Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Parents as Excellent Identifiers of Giftedness?

Yes!! Part of my denial when he was younger was because we lived in the Bay Area. What he did intellectually just didn't seem so unusual when there were younger kids doing much more physically and quite a few of them intellectually also. And then I had my first brush with the word 'asynchrony' and almost literally felt the huge light bulb turn on!

We're beginning to see this in our usually not-so-stubborn DS8. I'm seriously dreading the tween/teen years and am hanging around here hoping for more threads on tween/teen behavior so I can be prepared.

In addition to what's already been said on this topic, I would add that everyone wants their child to be great, but everyone also wants their child to fit in. It's slightly illogical, when you say it that way, but I think you see it in all sorts of areas. Being smart is good, but being profoundly gifted is odd. Being great at baseball is acceptable, but being great at fluid reasoning is not. So, instead of bragging about it, (also not acceptable) we try to explain to ourselves ways that make it not so.

And, jumping to the original topic: I think the title is a bit misleading. The parents are agreeing to statements which in turn identify the child as gifted. They are not themselves identifying their child as "gifted" and snatching that word out of the air. Most of us only realized that our child(ren) were "different", and it took us a while to get to the reason. I also think that if you were just asking people if their child is "gifted" you'd get a higher than appropriate response. After all, "everyone's child is gifted." (sorry, I loathe the term gifted; I have a fondness for precision in language) If you asked if they thought their child was in the top 3% you'd get a lower than appropriate response, because 3% seems far above the acceptable normal range of smart.

Speaking to the normal-for-us idea -- that was totally us -- it sounds a bit bad to say it, but we expected DS to be smart, even really smart, because, well, he's our kid. But, wow. After a while even DH couldn't deny it, and he's the best at spinning things. On the flip side of that, I find myself pointing out to my friends that their kids are really smart, and even likely quite gifted, and that they shouldn't use DS as the benchmark of what gifted looks like because normal for our group isn't average.

I agree completely. Some things I've often noticed here:

1. When someone posts scores, they often give extra information designed to give the impression that the test scores are low. This seems to happen even with DYS-level scores, as if they're something to apologize for; it appears to happen over the entire spectrum of scores.

2. There is somewhat of a tendency to engage in one-upmanship. This happens with testing info sometimes, but has also happened in discussions of milestones and school advancement.

3. There is sometimes a tendency to false modesty: for example, acting like a smart child's skills actually scare the parents by virtue of being so advanced.

4. There is a bit of cliquishness, or so it seems to me. Talking about "these sorts of kids", you know 'em once you've had 'em, that sort of thing. I think that this is may be a form of response to the fact that people come here with information or questions on children who are pretty obviously not DYS level or above in current ability.

5. There is a borderline obsession over categorization, e.g. the Ruf levels or the labels of HG, EG, PG, with or without pluses. Once one's kid reaches the gold standard of DYS admission, one's kid is able to be labeled PG here. I think this may be a sort of safe haven for a parent's ego.

I don't want to offend anyone, and I should mention that I myself may have done some of these things too. I consider these sorts of behaviors to be natural and unavoidable in a group, due in part to the way intelligence scores are viewed. You reduce a person to a number, where a higher number is better, and it's going to create stress. And many of these behaviors have a rational basis. There certainly are bad testers, perfectionism, etc. I view the comments by parents going along/commiserating as confirming those parents' views of their own children, but also as driven by honest emotion for fellow sufferers.

I've noticed this. I think it's very natural; we see our own [children's] capabilities as being what we [they] can do in ideal circumstances (which is fair enough) but extended on-demand reality never comes up to that imaginary standard. (Cf the Fundamental Attribution Error, and more prosaically, people estimating how long it's going to take them do to something by thinking about how much they could do in so many Ideal Engineering Days - it's a psychological basic.)

This I don't recognise as having happened here so much; I hope this isn't a sign that I do it myself a lot! It may be a question of how one assigns motives; I don't think that if one person posts that their child got to a milestone at age X and another posts that theirs got there at age Y < X, I'd see that as entering into competition, so much as joining in. Perhaps people are less likely to contribute a Y > X, though?

Yes, this is a comfortable position to take, socially. It can also, I swear, be the absolute truth. I am very scared for my DS and by the responsibility of making choices for him.

This is an interesting one. Clique is just a negative word for community, after all. I certainly experience a tension between wanting to be welcoming and wanting to preserve the distinctive feature of this place, viz. that here I can feel my child is relatively normal.

I agree that there's a lot of focus on labels and numbers that doesn't sit well with me, but I'm not sure ego is the reason. I think most people generally feel happier with phenomena once they've been labelled and numbered. I strongly mistrust the labels and numbers (I don't feel that any of the ones generally used here have particularly well-defined or useful semantics) but I nevertheless feel the attraction. Names are power, and numbers even more so :-)

Yup.

No, no. Nothing of that was aimed at you, and I didn't think of you when I wrote it. You just share your experiences. My statements weren't aimed at anyone. There are trends here, like in any community, so something I once noticed might not happen any more; people here don't talk about milestones so much any more, for instance, though it was all the rage for a while. I might also simply be wrong on a number of points. In any event, the main idea I wanted to convey was that the same forces can affect us all.

I can understand a desire not to let this become like other websites. Without naming obvious ones, I've seen how they can get to be like the local playground, opinionated confrontational types and all. It's a shame that your son can't be admitted to DYS.

I love this! I would still answer no even though the tests say otherwise LOL There are a lot of gifties and smarties at DD's school, 25% test in to gifted (IQ 130+), many more I assume are very close, and there are about 5-6 I would guess to be 145+ or at least extremely motivated. DD merely looks to be in the top 10% of her peers, not 3%, a fact which keeps our pride to humble ratio in balance. I still secretly think that her IQ score was somehow inflated.

Now DS on the other hand...well...sigh....I'm not sure anything can balance his pride

I feel like my DD is probably more like top 10% in her general peer group (as in, the people we hang around with), all around...BUT I really feel she is in the top 1% or beyond in terms of her motivation, curiosity, and drive. This is a big part of what makes her look different. I was explaining the concept of state standardized tests as a general metric for academic performance last night (she's never taken one) and her eyes lit up. "Can *I* take one? Do *I* get to take one of those tests?"

I wonder at times if this is what makes my dd12 look so different as well. If I had to guess, I'd say that the two communities we straddle school wise, both of which dd has attended school in, are 1) a very average make up where 98th nation-wide is probably 98th in this community, and 2) a somewhat more educated and intelligent community where a 98th nation-wide score might be 90th or 95th for this community. Dd has chosen to choice back to the higher ability and achieving community for high school b/c she feels like it is a better fit for her.

That said, she still looks like a kid who is rarer than the top 1-2% in both communities. She is probably a top 1-2% kid here when compared to kids 1-2 yrs older than she (the grade she's in). I'm not sure if it is b/c her IQ is actually much higher than measured so much as that her unusual drive and direction make her a force to be reckoned with. She's also just an "old soul" who seems somewhat older than her chronological age.

Yes, that really resonates with us, as well.

That sense that someone like me or my DH could totally fly under the radar around here given the local distribution (about 30% of the school district identifies as GT, and that is top 5% here). DD is easily still top 1-5% (depending upon the day and the context) even among peers several years older than she is.

She feels out of place a lot even in the best fitting environment we've been able to concoct for her... and for most gifties, it'd be an exceptionally good fit, I think. It certainly would have been for everyone I knew in my own peer group growing up.

I also have the sense of wanting to tell my friends (many of whom do have GT kids, identified by the school district) that they really should not be comparing their kids to DD. But I have yet to figure out a way of having that come out sounding anything but insufferable. So I just offer genuine enthusiasm for their kids' very real accomplishments, try to encourage them to talk about their kids, and keep quiet about DD.

I have nobody IRL to talk with about the kinds of asynchrony issues that dog our every parenting decision, however. I think maybe that is truly a problem related to LOG.

A lot of advice from other parents (even educators or other child-development experts) is inappropriate to our situation. It's a bit isolating, and it definitely requires good social skills on our part to smile and say "Thank you" for the (otherwise thoughtful and well-intended) advice... after all, "Use your words" wasn't useful with a toddler who already had a pretty significant vocabulary and no 'off' switch. LOL. Just like "oh, there's parental control software for that" isn't now that my 12yo knows how to hack most of it. When I mention things like this to counselors and school administrators, they just kind of go "blank" a lot of the time. Occasionally, I'll describe something that DD habitually does and they'll become very excited to finally know a child that really "does that" since they heard/read about kids like her. So yes, I think she must really be that unusual.

We didn't exactly live in denial-- more that we didn't want to be "those" parents. The insufferable braggarts whose kid isn't that special. So we tend to downplay what DD does rather than over-estimating it. We're both physical scientists, too, which makes us hypercritical and skeptical of subjective data, but also of numerical data, for that matter. We don't tend to put a lot of stock in labels and testing, believe it or not.

Yes, we expected that our child(ren) would be bright-- probably gifted, even. We both are, after all. I didn't really understand some of the things that my extended family had shared about raising the PG member of my family until the light dawned re: DD when she was a few years old, though. Then I finally understood the odd mixture of terror, exasperation, exhaustion, and pride evident in those recounted anecdotes.

This may be because I already know that my DCs are not DYS level, but I haven't looked at the details people post in quite that way. We opted not to test our kids because our district doesn't (as far as we can tell) take cognitive test scores into account. This has left us caught between what I've read on-line and off, and the vague assurances of people in our district who talk a good game, but whose practices seem more aligned with the mythology of giftedness (hard working/high acheiving/dot the i's cross the t's kinds of kids) than with the complexities. I have...well, based on what I've read here, probably not a cheetah, but certainly a very fast gazelle who only runs when there is real risk (she doesn't like to fail) or something really enticing to run after. It has been extremely difficult for me, as a parent, to figure out how typical or atypical she is. The details that people have been willing to share here have been ENORMOUSLY helpful to me. The sorting of kids into HG/PG etc. is part of the picture I needed to get a more realistic picture. As has been mentioned in other threads, it is very uncomfortable to test the waters IRL without feeling like I have to mince words or downplay what we have seen, especially where it is inconsistent with she does at school. Getting a better picture has given me the courage to advocate for her and to--finally--get her moved from a "cage" to a "fenced grassland" in her strength subject. As it turns out, she is a much happier and much faster gazelle out in the grassland than she ever was in the cage of her very modestly differentiated classroom, and it has given her the motivation and courage to request more in math (a secondary strength), which is a strength that has always been muted by her global rather than linear approach to thinking and learning. Now if I can just get a handle on my "all or nothing" DS....