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.
