Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Raising the Floor

Yes, this is really helpful.

Mostly, this is reassuring to me that we've sort of settled into this same general approach (honesty, recalibration, and specifically identifying "learning opportunities" for life skills/self-evaluation, as well as identifying individual percentiles in separate domains). I'm not sure that the results are always what we hope for, but we are employing the same general strategies because those have seemed to be the best of the options available.

It's a great conversation. I found ZenScanner's remarks especially thought-provoking this morning, as did my DH.

I didn't mean to suggest that I've found a lasting solution to motivation!

Our DS7 is extremely resistant to external motivation. This is our single biggest struggle as parents of a gifted child.

The best strategy I've found is to give him an ample supply of raw data, empower him to make decisions for himself and then gently guide him through his own decision-making process so he lands on a reasonably good decision.

SS, that is precisely the strategy that we must use with our DD13, too. She's always been this way.

Imminently reasonable with respect to data, but not one bit amenable to external inducement as motivation.


She can look incredibly lazy. She's not. She's just not interested in following someone else's agenda. LOL.

DS 7 is a bit of a conundrum abut the tension between strengths and weaknesses. He tends to over-negative the weaknesses - I'm so bad at that, I'll never get better - but can both shrug about his strengths and get arrogant about them. He has fine motor issues and its been a struggle for his and he gets so frustrated - but it's the only thing teaching him that you have to work at things and you can see the improvement from that work. But he hates that he's not better at it.

It's interesting that the question from synaptic was do you want to work on strengths or weaknesses. DS would just expire if it was all about his weaknesses - and could never choose to focus on them. And I'm not sure we would encourage it.

DeHe