Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How to Hothouse Your Kid

ok, i guess i'm back. here we go...

DD: uh, this won't fit.
Me: yep - use one of the smaller ones.
DD: how many?
Me: here's the one cup - add them into it and sort it out.
DD: cool!
Me: yeah. (DD keeps puttering while i'm busy)
DD: huh. i can mix them up, too - and it still works.
Me: what do you mean?
DD: well, one 1/2 + two 1/4s is 1 cup.

and it rolled out from there. and more questions and more experiments. i guess it's a good thing we're homeschooling now. (really going, now - i have no business here.)

I think some kids are just wired differently - partly due to genetics. Some kids just suck everything in and are more intuitive, perceptive than others. Some of it does stem from exposure and environment. Here, I mean my child was exposed to different vocabulary, transportation systems, different lifestyles and housing, etc. - from just living in NYC that my VT niece is simply not exposed to.

I was thinking about this recently. My 2e pg son was nearly 4 years old when he decided and insisted he wanted to be a curtain wall tester for Halloween. We had gone to the NJ Science Ctr and experienced a curtain wall test himself. He was so fascinated by the curtain wall test at the NJ Science Ctr that he wanted to be a tester again for Halloween.

My VT niece is now the same age and she is showing eg/pg signs. Still, she's got no clue what a curtain wall test is. She lives fairly close and been to Montreal so may have seen skyscrapers there, but it's not NYC.

IF my son had not been to the NJ Science Center would have been a curtain wall tester?? No. I don't think so. IF I had been oppositional to him being a curtain wall tester for Halloween would have still been one? Perhaps. My son is very independent. But IF my son had a different personality and temperament, then he may have not been a curtain wall tester IF I had discouraged him.

I found myself explaining Bayesian updating of priors to DS2 the other day when a cab just about ran us down in the street against its red light. I said something like "what are the odds?" and it just sort of popped out contextually. Odds are he won't absorb that kind of material but, being an extrovert, I tend to vocalize a lot of my thoughts. I think he gloms onto some odd topics by dint of this habit of mine.

It's also much more interesting for me to revisit topics I like than to say in a banal falsetto, "Oh look at the doggie-doggie going pee pee on the tree!" Shudder. (In no way am I implying that you or anyone here is guilty of spewing that kind of nauseous tripe. I just offer it to contrast the kind of nonsense I hear most children being subjected to.

So the combination of a nerdy verbal parent and neat stimuli makes for some interesting opportunities to learn, as long as learning isn't what the parent expects from the interaction.

off to google curtain wall test because I have no clue what that is...Now I know what a curtain wall is and a curtain wall test is but...



What does a curtain wall tester look like? Someone in a lab coat or is it a costume of a wall?

I'm sorry, but I just don't see how the use of rewards for work well done is possibly a telltale sign of a hot housing parent. Perhaps you're speaking more of the use of excessive punishment?

In the world of adult work, what of bonus incentives, or the threat of a demotion/getting fired? I think using rewards/punishments for performance/non-performance normal.
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When I first signed in to Davidson, I had a signature line that went something like, "You can't teach an elephant to dance." I got a lot of bad reviews on that and it went bye-bye. However, I feel this expresses my feelings on hot housing to a gifted level. It's just not possible. If reading at three qualifies a child as gifted and that child was shown Sesame Street and had a book of the alphabet before then, is that hot housing? If so, why don't more children read at three, what with the readily available resource of tv and the library?

Oh, and I once read a review of the Baby Can Read. It involved isolating the child in a restraint of some kind, in a dark room, without anything but the program playing. THAT is hot housing.

!!!

Truly, utterly speechless. What kind of parents/adults would ever subject children let alone babies and young toddlers to this? That is horrible.

DD8 was at the zoo with me in the reptile room, and she was clearly anxious about how to tell venomous snakes from the other kind. I had to give her some information as a way of calming that anxiety. So we talked about pit vipers, identified the pits that give them their name, and also noted the distinctive shape many of them have to their heads. We discussed how certain keywords in species names are telling, because "rattlesnake," "viper," and "cobra" always mean venomous, but "boa" and "python" always signify constrictors. We identified the difference between venomous coral snake and its friendly doppleganger, the scarlet king snake.

We didn't draw much attention during our conversations. The weird looks came a couple days later, when DD went back to the zoo with a couple of her friends, and she delivered her version of the same lecture as she led them around the room.

this is exactly my dilemma. Here, it isn't just about getting a certain IQ test or ability test score to get into the gifted magnet school. Unless the ability test shows intelligence above around the 99.5th percentile, they ALSO have to have achievement test results in reading and math. And in order to score that high they HAVE to be working above grade level. If the school does not instruct kids above grade level, the kids either have to teach themselves or the parents have to do it. So the majority of the kids who qualify for the highly gifted program here are most likely hothoused. I made DD do reading comprehension tests over the summer for practice in hopes that she can pass the dumb reading achievement test (98th percentile or above) so that she has a chance to get into that program. Since she already has the math score I'm not worried about math at all and we never talk about it. And it's because the regular school classroom is grossly inadequate. If I felt it was meeting her needs, I wouldn't bother. It's not about my ego or about her being labeled "gifted"--it's about getting her out of her heinous school and into something more appropriate. Since she has some 2e issues, I'm not sure what's appropriate for her yet and she needs more testing. But I at least want to give her a chance.

Plus, there's that whole seeking-parental-approval thing that small children have going on. "Mommy... LOOK AT WHAT I CAN DO!!"


And possibly, child abuse.

I was reading this the other day and thinking if some people might consider it hothousing:

http://www.heritagesource.com/profiles.htm#SayAllen

I consider it parent-led enrichment but she was 9 when he began requiring her to write essays for him, not 3 or 4.

I'm starting to wonder if I should be doing more to prevent DD from hothousing herself. It was such a hot and lingering summer here that we got into spending too much time indoors to avoid the heat outside. We need to reset our schedule/structure.