With all three of my kids, though, I've found that dealing with them without manipulation has worked the best.
YES-- and this is why the book "The Manipulative Child" was so helpful for my family. It wasn't about punishing particular behaviors in my child so much as depriving them of any satisfactory reward for her, often via changing my OWN interactions with her so that they were less manipulative as well.
Unfortunately, a lot of parenting wisdom is about coercive or manipulative operant conditioning or extrinsic rewarding, and for some kids, it's really bad news. I do think that "GT" status may well be enriched in that group and
vice versa. But there are plenty of kids that don't fall in both groups, or are in one but not the other.
Some of it is personality. I'm really liking the person that my daughter is growing up to be, so there is a lot of hope for parents of younger kids. She was an enormous amount of work/stress/trouble for about seven years, but it's paying off handsomely now.
