Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school Your perception of other same age kids?

That's the nice thing about the internet bulletin boards, they're outside of time and space. This conversation will be here when you get a round toit.

This thread has taken a turn since I checked in last! Like I said at the beginning, I do know that people commented on dd13's alertness regularly when she was a baby but I don't know that I was noting other babies' lack of alertness or viewing them in a negative light. Dd was, and is, different, but not better.

I do think that is it very valid to discuss things that stand out about gifted kids and also probably much kinder to avoid characterizing ND children by comparing them negatively to those differences.

FWIW, I, too, took lucounu's post as tongue in cheek since that's one that has come up as judgemental.

You know I almost like this discussion calling all the other people's kids different more than I like the threads that say, "oh I wish my kids weren't "gifted", because that makes them different".  Celebrate Giftedness!

And if I offended anybody, here's my flowery appology:
http://player.vimeo.com/video/27920977?title=0&%3bbyline=0&%3bportrait=0href=

Click on the > play button on the lower left, not on the []s in the middle.
Enjoy!

Have any of the other parents of mixed-race kids noticed that kids who aren't mixed are kind of, well, not that cute? At first, I thought I was the only one who noticed it, but seriously, strangers come up to me all the time to point out how beautiful my DD is. Even people who have seen lots of kids do it, and when I googled, it turns out that research shows it's true - people who aren't mixed just aren't that attractive. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100414092523.htm

IMHO, there is no polite way of saying someone else's kid is ugly. It does not matter if you're saying it about a class of kids, rather than a specific kid. It does not matter whether you attempt to cushion it with an appeal to empirical proof that some classes of kids are ugly. It does not matter how many other people agree that some classes of kids are ugly. It does not matter how honest and nonjudgmental your intentions are. It does not matter how many ugly people are in your family, or whether someone called you ugly when you were a kid. There is no polite way to call someone else's kid ugly.

And IMHO saying "my kid is remarkably beautiful" is not at all the same as saying "your kid is ugly," or even "ugly by comparison to mine."

I'm sure someone is going to respond by saying, "there's absolutely nothing wrong with being sleepy / lazy / glazed / slow / ADHD / blank / sedated / wrong / zombies / handbags / lumps / drugged / babyish / OMG I'm not even halfway through the thread." There's absolutely nothing wrong with being ugly, either. That still doesn't make it polite to point out.

One thing that's always attracted me to this forum is that the quality of conversation here tends to be pretty high. Different people have different perspectives, and interesting articles or ideas get posted all the time. I really like that.

This forum is pretty much the only online parenting forum I visit. Any others that I've looked at seem to have too many members engaging in one-upmanship and putdowns. IMO, this type of thing is pretty petty and just detracts from the value of a conversation. It reminds me of the garbage I used to put up with in seventh grade. Too many mean girls, too little respect for others.

This thread has shown a lot of disrespect and a lot of nastiness. A couple of members have tried to justify their posts by writing that "I'm just making an observation," but this seems rather disingenuous and an excuse. As others have observed, there's big difference between saying,

My baby was really alert when he was a week old. Did anyone else notice that? and Other kids look like they've been dosed with sedatives compared to mine.

These two sentences could easily be interpreted as meaning:

My baby was really alert when he was a week old. Did anyone else notice that?

and

Other kids are so brain dead compared to my uberchild.

Emm. I kind of got the impression that this was what Iucounu was trying to communicate.

This thread has been disheartening for me not just because people here actually wrote that other children are zombies/dazed/glazed/drugged compared to their little geniuses. Worse is the fact that at least a couple people don't really seem to get (or care) that what they said is crass and belittling. Why would a person feel a need to belittle another? This is not something I get. As I said, people can (disingenuously IMO) claim that they're just being "honest" or engaging in free speech, but I think that other people may see through that. And I'm thinking that this attitude probably comes across in a general way if it's expressed so bluntly here.

So, yeah, a right to free speech includes a right to belittle other people's kids because they aren't as stupefyingly, electron-splittingly jelly-doughnut brilliant as your own little megabrained toddler and his IQ of ten to the power of six. We are all so small in comparison, I just hope my kids don't go blind from the sheer reflected magnificence of it all. We're just trying to muddle through as best we can, you know?

I guess I'm just voting that you want to belittle others, I'd prefer you do it somewhere else. PM each other. Call each other. Talk at the water cooler. Be as vicious as you please in private. Just don't give people like the woman who wrote that sick-of-hearing-about-your-gifted-kid-blog a valid reason to complain about parents of gifted kids. Please?

I agree with this. And re: lucounu's post--I do have a sense of humor, and I totally get that it was tongue in cheek--it was sort of the cumulative effect of the word choices leading up to it.

For whatever it is worth and getting back to the OP--my gifted dd11 was incredibly alert as an infant, and the word my mom used to describe her the most even when she was only a few weeks old and still several weeks away from her due date was intense.

If you are a mother of an "ugly" baby, you aren't going to want to hear any of those statements and you certainly won't thank the other mother for saying the first one instead of the second or third one. The first statement implies the other--it's just a more polite way of being insensitive or even cruel if that's your thing.



Absolutely agree ... in a different context. Good thing this is a gifted forum!

If I was the mother of an unattractive child and I went on a forum for remarkably beautiful children. What right do I have to complain when they talk about first noticing that their child was different and how, in specific, they were different? If this talk makes me uncomfortable, maybe I shouldn't be frequenting this forum? If hearing about how everyone commented on their infant's amazing beauty or perfect features offends me, why am I reading it? If hearing about how other children just didn't have that same perfect symmetry offends me, why am I reading it? And why shouldn't those parents have a forum to find others like them. More power to them!

Why are we acting like it's not OK to notice that gifted children are different, or to talk about it with other gifted parents?

So silly.

Exactly right on. Thank you for taking the time to post, because I think this really gets at the heart of it.

Very well put!