Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion High Achievement Relatives vs. Gifted Family

I would say " all-encompassing nurturing", as I termed it, is as much about interpersonal interaction as it is about giving your child the skills to be self-sufficient in an age-appropriate way. To me, nurturing would include providing a diversity of environments and experiences that support exploration, like the one you enjoyed as a child. To that extent, I think many parents throughout time have used the approach I describe just by incorporating their children into day-to-day activities as active participants, rather than as passive bystanders.

I agree. Profoundly so.

I realized the other day, too, that as parents, we are-- even the best/most mindful of us-- preparing our children for adult roles that we can imagine them having.

Odds are stacked against us there-- dramatically so. They won't be doing what we imagined, by and large, and the fact is that the pressure in parenting "well" with multipotentiality in the picture is the stuff of which nervous breakdowns are made. Air traffic controlling has NOTHIN' on that.

I feel very blessed that whenever I poke my head into that particular rabbit hole, my DH kindly grabs me by the foot and hauls me back out again and delivers a wake-up call to my sheepish self.

Now, of course, having read Amy Chua's Tiger Mother memoir, I can sometimes shake MYSELF with "What are your dreams for Coco?"



Just noting that I have found this a helpful de-escalation technique.

IMMV.

This definitely worked for my brother in law and sister in law.

So, it is effective if you want to produce doctors or dentists.

Works unless you have children who decide to do something that you never envisioned. Either because they truly want to, because an option is available in two decades that simply wasn't imaginable when you were raising them, or because they'd rather eat broken glass than follow YOUR plan for their lives, I mean.

Not that anyone in my family is highly oppositional about autonomy, subversive, or maybe non-conformist or anything. LOL.


It could be that this is a quirk in my DH's family and mine, but the parentally dictated "life plan mapping" technique seems to be most successful with the high achieving sort of child, and increasingly less workable the higher one goes in LOG within our extended families. In fact, most of the EG/PG people in both families have taken positively unholy delight in shattering their parents' expectations in one way or another. It's possible that this is a genetic quirk related to self-determination. (Cue Sid Vicious singing "My Way.")

Any career advice has to be couched as a two-way conversation and it has to be ultimately respectful and non-emotional in the extreme. Pretty much ANYTHING that I want my DD to do and she thinks is not something that SHE wants to do, I have to use logic and her own self-interest as very transparent objectives on my part. Always have.

Preserving options so that SHE can choose, and pointing out her strengths and matches with different occupations/activities is a way different game than thinking that I'm driving the bus. KWIM?

It works with gifted underachievers with respect to self-interest.

"If you are a doctor, you only have to work three or four days a week."

Just apply enough external pressure to achieve the desired goal and once the program is completed, coasting through life can resume.

I was raised for a STEM career and ended up on Wall St, after sliding through engineering. Totally accidental. And I think my parents were not even aware there was such a thing as a career on Wall St or how to get there from a small city in Canada.

I keep telling DD that I am just keeping the options open for her. Maybe she won't need Chinese if she is a marine biologist. But if she is making deals around the world, it helps. If she wants to be president it helps knowing Chinese and spanish.

And cleaning toilets is an option too, but won't buy her a first class ticket anywhere.

Life plan mapping is enforcing the way she wants to live and how she can support it.

This is when having two introverted parents without many close friends comes in handy LOL No competition or crazy remarks. Both our families are great for the most part but I do have to be careful bc my DD and niece are the same age.

My husband has an aunt who taught school forever and comments that all kids catch up by 3rd grade and we don't need to fret about DS. Right. Whatever you say.

OMG -- if this socially-awkward introvert hears that one more time from a so-called expert, she is going to lose it!!!

That was my mom's favorite line. She mixed it up with "{DD} seems perfectly NORMAL to ME." (with a pointed glance at us to indicate that clearly the problem was us, and that if we'd just stop all that 'nonsense' that she could get on with being a happy and more normally developing 1yo... 2yo... 3 yo... 4 yo... 5 yo... well, maybe... 6yo.. yeah, okay, maybe homeschooling isn't ALWAYS bad... )

Understand that my mother was a career elementary educator. So she definitely adopted a fairly smug/superior tone over it all, too.

Reminds me of a Simpsons episode where Bart's teacher reassures his parents that he will turn around. He takes Homer to a movie many years later, ordering tickets for... "One senior and one Chief Justice of the Supreme Court."