Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How did giftedness affect your family planning?

It took 5 years to have DD so the idea of "planning" seems a bit absurd. DD and DS are 16mo. apart and I spent a few years after they were born exhausted. DD could be intense with a lot of mood swings and demanded a lot of attention. DS was very passive and easy for the most part but he had delays which caused stress and running around to medical appointments. The idea of a third child made me feel exhausted and still does. I don't think the "giftedness" plays a role. It has its challenges but the disability aspect is what has exhausted me most. Both kids are 2e. If both my kids had been "easy" and "typical" maybe then I would have been more motivated to try to have a third, thru infertility treatments, or adoption, or just trying the old fashioned way. You never know what you are going to get when you decide to have a baby. You can make an educated guess based on the fact that siblings tend to be similar, but there are no guarantees. I have a friend with twins. One has autism spectrum disorder and behavioral issues. The other twin has a genetic disorder that has caused her to be wheelchair bound and completely non-verbal, profoundly deficient in terms of cognitive ability (not sure of the PC way to say that), with all kinds of medical issues causing her to be in and out of the hospital (at one point she seemed to be in the hospital more than she was home). They have no idea what her life expectancy is. The genetic disorder/health issues were not detected until she was about 6 months old. The parents are heroes in my eyes, and I have no idea how they have endured everything they have been through. But most parents love their kids so much they step up to the plate and do whatever is needed, exhausted or not.

The only way that giftedness played a role in our family planning is that I had a high enough IQ to have a job that paid enough that we could afford IVF in order to conceive our second.

We imagined having a couple of kids. Not a set plan or anything, but it made sense to us.

Then we had DD and she never slept. Never slept, walked (ran, climbed, jumped) early, talked early and nonstop. And still never slept. Needed stimulation always. Terrible colic. And did I mention that she never slept?

I was 30 when she was born and it was five or six years before we even came up for air. I feel like it was decades off our lives.

If DD is this way because she's PG, well then we choose not to have another because of that. We knew she was scary smart from very early on too (I have a log I kept of all her freakishly early firsts for the first year), but it was the endless intensity that drove our decision.

I think the cost of children in parental time and money goes up more slowly than linearly with the number of children. Most people in the U.S. buy the education of their children through the purchase of a home in a good enough area. Once they have done so, they don't bear most of the cost of pre-college education (although I am well aware of transportation and other activity fees). We paid our live-in babysitter more when we had three children but did not triple her pay. It is known that having children reduces mothers' earnings, but I doubt that having three children reduces earnings by three times as much as having one. The direct cost of music, sports, and other lessons is proportional to the number of children, but the time cost of transporting them to the same activity is not. Since our youngest turned five or so, our children have been able to entertain each other for hours at a time without needing our attention. We don't need to schedule play dates.

The main benefit of having children -- that they get to enjoy a life -- is proportional to the number of children. If the cost of children is less than proportional to the number, that is an argument for having more of them.

Also, when the kids get older, they can take care of themselves and help around the house. Yesterday DS14 helped my husband put a big shelf together for our garage. They cleaned the garage thoroughly after that. He's been helping like that for a good few years now. DD9 regularly cooks her own simple meals and she helps us cook more complex ones (DS14 as well). Again, she's been doing that for a while. I want to say that she made her first sunny-side-up egg two years ago.

In our experience, once the kids are old enough to do all of the following, life gets a lot easier:

• Eat by themselves and rinse their dishes
• Take a shower by themselves
• Get dressed by themselves
• Get out of bed in the morning, eat somethings simple, and amuse themselves

This stuff started to happen around age 2 in our house. By the time my youngest was 5, things were much easier than they had been before that. Now that she's 9, most of that frantic stress from the younger years is gone.

On the financial side - that was a consideration to some extent. We left the city where DH and I met and moved to one where cost of living was so much lower, and I suspect that if we were still living in the high cost city, we would have struggled with the idea of more than one child. Where we live now, many families here have 2+ kids (our next door neighbors have 4 children and our daycare is full of families with siblings - DS's age group has 4 kids with siblings DD's age and that is just those families with children the same age spacing as us). Our area is really set up for families with children (when we went to visit our former city and went to the area's large Whole Foods market, it was hard to find decent baby food compared to our local supermarket's baby food selection and the area in general felt somewhat unwelcoming to young children when we went around and about).

Thank you! Just having someone commiserate is so relieving. DH is away at work until 7pm or later on week days, so he appreciates the "end product" but has no real sense of the inputs needed. (Our concepts of need are, shall we say, different, though I think the gap is rapidly closing the more I encourage Dad-DS solo play. DH grew up in a cold family where children were bred to be ignored, so he's a far cry from his parents.)


Yes!! I have the luxury of being able to nap or do computer work during DS' nap or, as is the case today, veg out on the forum.


Frankly, I think that's the best approach.

My control freakish inclination to plan will need to be tempered. That's probably a good thing in and of itself.


Yup, he started around 21 months but prefers strongly to be read to. He seems to have little motivation to read to himself, so again, my old friend "wait and see" is at my side.

His favourite play these days is imitating home repairs and inspection shows, which can't really be done with other children.

For instance, this has been our day:
- Cemented a crack in the pool deck
- Performed a top to bottom home "inspection", including note-taking
- Sawed a dead branch off a tree and sealed it
- Sorted leftover patio stones
- Cleaned the drain spouts
- Went for a few "forklift rides", in which I carry him all over the yard and deposit him in various "warehouses"
- Read a handful of books
- Ate two meals
- Built a working construction site out of gardening tools and duct tape, including a wrecking ball, crane, excavator, and construction elevator. This boy loves to build something from nothing!

DS tends to like imaginary scenarios that other children (esp. his age) won't understand, like excavating and replacing weeping tiles in a basement, or deploying a defibrillator to recussitate a patient. The benefit is we play some really interesting games and I get a ton of help around the house from my right hand man!


I'm going to look into that book--thanks for the recommendation.

Not so much about giftedness. It’s their intensities that make parenting so tiring.

I am always surprised how laidback my friend’s children are compare to our own.

I know EXACTLY what you mean by your decades comment! It feels like DS was programmed to be 10 by 3. I feel like I have parented several children in terms of the time and energy intensity of our interactions. I was in my mid-20s when he was born and was thankful to be a young, strong, energized mother for DS. Lord knows I need to be!

I have a friend who had three children in four years and I boggle at how that is even possible. They're all such mellow, cheery, laid back children. Three DS in 4 years would have been a kamikaze mission! (That's also a biological impossibility for me--the flip side of intensive full term nursing is that my fertility hasn't returned yet.) But every time I look at DS, I can't help but think that he's my favourite person (other than DH!) and will grow up to be an incredible man of many talents who I'd love to share life with. My little extroverted inventor, my snuggly treasure.

I'll PM you when even one of those things happens and we can have a forum party!