Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Dd needs a boost - why is gifted great?

OK.

Then no, being gifted is not a guarantee of success even with a good childhood.

That's your opinion. My opinion is that it does provide a guarantee.

To disagree might suggest we have different definitions of a "good" childhood.

I hate to consult the tv for answers, but here is tv tropes website definition for stories about "wanting to be normal". If you're helping your daughter develop her charachter then you need to explain Greek pathos to her and tell her to be truly pathetic (in a good way, so everybody cares) she needs to actively dig for her epiphany and not just let the phrase become cheap.
http://inpraiseofargument.squarespace.com/teach-a-kid-to-argue/


"i want to be normal"
When done well, this can be an interesting metaphorical exploration of how even the most blessed can feel isolated and abnormal. When done poorly, it comes off as cheap angst that will get tiresome.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IJustWantToBeNormal

Well, there's my weird2 cents. Why can't I just give a normal answer for once. It's like I'm always talking in metaphors where it almost sounds like I know what I'm talking about, but I can never be sure.

Here's a recent forum discussion (from here) which equates this phrase as loosely related with grappling with existential depression, possibly leading in some cases to Dabrowski's positive disentigration:
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/152956/1.html

Strongly agree with MON. We do not pose "gifted" as "great"-- we pose it as a what-is thing, like having brown eyes or being right-handed. (And we avoid the word as well; it's just loaded.)

Everybody has been dealt a particular body and brain, and they work with what they have. Some features are typical, some are unusual; it is good to appreciate and know about what you have to work with and use it to improve the world and the lives of the people around you.

Surely your DD can think of some ways she can do that. It's not about the features, it's about the doing.

DeeDee

Top 10 job satisfaction traps for the highly gifted:
10) Topic and challenge don't always align.
9) Many jobs can be exciting and interesting to learn, but the well-learned job becomes routine and routine becomes boring and unsatisfying.
8) There is a very high probability (btw, a more defensible term than guarantee;) ) that you will report to someone less intelligent than you. And a similar probability that you'll be tasked with things that fail your intelligence sniff test.
7) Higher challenge jobs often have higher challenge social environments.
6) Sometimes once you know where the outcome is headed, you get bored and skip the middle steps.
...
1) Twenty years out of college you may be delivering pizza while still trying to define satisfaction enough to decide which profession you'll find satisfying.

This is why it's important to pick some sort of career track out of the career vending machine.

Wow. I don't know the gifted people you know, clearly. The gifted people I know are successful and happy in their careers. The ones that aren't have had my definition of a bad childhood.

I'll bite next.

On the basis of what data could you possibly make such a claim (that, "given" - my scare quotes - a "good" - yours - childhood, and giftedness, success is guaranteed)?

I suggest (a) that you are

- very likely to be falling foul of No True Scotsman (if someone isn't, in your eyes, successful, you then identify a way in which their childhood was not good, in order to rule them out)

- very unlikely to have remotely sufficient data (even if we allow that you can tell whether a given adult is successful or not, you don't typically know either whether they have been labelled gifted or whether they had a "good" childhood, and even if the group of people for whom you do know both is somehow large, I can't conceive of the life you could lead that would make it sufficiently diverse to justify a claim of a "guarantee");

(b) that you don't "give" a child a childhood; a child is a participant in the process that builds their childhood. Could it be that children who are able (both from who they are and from the situation they are born into) to build good childhoods are more likely than average to be successful adults? Of course. Is that anything to do with giftedness? Unlikely. Is it a guarantee? Of course not.

Who me, argumentative? Count it as another plus of being gifted ;-)

I can only go by what and who I personally know. My anecdata has proven to me that my friends who are gifted and successful have had, in my opinion, a good childhood. Those who I know that have had bad childhoods have not ended up successful (once again, my definition- not anyone else's). This is what I know to be true; I don't need strangers in a forum to tell me how to perceive giftedness in my life, and on my side of the world

I can't give you my opinion on your life in America, or tell you what you should think success is; I just know what my worldview is. I believe I wrote 'to me', not 'this is how it is for every person on Earth'

And, you may not "give" a child a childhood, but as a parent you can certainly give them a good one, or a bad one.

I have posted lots of links to research finding that IQ is positively correlated with success, but nothing is "guaranteed". If
squishys avoided using that word and phrased her observations in terms of tendencies, fewer people would be disagreeing with her, although plenty still disagree with me .