Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion 3 groups of HG parents of HG kids - a good model?

I'm not connecting with any of your three groups, and I think I've finally got to the point of being able to articulate why.

You're missing me out because you're tacitly assuming that all the people you're talking to were at least as happy and accepted at home as they were at school: they had a solid home base from which to contemplate whether school was a good fit, and if not, why. That's not unnatural when you spend most of your time thinking about children of parents who are inclined to seek out forums like this. However, it doesn't follow that we, as children, had parents like that.

My experience, which I think is common enough that it needs to be included in such a categorization, was that I didn't have a parent like that. I had one who didn't get me or want to get me - that is, who decided that there was something wrong with me - and one who might have got me but was never there. School was therefore my refuge. Whatever the problems I met, I couldn't afford not to fit in there; I needed it to work, and I made it work, by bending myself to fit. Your first two groups don't fit me because they involve an acknowledgment of lack of fit that I couldn't afford to make. Your third group doesn't fit because it wasn't that I wasn't bothered!

Problems for parenting resulting from this: lots, but mostly, the need to acknowledge what one needed and didn't get in order to recognize that what one's child needs may be different.