Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School When they pretend like they can't

Yes, but in my case I think it is a family tradition that does not completely end with childhood.

Well, children often pretend like they can't do something if they want to get out of doing it. That much is natural. I have seen it more often with a difficult, intricate or tiring task that they prefer to pass off to someone else. In your case, I am a bit concerned by your reference to "without application of great bribery, typically will not read aloud from a book." I don't want to be judgmental and perhaps in your DS' case you had a compelling need to have him read aloud, but the bribery itself is a glaring red flag leading to trouble. Furthermore, I know that Montessori clumps several grades together but I am assuming that your DS is in pre-K although the 5-year-olds must be in K and the 6-year-olds in 1st. Personally, I am uncomfortable with why Pre-K "teachers" would have any need to test a child, particular in the fall. This is probably not what you want to hear, but I would back way off and make sure his daycare providers do the same. If he is at the Step 2 level, he has quite a ways to go (although that can happen very quickly) before he is secured/advanced enough in his reading not to be troubled by prying adults.

DS6 will not do anything until he can do so with mastery. DD4.5 can read early readers but pretends that she cannot.

So, yes, I can relate.

This is why I have really no idea how gifted my kid is. If asked to perform (as I have slowly come to realize) he takes 'evasive maneuvers'. He will read words like "camouflage" or "practice" but balk at "we".

I asked once him point blank (but gently) just how much he could read he replied "I can read a little bit ... little words like if an it" which is verbatim quote from "Hop on Pop". Sigh.

This is one of the reasons we are doing gifted private school - the only way I can think of to get him to drop the mask is to have so much interesting stuff and interesting peers that there is no time to play games any more.

DS8 is very straightforward, transparent and honest.

DD5, unfortunately, is not.


This is part of it. We've just started homeschooling DD5, after previously having a life of just play, and she is quite resistant to it, and extracts a pound of flesh per every minute of cooperation. I'm not sure if/when/why she may be hiding abilities, and it makes it difficult to parent.

extracts a pound of flesh per every minute of cooperation

Indeed.

I can certainly relate to this. My daughter can put a union-worker on a work slowdown to SHAME, I tell ya.

My DD (now 11) has a severe case of perfectionism. When she was three, the other parents could tell which sidewalk chalk drawing was hers because she insisted on drawing rainbows in ROYGBIV order every time, no exceptions. She refused to talk until she was three and could speak in complete sentences with a vocabulary she felt sufficient to express her thoughts. Before that, all she would do was use hand gestures. She began wanting to write from the time she could hold a pencil. Then she quit writing and drawing for over a year and would only scribble. She finally started drawing again and writing in cursive (she went to a Montessori pre-school) when she felt she could do it well enough.

She isn’t stubbornly resisting authority like some of your DCs. She is happy to show what she knows, but only if she’s absolutely certain it’s correct. She is anxiety ridden about doing everything perfectly, and she just shuts down if she can’t. Last year, she shut down in the middle of a math test because she was faced with a difficult problem that she didn’t immediately know the answer to. As a result, she didn’t finish the test, and earned a C. I told her in the future to just skip the problem and come back to it if she had time. What did she do on the next test? The same thing. She felt like she had to do the problems in order, skipping one felt like defeat to her. It took earning two Cs in a row before she changed her test taking strategy. Of course, I know that this was motivated in large part by her perfectionism too because she wanted the A and had to learn the hard way her strategy wasn’t getting it for her.

It’s a constant battle with us because I insist on challenging her. I keep explaining that if all she does is show what she already knows, she isn’t learning. I tell her she has to be exposed to concepts she doesn’t already understand and try problems that she doesn’t already know how to solve. This often means often failing on the first few attempts, but that what she needs to really learn. Even so, just this morning at math team practice, she sat teary eyed staring at the third problem because she couldn’t solve it. It didn’t matter that the eighth grade boys who are three years older than her couldn’t solve it; it didn’t matter that her math teacher couldn’t solve it. She refused to move on to the next problem. It’s déjà vu all over again.

We deal with this perfectionism as well. Some kids are just really aware of being ahead and not wanting to a)mess up and b) be different from other kids.

My kiddo at 4 (!) was telling me "Mommy, sometimes I get things wrong on purpose so I'm like the other kids."

Basically, on reading, I didn't bug him about it until kindy, at which point I realized he was reading way above grade level.

By that point we'd progressed to "I can't read because my friends can't read" excuses.

So what I did was at night, I read a book, he read a book. Sometimes we shared a book, alternating who was reading. It was not optional.

He balked but I pulled the mommy card and refused to accept that he couldn't read (as he liked to try and protest). Eventually he got over it and has become more open about reading.

I don't know what the answer is, but I do read a lot about perfectionism looking for tips. And I do things like, when we play tennis, I give speeches that go something along the lines of:

We are going to play tennis.

And by play, I mean we are going to miss the ball.

All the time.

If we do hit the ball, it will go into someone else's court.

Or bounce back and hit us.

But it doesn't matter because we hit the ball.

Any contact with the ball is good, okay?

It doesn't matter if it goes over the net, if it hits Daddy in the head, you hit the ball and that's what counts.

Playing tennis means we miss the ball, chase it around, pick it up and miss it some more. Any hits are a bonus.

Just as an aside, here, I'm still pulling my hair out over this one and my DD15 is a college freshman.

Right now, it's chemistry. She's in the accelerated majors' course, and she never took high school chemistry. So technically, she had to talk her way into the class because she lacked the prerequisite* for the course.

Right. So of course she "can't" do this level of material, right? Yeah, I'm sure that a 200-level chemistry course is way beyond what my PG-let is capable of.... Riiiiiighhhhht.




Except that she can certainly help her FRIENDS do the same chemistry problems, and answer their questions-- when she quits flailing around like a dying operatic soprano and stops wailing about her lack of "preparation" and all that she "is incompetent at."

There are days when a foot shock pad seems like a great all-purpose parenting tool. {sigh}


Er-- right.

What I meant to add, here, is that this kind of thinking isn't exactly pretense. That is, when my daughter says, in her knee-jerk way, "I don't have any idea," she really means it sincerely. But it's entirely EMOTIONAL, that response. It's not that she really doesn't know, or isn't capable of winkling it out, so much as that she HAS to actually consider it, and risk being wrong since she doesn't know-know. Off the top of her head. And perfectly, with absolute confidence.


And yes, we insisted on this particular chemistry course because it would push so hard on her perfectionism. We want her to know now where her study skills are deficient-- not for her to find out a year from now in a 400-level computer science course in her major. We also want college to feel challenging to her. The rest has not, at least thus far-- the pace and content has been a bit too easy in a couple of her classes, and about right in math (well, it feels "comfortable" to her).




* this situation is somewhat unique (and as such presented a good opportunity for a PG child!) in that while she lacked the formal preparation in a credentialing sense, she's lived in an immersion environment for this subject, and has not one, but TWO former chem profs who have taught this course-- nay, designed it, even-- many times. We KNOW that she is more than capable and better prepared than about 75% of her classmates, high school chemistry notwithstanding. Just wanted to say that-- I would not have pressured her to take a 300-level engineering or math course if she lacked the prerequisites. This isn't even about her learning the chemistry. It's about learning study methods, facing her FEARS, and discovering that she does too have flight feathers. So. Golden opportunities like this one don't come along every day-- but when they do, with a perfectionist, you CHARGE for them if your child is HG, because the world is (mostly) too easy to make them possible.

"Sweet cuddly shark" oh my.... Just yesterday I was thinking that as long as manage to get her to adulthood without turning into a recluse or selective mute that one of our daughters is going to be capable of shredding people into tiny little pieces in the blink of an eye.