Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Non-Gifted Parents/Gifted Environment-Xperience?

My feeling is that we're all stupid. LOL.

It just manifests in different and idiosyncratic ways. Ergo, arrogance in anyone is pretty fundamentally misplaced to start with.

EVERY person is better than me at something. If I figure out what that is, I can probably learn something from any other human being. You know, assuming that they are otherwise likable and will put up with me. I'm really bad at sports. I'm definitely one of the "slow kids" in that domain. I'm glad that my DH has patience with me, and I try to return the favor in his areas of weakness.

I was never identified - I'm not sure if they had a process or not. I do know they asked my parents if they wanted me to skip 1st grade but they decided not to do that. Yet I never got asked to be in the TAG program until maybe my junior year (and even that was mostly an independent study kind of thing). I was a typical high achiever with good grades but most of my standardized test scores ended up in the 90-95th percentile range (worse for math) so I wasn't in with the super smarties in my grade LOL. I've never taken an IQ test as far as I know but after reading up on all of this on account of my DS, I would guess I am in the 120s (maybe).

I always felt like I was good at school but not necessarily inherently smart. My DH says otherwise but I don't know about that. One thing I am not good at is debating and having high-level conservations about world events, etc. That intimidates me. Maybe because I am an introvert LOL

Neither my DH or I are mathy (I usually got A's in math but that was because I studied). I have no idea where my son is coming from with his mad math skills at 7 years old.

I have found that is forum is full of information and advice that has been really helpful. Not necessarily above my understanding though although the advocacy and policy stuff is very new territory and therefore intimidating.

Hi Ametrine,

I think that you may have inadvertently hit on what a lot of gifties experience commonly. Like you, I also feel very uncomfortable in a group of people who think very differently than I do. I often don't know what to say and end up staying mute or walking away.

So it's possible when you feel out of place in some ways here, you've experienced what gifties also go through. TBH, this forum is one of a very few places where I feel completely comfortable writing in a way that's really me --- meaning that I don't have to be careful about things like vocabulary.

When I was a kid, other kids would get angry at me and tell me that I "thought I was so big." I didn't understand what they were talking about until many years later when I realized that I was using "big words." The other kids a) didn't understand me and b) probably thought I was trying to show off and make them feel inadequate. But I wasn't. I was just a kid and was speaking naturally (for me). And I honestly had no clue that other kids didn't understand some of the words I used.

I don't know about the mentality you wrote of. Yet I suspect that a person could think it's there when people are communicating and it's hard to understand them. A person might feel like the gifties are showing off or trying to exclude others. But (IMO), in a forum like this one, people are just feeling comfortable enough to write in ways that are natural to them.

So don't feel excluded. Everyone is welcome here --- even people like me who get very passionate about certain subjects!

Okay, hope that helps.

I've run into that too. I find that, 1) I really irritate people when I talk through the entire process of what I am thinking and often do better to pare it down mentally before I speak to essentially give the Clif note version of what I am asking/saying/etc., and 2) I, too, have some people who think that I am a control freak. Dd12 tells me that a mom of a kid she's known forever and who has, over the years, had some difficulty with kid comparisons, has told her on more than one occasion that I need to start drinking.

This thread, as a whole, though brings up an interesting side thought for me. I've long since accepted that there are LOG and, while I am more gifted than some who are in the gifted range, there are certainly those who are much more gifted than am I. There are threads here, and conversations IRL among very intelligent people, where there are aspects that I don't *get* at first glance, but I don't wind up feeling like the non-gifted parent as a result. I wonder, and here's my long round about way of getting there, if perhaps posters who feel like the non-gifted parents of gifted progeny are either expecting to be as gifted in all areas as everyone else who posts here (holding themselves to too high of a standard) or perhaps are dealing with differing levels of giftedness in themselves than the members whose posts they are reading frequently.

Ultimately, I guess that this runs back to a question of the heritability of intelligence to me. Do any or many of you feel like you have children who are many SDs above you in terms of IQ? I do feel that at least one of my dds is probably somewhat more intelligent than am I. Full disclosure: I belong to Mensa and would qualify for things like Intertel (99th percentile group) although I've never seen the point in joining. I'd say that I'm HG, but definitely not PG. My *more able than me* dd is just a tad shy of 99.9th ability, but really not quite there. My other one is hard to say b/c she is wildly 2e. One IQ test says that she is 99.9th+ and others say that she's about where I am or perhaps a tad below.

I tend to lean toward a mental model of intellect that puts a lot of stock in innate ability that can be lost or developed, but not developed out of thin air (i.e. - a kid is very unlikely to be gifted if it isn't in the innate mix/genetic pool). That's where I tend to think that those who have kids who are tested at the 98th percentile+ FSIQ/GAI (or something close to there) are unlikely to be truly "non-gifted."

I was going to ask op the same thing, how she thinks her dad is pg and her son is on the mg/hg border, but maybe she's the same and didn't show as well in "the shadow" of a pg parent (who thinks a level 3 granchild is not gifted). I didn't want to say so because I didn't want to minimize her reality if her perception is correct. I'm sure that line of thinking has already been considered and she has been here long enough to have read about imposter syndrome already. My mom told me one that she was scared when I was nine and she realized I was smarter than her. Now that I am grown she is able to say the words "I was a very good mother." Mothering is about commitment not necessarily about inate ability, imo. hth

level of commitment vs level of innate talent
yeah, that conversation makes its rounds, right?!

I do think my kids are smarter than I am, though I'm not sure by how much. I don't know my exact IQ, but I have a general idea (I was tested as a child).

My DH has never taken an IQ test, but he is definitely smarter than I am. I'm okay with all of this. I have some areas of major strength where I outshine him, but he's a renaissance guy (he can do anything--though he doesn't like higher math).

When I help DD with her math, if it's a spatial question and she feels confused, she's more likely to be the one to figure it out first. (I'm terrible with anything spatial.) Really, I shouldn't even help with those.

I can see situations where the parent is MG and the kid is HG or the parent is strong in verbal reasoning and the child is very spatially gifted, for instance, but I see a difference between there being levels of giftedness or differing areas of strengths within a family and a family where the parents are of totally average intellect and the child is gifted.

Oh, I agree. I don't think my kids are "many" SDs above me. (That's pretty major.) Like others here, though, I also feel that I am not as smart as I once was, so sometimes my kids really make me feel stupid. And I feel I probably have something approaching an LD in spatial reasoning--maybe nonverbal learning disability. That's something that could happen--a parent could have an LD and then have a child who is gifted in that area.

DH and I know where we fit on the scale, and we know very firmly-- though without testing-- that our DD is about a full SD from her dad. She's probably more than half a SD from me.

All of that is plus-or-minus about a half SD.

DH is HG/HG+ and I'm HG+/EG by the numbers. DD is "more" than that.

I can get inside her head in ways that my DH can't. But I'm never sure how much of that is LOG and how much of it is personality. She is very much like me in temperment/personality.