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Imagine there was an accurate and fully comprehensive standardized test, which had a subtest for every imaginable skill that's useful in life: making friends, riding a bike, caring for a family, all of the intellectual traits associated with giftedness, etc.
Let's say you wanted to maximize your score, under the assumption this would help you to give more to the world and have a better life.
Which is the better strategy? Is it to lift up your weaknesses or to push your strengths even further?
After my DS7 was evaluated, I drew a bell curve (normal distribution) and explained it to him. I asked him where he thought he scored on his evaluations for math, reading, IQ, etc. For each, he pointed to a location on the chart. His answers were surprisingly accurate. He identified his IQ within a third of a standard deviation.
I then asked him where he thought he scored for making friends, behavior, riding a bike and some other life skills. Although we don't have any standardized scores, his answers were very close to where I would score him. He scored himself in the bottom quartile for all of these.
I asked whether it would make him happier to improve his strengths or his weaknesses. He said he'd rather improve his weaknesses.
Since then, I've found that it motivates him to think about where he's at on each of the curves and how he's improving. He knows he has strengths and he knows he has weaknesses. He no longer confuses them. I believe this confusion had led him to think he was bad overall. I think this is much of what causes anxiety and perfectionism in highly gifted children.
Having a profoundly gifted son has caused me to reflect deeply on myself and my own life. I was profoundly gifted as a child and my childhood was filled with depression and anxiety. As an adult, I continue to be tormented by every weakness -- and every mistake I make.
My son has leveled up and is proudly riding his bike. He's rapidly closing in on the mean of that curve and wants to take it further.
The experience has taught me a valuable lesson. It's well past time for me to separate my own weaknesses from my strengths, accept them and focus on improving them without embarassment or shame.
That isn't something that comes natural. It's easier for all of us to shy from our weaknesses and retreat to our strengths. When the delta is extremely large and the stakes are high, the impulse to do so is overwhelming and resisting it can create severe anxiety.
Because of this, it's important to focus on improving relative weaknesses in a safe and supportive environment where the stakes are low. A childhood with a loving family and good mentors is about the best environment one could hope for.
I wish you the best with your own children. I would love to hear stories of how they've learned to accept and overcome their own weaknesses.
Your DS is lucky to have such a thoughtful, supportive dad who understands how he feels.
With our DS we try to help him overcome his perfectionist tendencies (and we've seen improvement this year!), trying to work through his rigid-thinking tendencies, and also try to help him rewrite his negative-thought processes. We've seen much improvement in all of these areas and it's my hope it will serve him his whole life, but especially get him through the difficult times.
Thanks for starting this discussion, because the whole child is so important.
I love this. "The experience has taught me a valuable lesson. It's well past time for me to separate my own weaknesses from my strengths, accept them and focus on improving them without embarassment or shame."
I do think it is valuable for kids to see approx. where they fall on the bell curve. I think that can help diminish imposter syndrome particularly in gifted girls. I also like the way you approached the whole child.
What a wonderful insight, SynapticStorm. Thank you for sharing this; I think that this will be very helpful.
What do you do with a child whose self-image seems skewed in both strengths and weaknesses?
I'm asking for insights, there, if anyone has them. I've been really startled at how UNrealistic our DD's assessment of her own strengths and weaknesses is-- she tends to skew most things in a negative direction. I feel guilt at times that maybe we've fostered that by doing multiple grade skips (so she underestimates her strengths as "somewhat better than average" and overestimates weaknesses as "I'm terrible at that").
This is fantastic. I have been thinking about a good way to present my sons scores to him and I love this idea. He knows he is smart, but he also has confidence issues in other areas. Thank you so much for this.
One of my son's weaknesses is that he can't draw very well because he has a disability that causes hypermobile finger joints and pain when he tries to write or draw for more than about five minutes. I think he also has some vision issues that affect drawing ability.
He exercised his hand muscles by using squeeze balls and all he got for that was the ability to squeeze my hand to the point that it hurts. It did nothing to improve the amount of time he could write or draw without pain.
He plays a game online that involves drawing pictures. He gets points if another person guesses what he drew and he doesn't do so well on that part but he says he still wins at this game because he also gets points for identifying what the other people drew and he is really good at that.
He became physically weaker while in a scoliosis brace for three years that didn't allow much movement except walking. When he was told to quit wearing it because it wasn't working he worked hard to regain his strength by weight lifting and doing pull ups on a power tower only to find out that he has a heart condition that can be made worse by weight lifting and doing pull ups. So he is back to walking--which also hurts but he does it anyway because he wants to be healthy.
Overcoming his medical anxiety will be very hard. He was misdiagnosed by several doctors who would not listen to us. We now have to trust that his orthopedic surgeon is different and can safely perform the spinal fusion surgery and that none of the awful things the doctor said can possibly happen will.
We are unschooling this year because medical issues took so much time. We were criticized by my college professor sister-in-law and my son was compared to his athletic cousins without a disability. Instead of support we get criticism.
But my son has a very loving immediate family. My husband, my daughter and I will do everything we can to support him. He is still a gifted kid even if he is not using the same curriculum or learning subjects in the same order as everyone else and even if he needs to take time off to recover from medical issues.
Interesting. Like HK, I don't think my DD would be able to rate herself accurately...or, at least, her report to me would not be accurate. It can be hard to tell whether she fully believes what she says about herself (mostly negative) or if she is saying it in part because she wants to be reassured. I think in her heart, she knows she is good at at least a few things, but she would not place herself on a bell curve at anywhere close to the places where I would place her.
Which is the better strategy? Is it to lift up your weaknesses or to push your strengths even further?
Of course, there is a question of relative effort. And motivation is big.
The problem as I see it for many of us and our kids is that there is basically very, very little accidental learning. It is largely about intentional (and powerful) learning. Motivation is critical for intentional learning. Synaptic, I'm glad you've hit on a motivational strategy for your son.
A common criticism is a lack of common sense. It took a long time for me to realize that "common sense" is an accumulation of rules of living that typical people learn in the course of experience. I was around thirteen when it dawned on me that I could apply intelligence and observation to social interactions. Apply being the operative word.
With DS7 we talk about specific observations and reason through social situations. Not something that ever happened with my parents, because they grew up accepting the auto-magic of that sort of accidental/experiential accumulated learning.
What do you do with a child whose self-image seems skewed in both strengths and weaknesses?
I'm asking for insights, there, if anyone has them. I've been really startled at how UNrealistic our DD's assessment of her own strengths and weaknesses is-- she tends to skew most things in a negative direction. I feel guilt at times that maybe we've fostered that by doing multiple grade skips (so she underestimates her strengths as "somewhat better than average" and overestimates weaknesses as "I'm terrible at that").
What tends to work for us is feedback, feedback, feedback. Providing the right kind of feedback to DD8 at the right time is something of a tightrope walk, though. If the feedback is too negative or too positive at the wrong time... yikes.
As her parents, we're immediately distrusted as biased sources, so we have to continually earn her trust by being entirely honest with her, even if at times it's not what she's looking to hear. That way, when we tell her positive things, she's more likely to believe us. But there's a difference between being entirely honest and being brutally honest... a little spin to soften the blow of negative criticism is not a bad idea. There are some times where she gets a little too full of herself, too, and it's not a bad idea to nip that in the bud, even if this is a kid who tends to err on the other side of self-image. So yeah, you had a great game today, but don't go around telling your teammates you're the best.
Often times DD looks at others for comparison, and she's looking at the wrong groups. In those incidents, we're constantly recalibrating her, by pointing out her age, and what's typical of that age group. So in your case, the next time your DD decides she "sucks at (school subject)" it'd probably be helpful to point out what most kids her age are working on in that subject.
Other times, DD just has misplaced ideas of what she should be capable of, like if she doesn't get something right the first time, and decides she's just not good at it. That's where we step in with our own examples of learning that particular skill, if applicable, or pointing out that she's already doing it better than we could if not. And we go back to past lessons of learning something difficult, staying with it, overcoming obstacles, and gaining mastery over time, because for a great many things, this is the learning process. This is where past success fuels future success.
There's rarely a day that goes by where we're not employing some of these techniques, and our DD is starting to get more realistic in her self-assessments. Hope some of it helps for you.
