to never be Homeroom Mom again, and this old post, as they reinforce what you are describing. You are not alone!

I didn't read this whole thread, but agree with whoever said that gifted kids should have similar levels of challenge as "regular" kids. Most average 4th graders do not want to do math homework, but it's still required and expected. Those kids are not "pushed", they are just expected to have a reasonable work ethic. The same should apply to gifted kids...just because they are gifted doesn't mean they get a free pass. They need to be given work that is suitably challenging even if they are not thrilled to do it. Not all gifted kids are motivated and driven, some are just plain lazy. My second grader was accelerated 3 grades for math. If he had not been accelerated he would probably have 5 minutes of problems each night like 37-8 and would learn nothing. The only reason why he might want to do that, is because it would be over and done with quickly and then he'd get to play Minecraft. But the teacher instead makes him do harder work that takes longer. It may be "pushy", in that other kids his age aren't expected to do that level of work, but it is also teaching him a work ethic and to work through things that might be a tad difficult. I don't think this is "hothousing". Hothousing is more extreme--where the child is simply incapable of doing the work or it takes away from other worthwhile activities.

If hothousing is defined as having a child do more difficult work than age peers, even if the child doesn't like doing it, then any school that ability groups and gives the brighter kids more difficult work is hothousing those kids who are not motivated/driven but still placed in the "high group". It's not about what the child "wants", IMO...it's about giving them appropriate challenges, with "hothousing" being the extreme or inappropriate version of that, causing harm to the child. I also think it depends on the activity. All kids need to learn math, even if they don't like it. But gymnastics? Or soccer? Not so much. If those activities are "forced", just to give the parent an ego trip, that's a different story. The ironic thing is, most sport nut parents are not considered to be "hothousing" and it's socially acceptable, vs. a parent who signs their kid up for after-school math (because the school will not differentiate) is viewed with scorn.

I "require" my child to do a lot of things in addition to his school academics. These may include after schooling, sports, music, robotics etc. I am trying to develop a well rounded child and this is my way of doing it in spite of the drawbacks in his schooling. My child is good natured and energetic and enthusiastic and I try to find very interesting ways to accomplish what I require him to do - but, if both our personalities were any different, it might start to look like hothousing or Tigermothering.

To me, Hot housing is when a child is not able to accomplish the levels of output that the parent expects and the parent makes the child work night and day to measure up to expectations with a lot of displeasure and consequences for not producing the output that the parent expects.

Lack of free, unstructured time is not an indicator of hothousing - most intense, gifted kids that I know are busy doing something structured that they hardly have any free time (I know a few that are very good at violin, chess and soccer and each of them is so busy at a young age).

I think the question is whether you would be doing these things if it was not part of some sort of imposed program.

I know that when I was younger, I had very little interest in any of the activities that I was doing. So, when I was no longer required to do them, I stopped doing them because the reason that I was doing them had precisely nothing to do with the actual activity.

The activity was a means to some other end.

Blackcat, I think that you've nailed it-- if it's about genuine desire to do right by the child's long-term interests, while respecting the child's innate developmental arc, then it's unlikely to be hot-housing.

It may still not (quite) be healthy, if the parents are not being realistic about that developmental arc... but then again, that tends to drift into "it's not really about the child that I have in front of me" as well.

If it's about the parents' ego-- at all, then it probably IS hot-housing, or something like it.

I also find it strange that hot-housing in athletics is seen as completely okay, and yet those same rabid parents who scream at their kids, the coaches, etc. from the sidelines of a soccer or hockey game think that, in general, a chess/competition maths coach for a 10yo is "over the top" and quite possibly "abusive."


Uhhhhh-huh. You keep tellin' yourself that.

DD was placed rather inappropriately in pre-algebra (the course before Algebra I) when she was still 8. I want to take a step backwards because with her poor EF ability and attention, I think she would struggle too much with Algebra next fall. However, there are probably other parents who want to push their kids forward, just so that their kid is one of the "top" kids, even if their kid may struggle with it and not be ready. I think this is hothousing.

Unstructured play has so many cognitive, emotional, and social benefits that failure to provide it should be considered a failure to properly nurture your child in all three domains.
http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/value-unstructured-play-time-kids-81177
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/08...y-childs-play-helps-build-a-better-brain

Yeah, free, unstructured time is really important for kids. I know there are children who are so talented and driven in an interest that they end up without much of it, but I think it's a very hard line to walk and I'd be very careful with that if it were my own child.

I have been struggling with this question this year as my DD began Kindergarten in the public school. When I brought DD for registration, no one cared (or truly believed) that she was reading chapter books and doing double digit math, basic multiplication etc. She was age 5 and age 5 children go to Kindergarten. For their part, they tried. But, here we are near the end of the year and her reading skills are the same as they were in August, her math skills are the same they were in August, the science concepts presented were exactly the same as the ones I taught at home last year... and her behavior has regressed dramatically. In short we lost an entire year, and the only thing my DD really learned was that school is a place for socializing and no one will make you work that hard.

So now what? This school is the "least worst" place for her, but when compared to her potential she is failing. As it is, DD is only home from school for 4 hours before its time for bed. By the time she is done with her assigned homework, she gets an hour and a half of "downtime" before dinner, bath, reading, bed. If I move her bedtime and do about 40 minutes with her in the evening (I am considering EPGY)the gap between her knowledge and her schoolwork will grow even larger, what happens then? I have no idea what to do. The other parents think I am forcing this on her. They don't understand that she was simply ready to read early, and her math abilities are natural, so if I "teach" her something at home, it's because she has already discovered the basics on her own. I'm just building on what she knows. The work is 'just hard enough' for their kids, so by comparison I look like a crazy tigermom. I feel so unprepared for this.

I would have to agree with blackcat, that what may appear to be hothousing from the outside can also in reality be the parents trying to find an appropriate challenge for their child. It's very hard to make any kind of blanket statement as to what is/is not hothousing, much akin to Justice Stewart's "I know it when I see it" decision.

I agree that the goal of the parents is important, but how often are you actually going to find a parent who acknowledges that they are doing the afterschooling/Kumon/tutoring/pushing so that their child just looks better to others? And isn't it almost impossible to really know from the outside, absent evidence of some sort of abuse? Does every child agree that s/he needs to be challenged/pushed even a bit so they will learn study habits, develop a work ethic, and develop the persistence which will/may one day be required of them? Can very young children even understand those concepts fully, or would most just feel like more work is unfair?

I say this as one who actually *wishes* I was hothoused a bit in my youth and that I could find it in myself to hothouse my son just the tiniest bit. School is not an appropriate challenge for my son, his math and science instruction in particular is 2-4 years below where he could be. He has no homework because he finishes everything at school, he never studies and still almost always aces tests (how do you even end up with a 110 test average?), and has enough "free time" at school to normally read 2-3 books each week- at school. He reads more at home.

I absolutely *know* that he is not developing a work ethic or learning study habits and persistence. I also absolutely *know* that if you ask my son if he wants more challenging work, his answer these days would be no. He’d rather have that time to focus on soccer and read books of his choosing, rather than someone else directing him. Some of that may be personality, as I am that way as well. But much of that is probably because that is the pattern he has fallen into due to his lack of challenge.

Meanwhile, a friend of his at school is being hothoused a tiny bit, and he is learning, at home, the types of math my son should be doing and he remains much more curious about academics than my son these days. So while my son’s goal has changed from being the next Faraday or Sagan to now wanting to be the next Iniesta, his friend has remained on the primrose path, so to speak.

So have I failed my son by not pushing? I wish I knew, and of course unfortunately won’t know for many years. I only know that in my 20s I began wishing my parents had demanded more of me than the very low expectations of our schools. My son may be completely fine if he never lives up to the potential I know he has, or perhaps he’ll actually learn to push himself when a little older. I do err on the side of caution, since I know he’ll never be 10 again, can’t at 25 dream of playing in a Champions League final. He can, however, hopefully learn study habits at 16 and push himself to do more and be more at 22.

I find it hard to judge most parents who are, I hope, trying to do what they feel is best for their children. Are they always right? Of course not, but sometimes it's hard to know what is "right" in parenting until years later. Unfortunately, we’re really all just guessing at this point.

((hugs))

I have absolutely no guidance, unfortunately, as you can tell from my post just below yours, but I just wanted you to know that there are plenty of us who feel the same way and understand what you are going through. Kindergarten was especially rough for us as well, and, although the complaining has ceased now in 5th grade, the challenge has not gotten any better. I hope you find a better fit and wish your family well!

It is my understanding that this is a frequently-used comment by schools to encourage parents to allow children to slip into underachievement. It is also my understanding that lack of mental stimulation changes the brain and makes it more difficult to pick up the pace and learn later.

You may wish to study about advocacy. Other posts point to many helpful resources. A good first step is often having your child evaluated (IQ tests and achievement tests), providing a basic set of facts to work with. If you are in the United States and your child is profoundly gifted (99.9th percentile), the Davidson Young Scholars (DYS) program may be of interest.

Hmm... I don't know if I fully agree, just based on Madeinuk's comment about executive skills withering on the vine because everything is so easy (and many of them won't, without prompting, do difficult and low interest things "just because it's good for me")

I haven't read the whole thread yet so I'm sure other people have chimed in already. This, however, is an area I feel strongly about - I almost think sometimes the kids who are NOT gifted or who have dual exceptionalities that create challenge are the ones who have a better shot in life because they are forced to learn work ethic. Mind you, if you're able to accelerate your gifted kid at school so the challenge is there, then problem solved. However I speak as one of the formerly unchallenged gifted kids who has suffered as a result, so... I make sure my kids struggle.

Doing things that you have no interest in doing does not really help you develop a work ethic or executive functioning.

I think there is something else involved here.

Yeah, for some reason it is completely normal, expected and OK for children to sit in the classroom and struggle with the material. But when we give our GIFTED children appropriate, way above grade level material, so that they get a chance to struggle, it is looked upon as "hothousing"....

I get what you're saying. I had a teacher in elementary who always kept telling me, "You just need to apply yourself", and I'd think, apply myself to what? Third grade math worksheets? The work was much too easy for me, and I didn't know or care that I was capable of learning, or that I was even supposed to.
But eventually it was just like Pandora's box opened for me, I guess - and it wasn't so much that anyone had told me that I should be doing this or that or learning a particular thing, it was just...I don't know. It's hard to explain but...it was almost like I knew that I could be doing so much more, learning so much more, that I didn't just have to float on the river of apathy and fifth grade worksheets. It was that spark, that excitement for learning that just wasn't there before. Maybe it's my personality, but I sort of started to challenge myself, you know? That's when I learned the work ethic, the persistence. And I wish, too, that it could've happened earlier.
That push isn't hothousing. It's opening the door for your son. If you take him to math and he doesn't like it, fine, go elsewhere, but making him realize that you know he can do more and that you expect him to learn - not accomplish, not learn what you want him to, but learn those life skills and gain that knowledge - that's what you want. Part of that might require a sort of metacognitive leap, but it's not going to be pushing him too far. It will push him in the right direction.
You know he isn't being challenged, that school isn't a good fit, that he's not developing good habits and persistence. But does he? And does he understand how important that is? It's hard for kids to understand the need for challenge just like it's hard to feel the need for vegetables. But it's still important, and if you're thinking about it like you are there's no way you're going to be pushing him too hard. He just needs a gentle push - guidance, not direction. After that it's his choice what he wants to do.
I hope this all makes sense. I haven't read the whole thread, but...I hope this helps.

Yes - for my son it's ADHD, and this profile is particularly prone to difficulties with tasks that are not engaging. Requiring my son to sit and complete tasks he's not interested in has helped him in this regard. It's really made a difference. It's a question, I think, of "attention resiliency." He used to be like a piece of paper caught in a tornado but now he can sit with his homework list from school and methodically work his way through it (he's 10 now). Fyi - no meds (ever), and he has a combined-type diagnosis that was called "severe" by the psychologist.

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).

Well said, Megmeg.

This thread is giving me insight into why people consider any attempt to have my kids do anything at all as being pushy, but I must say it still really annoys me. What happened to moderation? Why do they assume that if I make them change the kitty litter that I'm also standing over a piano with a stick to make sure they get into Julliard?

Here's the difference: normal kids do a lot of stuff they don't want to do or find difficult at school. They're asked to strive and figure things out, to progress and learn new things, then they go home and are asked to do a bit of physical activity, help around the house with boring tasks. Hothoused kids do this and then go on to a cram school to do more hard academic stuff because more is better. Our kids go to a normal school and sit around doing essentially nothing, so why is it automatically the same as the hothoused kids if we decide it's good for them to get a fraction of the same experience as a normal child gets? Why do our kids get thrown under the bus? Very few of our children get anywhere close to appropriate schooling during school time and have to get it afterschool, so why is it OK for most kids to do appropriate work, but not OK for ours?

And, on the other end of the spectrum, I do think that if a child is getting appropriate academics during the day at school that they should be doing something different after school. I am a strong believer in boredom. With regard to sports, many top coaches are warning of over training and over specialisation in children. I think they have a point, but I have no idea how a single family can change the system if their child likes a team sport. If you want to play soccer, you have to participate in that system.

(our kids means pg kids of the people on here in general. Personally we afterschooled for academics in a bad school situation, and were able to stop when we found a good school situation, and now we're just battling the sports issue)

I understand what you're getting at, but I'll answer for me. My kids do not get enough at school (this is a lot more true for one than the other at present) but they still have to go to school all darn day. One child has a lot of homework, too. I don't think enough is being asked of them in terms of difficulty, but I just don't have it in me to ask them to formally afterschool. If they really wanted to, that might be different. I have done a bit of formal stuff over the summer at times. That's a different ballgame because time is much more abundant. During the year...they need time to do other nonschool things. They do both read voraciously.

I know they could be learning more math, in particular, so it bothers me sometimes, especially when I see what some of you are doing. Math does not appear to be their passion, though, although they are both good at it. Anyway, I try to seek out challenge and experiences that push them in other areas. With one child chess has been the answer. The other one has been harder, but her school experience is more difficult, so it's not as much of a need.

Well, because you already lose the entire 8 hours at school.

So, in order to get appropriate childhood experience, you need more hours in the day in order to replace these lost 8 hours of boredom and mindless sitting.

Since you don't have more hours in the day, you have to remove necessary childhood experiences in order to provide other necessary childhood experiences.

People see the other necessary childhood experiences being removed and they get upset because you *are* removing necessary childhood experiences that normally happen outside of school hours.

I think that the solution is to agitate for a much longer day. Perhaps a new legal day that is 32 hours long.

If we can create daylight savings time, we can create the 32 hour day!

I actually discarded DS's math homework that was completely inappropriate, and substituted something that was an appropriate challenge. This works for younger kids where grades don't really matter (if they are graded at all), but it's harder to pick and choose what your kids are going to do in older grades. I did this with two different teachers and I think one hated me because of it, and the other couldn't care less. I think she was of the mindset that second graders shouldn't even be getting homework, but she has to do what the district directs her to do. So she didn't care that he never did the homework.

Since then we moved DS to a school where they simply move the kids to where they need to be. So for DS, that meant going from second grade to fifth grade for math. The math schedules in the school are more or less aligned. It's not rocket science, but most schools wouldn't even consider doing anything like that. For reading, there are 3 teachers and each teacher takes a different group depending on ability level. That's how it is for math, too, but DS was so far out of range, they just moved him to a different grade which has it's own math ability grouping and the 3 teachers split up the kids according to ability level. So he is in a group that is doing pre-algebra.

Since the school has him doing the right level I don't need to "houthouse" or after-school anymore, and it's been a relief to no longer have to worry about him making no progress or acting like a lazy slug.

I think that many/most schools could follow a similar model, but they are too stuck in a traditional mindset and unwilling to consider/organize other possiblities.

Thanks for the reminder - I will need to have the 'helicopter' completely overhauled and refueled in anticipation of a meeting with DD's future middle school principal. Apparently all Maths schedules are aligned and high school geometry is available too and I need to be sure that DD will have the chance for an appropriate level if challenge *during* school hours next year.

Jon, this post is a Thing of Great Beauty.

Thank you.


This is why our estimation of "least worst" for our PG-let was a 20 hour school week and a 4y functional acceleration. (This meant the otherwise fairly gnarly and evil solution that I like to call public cyberschooling).

Because a 32 hour day wasn't going to become a reality for anyone, see.

We weren't robbing her of childhood or keeping her in bubble wrap-- we were walking a high wire trying to preserve SOME age-appropriate and ability-appropriate(-ish, I guess... ) life for as long as possible to give our child a childhood, and education, and an adulthood to follow it.


I guess if I examine this through the lens of MLB stats, we did pretty well. LOL. The only reason that a 0.300 batting average doesn't seem so hot to other parents is that they aren't up against Randy Johnson in his prime. We were in a classic no-win situation. Least-worst was the ONLY winning gambit, and it was a long shot anyway.

Oh well.

I did exactly what you are doing (after-schooling) for many years with both kids, but we finally found a school that "gets it". I don't think after-schooling is "helicoptering" (which I said earlier in this thread)--I think it's a normal parental response when dealing with the needs of a gifted kid stuck in a situation that sucks.

Different plants have different environmental needs: damp soils, dry soils, acidic soils, basic soils, loose soils, firm soils, high temps, moderate temps, direct sunlight, partial shade, etc. There are also a wide variety of ordinary maintenance needs... feeding, watering, pruning, weeding, pollenating, picking, etc.

To hothouse your child means to place them in an unnatural environment in order to force them to develop early. But moving your child into another environment that helps them with their own natural development? That's not hothousing. That's just gardening.

Up!

As an avid gardener, your post resonates with me. May I give it a 100 Likes?

Which is why the second guessing. (it's the ciiiiiircle of liiiiife)

If you thought there was no value in those non-assessed childhood experiences, you'd be totally unconflicted and you'd be a hothouser.

And kinda OT, but isn't interesting how much easier and clearer the conversation was when we were using the term with strong racial/cultural connotations. Maybe it's easier to condemn or "other" people if you use tiger mom, but people have to examine themselves more carefully when using the term hothousing? And by the way, I'm very appreciative of people for switching so easily and agreeably. Every little bit makes a difference, right?

Of course-- and Tallulah, it's my experience that the behavior is mostly dominated (locally) by not the parents who are first-generation immigrants (though we know a few of them who do), but that it is disproportionately parents who would be considered-- white, advantaged, upper SES, etc. etc. who are doing this sort of thing.


I tend to recognize them by their sheer avidness when they discover that DD is so radically accelerated. I often use that as a filter, in fact-- anyone that gets that over-zealous gleam in their eye and is more interested in ME than in HER at that point... well, in pumping me for the recipe for the secret sauce, I mean-- I tend to know.

They aren't the least bit conflicted about it, as you note. They just see it as The Way to WIN.

The term "tiger mom" was unambiguously defined by Amy Chua's book, and became well-known through controversy and mass media.

Meanwhile "hothousing" has ranged in definition, sometimes aligning with references to the aggressive, competitive tiger-parenting methods of raising "trophy kids", other times used as a reference to finding/reproducing/maintaining an environment conducive for a child to thrive (thinking of Orchid Children, Eide blog post), and therefore hot-house can be somewhat ambiguous and highly subject to one's knowledge base.

For this thread "hot housing" was paired with micro-managing, over-involved, omni-present "helicopter parent" in the subject line, lending clarity.

But the term "tiger parenting", like the phrases "is it a cheetah", and "the tortoise and the hare" refer to observable behavioral clues, embodied by the animals they mention.

On the other hand, many parents agonize for the negative impacts they describe witnessing in regard to their HG+ children, when schools provide no intellectual peers or challenge worthy of the child's potential, year after year... and/or place a limit on acceleration. Parents may imagine it would be lovely to receive advice or even mentorship in guiding their own HG+ child's educational journey, from someone who's BTDT and is openly discussing that fact.