TO be fair, Michelle, I have encountered some of the pushy, Tiger-type parents. They can actually damage their kids, albeit with the best of intentions.
So this might actually be a genuine concern for a small subset of parents. Unfortunately, it then becomes a matter of baby and bathwater for those of us that are not actually "pushy" parents who want to crow about our "genius" child on an international stage, or have visions of Carnegie Hall or Nobel awards in our heads.
{sigh}
Yes, I am feeling a bit cynical as well.
There are times when parenting a child at sufficiently high LOG (or, I suspect, as an outlier in any real sense) relative to local norms places you on the crazy train whether you like it or not.
No matter how thoughtful, measured, and well-reasoned your approach to parenting such a child, you are destined to collect a metaphorical wall of shame filled with your social and parenting "fails" because there is no way to do right by that child-- not really, because you'd need superhuman strength to fight upstream like a spawning salmon attempting to breach Grand Coulee Dam, quite frankly; and also because with every misunderstanding from others comes a social fail, too.
While I look back at DD's K through 12 years with dismay, and wonder what on EARTH we should/could have done any differently to improve the ultimate sum of that experience, and to better prepare her for the realities of post-secondary education, and heyyyyyy, wait-a-minute, wasn't post-secondary ed supposed to be DIFFERENT??
-- well.
The upshot is that while any failure EVER on her part is instantly going to be chalked up to "immaturity" and/or some variation of "accelerated child" or some such thing, the reality is that the entire edifice of primary and secondary education failed her utterly, and we were more or less powerless to do MUCH in the way of damage control, in spite of our very best efforts.
I can't point to a single thing that I'd do differently knowing what I know now. Unless it were to homeschool-- but then again, our calculus on that subject was accurate at the time, as well, and NOT homeschooling allowed for level-appropriate opportunities which would have been unavailable due to chronological age, so there you go. Nope. Wouldn't have homeschooled through HS, either. The system isn't built for it.
Come to that, this is a gestalt summary of the entire problem of being what my DD is. The WORLD isn't built for her.
We accelerated to what her executive function and emotional maturity would bear-- and it wasn't enough, academically. She is paying the price for that now-- she has no idea how to memorize information, has no idea how to really study material that she doesn't know intuitively/ad nauseaum, and struggles to take tests which are memorization-based (because that IS how most people learn the low-level material, evidently). She did not NEED any of those skills to ace everything in high school, including "AP" and "dual enrollment" courses, and to smack a home-run on standardized tests, too. <-- that bit is important. She. did. not. NEED. to really learn to be a "student" in any meaningful way to do those things. Because she is what she is. She has enormous, but almost entirely untamed/undisciplined/untapped raw potential. And no way to deliberately ACCESS it, because nobody has ever asked her to, never mind insisted upon genuine effort in that direction. They THOUGHT that what they were offering was "challenge" for her-- but it most certainly was not.
That's the crystal ball for what happens to kids who aren't challenged sufficiently. "Wider and deeper" sounds awesome until you realize that what is actually being described is systematic stunting of a child's growth as a learner. Kids like my DD run the risk of graduating with top honors only to discover that they have been-- metaphorically, I mean-- raised BY WOLVES. DD is a "feral" student. Surrounded by very bright to bright students who KNOW all the things that she does not. Now, her raw potential is still what it is, and we're hopeful that it will turn right in the end, but this is a rough, rough road through adolescence and college, for sure.
My daughter has no idea how to LEARN that which she does not know. She has no idea how to work for understanding. Period.
I feel a little as though we thought we were walking a tightrope all those years-- thought we were so clever, we did-- and now I've woken up to the fact that we were actually walking on nothing but imagination.
Because she had such stellar academics and wasn't "acting out" or "underperforming" (from what they could see, anyhow-- WE saw that she was), nobody would listen to our concerns. Nobody.
I had just one completely open and utterly frank conversation with a school staffer in nine years. In that conversation, she heard me-- and was struck SPEECHLESS with horror. Her response?
A halting, astonished; "We have failed her. We have completely, utterly failed your daughter-- I am-- so-- so sorry {Howler}-- I don't know what to say to this, and I have no idea how to make this better for her within the mandates that we have to follow, but we-- and by "we" I mean not only us as a school, but the state's mandates, too-- have failed to do the one thing that is most fundamental for her-- she hasn't learned anything FROM us. Because she hasn't learned HOW to learn from us, we've harmed her."
That was four years ago now.
