I have absolutely no regrets from what I call my "fat, dumb and happy years". I think an equally gifted family is a great bonus. Everyone fits! It was only when we hit the school years, and realized our third child was not like the others, that the "g" word was even considered. I was GT in school, and I guess I really never gave it much thought. I got my kids...and they got me. In hindsight, we hung around with a lot of other GT families, and those friends with children whom I truly had concerns about are actually bright for the long haul,
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Truly though what can often become more problematic, is when the parents are flummoxed by what the kid can do, and have no idea how to deal with it. If the kid is sufficiently smarter than the parents, life is not as easy.
For us, it's not that I never identified my kids as gifted...I just never took the time to think about it, until educational programming became complicated. My yardstick was not bought at a retail store though,
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TERRIFIC way of stating this.
DD really has no idea just
how unusual she is-- but mostly because she hasn't ever been in an 'average' setting, I think.
On the other hand, because her exceptionalities are both genetically driven,
we took some time to recognize how remarkable she was, too. We missed a lot of very clear indicators in her first two years of life, and she didn't seem
so unusual to our families, either-- just like my DH and I... but... you know, a little moreso. Of course when you are talking about a pair of people who are both HG themselves, "a little moreso" gets you into PG territory in a hurry.
ETA: It wasn't until I started taking my then-3yo to work with me that I realized just HOW unusual she was. The other people I worked with would
chat with DD-- and remark in awe to me later, privately, that
they were forgetting how old she was in those conversations, because it was like talking to another adult... These were largely graduate students and scientists, incidentally, so pretty high standards for those kinds of statements. It was only then that we started looking at just what "normal" development actually looks like and realized that most kids don't know the entire alphabet by 18 months old, etc.
LOL about the teen years. Omigosh-- we. are.
there. DD is just turning 12. And yes, this is an e-ticket ride with a socially prodigious and HG+ child. Yikes. Her stubborn streak is a thing of awe-inspiring magnitude.
My hair is greying at a rate that I would never have believed possible three years ago.
