Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion I am a hot housing helicopter parent?

Howler, don't kill me, but what are you objecting to--the content or the memorization? I feel like memorization is pretty typical in a lower-level intro course. These questions don't seem too hard to me, although nutrition/health (we're on the edges of my field here) dabbles in BS, it's true. I think it's weird that everyone has to take this course, though.

The exercise in caloric values is memorization without purpose. It's not like you're going to be using this information to calculate caloric values of an entire food. If you want to know, you test the food.

Presenting ethanol as a nutrient is a content problem... and a pretty severe one that any layperson could notice. It's probably not a good message to be confusing for college kids, either.

"Five steps to behavioral change" sounds a lot like received orthodoxy that crushes original though.

So many great comments, and I’m nodding and saying yes, that, yes, all the way through. And yet, I am still deep in the vacillating second-guessing zone, and pondering the strong message on the thread begun by greenlotus that if the kid didn’t ask for it and doesn’t want to do it, it’s hothousing.

It seems reasonable enough at face value, but where do you draw the line? Many of the kids on this board are very driven and intrinsically motivated. Others, including mine, not so much. Some days it seems like my job as a mother is defined as making them do things they don’t want to. DS is immature and ADHD-I, no executive function skills and little independent functioning/ responsibility. He has anxiety attacks when faced with something he doesn’t already know how to do. And he’s probably the least competitive kid on the planet. Of his own volition, DS would never go to school, bathe, clean his room, clear the table, turn off Minecraft or put down his book and sleep. He would never voluntarily do homework or practice his 10 minutes of piano, and would mostly avoid going out to play or any form of exercise. He would never try something hard, something new, or something out of his comfort zone (from what I can tell, the math he does at school misses that ZPD by at least 4 years, even before we started AoPS).

I hope to god I am not driven by awards or honours. Certainly there’s no explicit ones, as I am so paranoid of others' sensitivity to the whole gifted thing that I actually hide the AoPS books when friends come over. But I too was very struck by Dude’s 'precipice' comment, and my second guessing is driven by the question, am I doing this for him or for *me*? Deep down inside, am I getting off on the idea that my ten-year old does high school math, or am I doing this because, as Ivy asks, the long-term wellbeing of my kid really, truly requires high-level math, right now, even if after-schooling is the only way to get it? When he's twelve, twenty, forty, will he be really glad we did this or think I wreaked his childhood?

I would agree with polarbear that many skills can wait and blossom equally well later in life. They don't all need to be pursued right now, and certainly not in a competitive way. But this felt different for me: I was watching the math love, core to his soul, being utterly and actively destroyed, day after day. If we lock that cheetah in the elementary school box slurping up pablum for 15 years, what will happen when we suddenly toss him out in the (university) savannah and say “go get that gazelle!”? Will he leap to the chase - or crumble with terror and crawl under the nearest bush? With my DS, I suspect he’d high-tail it outta there, blame someone else for it being too hard, and find something else to do (like live in my basement playing video games). I am terrified that I will fail my child, and feel very responsible for making sure this is not his future.

Ideally, yes, we should open doors and get out of the way. However, some of the ‘accelerate or not’ threads have highlighted that while some kids will walk readily through those doors, others will always instinctively say no. I find it terribly hard to balance my children's right to make decisions about their own lives with my responsibility to over-rule them for their own good, based on my supposed greater knowledge, maturity, and understanding of (known) short-term pain vs (hoped-for) long-term gain.

And the line is completely different between my two kids. I haven't even mentioned DD8, who is her brother's polar opposite in this regard. She's independent, strong, motivated and, above all, resilient. She's straightforward-to-deal-with verbal MG, so hitting her ZPD is easy to achieve in everyday life and desired extra-curriculars. She has to work very hard on her dyslexia remediation, and she has fast recognized the link between that hard work to her new-found reading success. For her, the hothousing line is so easily drawn, in a radically different place. For her brother, the agonizing continues full swing.

I know that SMART has to do with setting goals

Something, Measurable, Something, something and something

Hail google...

Setting goals is easy but achieving them isn't. That's why setting SMART goals - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely - is the first step in making your goal a reality.


But see the first goal I would set would be not to memorize any acronym that I can google and find in less than three seconds (that long because I have a sluggish connection).

Why did I know about smart goals? My son took an online PE/health class for high school last summer and had a question when he was filling out his "wellness" plan that had to include smart goals.

SMART goals was a really popular acronym and philosophy even in the corporate world for awhile.... I've heard of it all over the place I'm relatively certain that IEP goals are supposed to be SMART goals and were referred to that way at the time my ds was going through the IEP process.

HK, I'm sorry you're disappointed in your dd's university experience so far. It sounds like what your dd is finding is due to being in a state school and in the core of first year classes that all freshmen are required to take - once she's in with her degree-track program and taking upper level classes things may be very different.. depending on the university program.

polarbear

Yeah-- this is where I caution others to not necessarily think of college as "the open savannah" for our cheetahs.

DD is finding college to be terribly difficult and not at all what she expected for several reasons:

a) There has been a distinct bait-and-switch in terms of "difficulty" at the post-secondary level-- in the very worst way for gifties, frankly-- it's shallow and miles-and-miles of VOLUME-- memorized. No questioning, no thinking, no analyzing-- just memorize.

b) Her classmates seem well-suited adapted to this set of expectations (which isn't a huge surprise to me given what I saw of secondary in this test-crazed, watered-down time)-- she is NOT because we thought it was frankly abusive to force her to spend hours and hours on "work" that added nothing more to her learning in her AP/dual enrollment coursework (which she was generally acing and then some)... we preferred that she use that unstructured time for being a child instead...


So she was promised an environment where she could really RUN, and it's proven to be the ultimate "enrichment" experience thus far. The pair of factors (and the fact that she seems to be one of the only people noticing, plus disability management in a very hostile setting for her) is driving anxiety to levels that we haven't seen since that awful, awful last year of middle school.

A word about quizlet-- it works a treat for some people. Sadly, DD isn't one of them. I'll also add that flashcards are not actually all that effective/efficient as a learning tool for a lot of students. It has to be more 'active' than that to actually work for many people. For DD, what works is hand writing the paired items, and then ORALLY working through them, timed.

It is hothousing if there is a journalist or blogger looking for an easy idea for some parent bashing.
Seriously, the chattering classes can go from bemoaning hothousing among the middle class to bemoaning that lower class kids never get to learn an instrument or play a sport. Whether it's the one or the other depends on who is to get bashed that day for doing too much (parents) or not doing enough (politicians).

DS8 is one of those kids who has to be pushed into everything, usually weekly. So I insist he goes to Judo, because it really helps his muscle tone coordination and confidence (I had to accept he just hated swim class too much, and because he has swim class every other week at school, I am confident he'll at least keep up his moderate skill and not drown) and insist he practice the violin - he does not want to practice, but wants to play, and he hates being among the worst in PE, so off to violin and Judo practice he goes. And I freely admit I subscribe to a "one music activity, one sport" philosophy. Is it hothousing?
DD4, on the other hand, wants to do everything her brother does and then some. So she goes to kiddie Judo, and swim class (or did until the life guard came out of her cubicle and said the screaming had to stop and what was wrong with my parenting anyway), and to early music education, and because she wants to learn violin too and her best friends mum was all gung-ho about organising a Suzuki class, off to violin class she goes now, too. Is it hot housing? She wants it all, even swimming, and we are currently working on the screaming part.

For my husband, it is hothousing whenever a kids schedule interferes with his plans for the day. If his plans for the day happen to involve some cool college level physics stuff to enjoy with DS8, that's fine.

It's my youngest who is over scheduled,p. He does PT twice a day with one parent each (and we should do it both twice a day, really). He sees a private PT weekly. He has PT twice weekly in preschool. He could do swimming in preschool (we have held out till the weather gets warmer). He goes to speech therapy weekly. We could and should do more (have gait orthotics prescribed and work with that, work more on standing, do more massage, work on speech daily...I am maxed out, and happy to just see him play with big sister. Am I slacking off?
Really, no one from the outside gets to determine what is and isn't hot housing. And if anyone did, I'd proudly declare my three little hothouse flowers, and I am their gardener and know what's best.
On the subtopic I have been reading with great interest about:
Is it true that there is NO space left even in post secondary that would be right for a PG kid like HK's? For DH (who is NOT in her league at all) I have always been thinking that if there was no program at a continental university to be found that would suit him, I might look across the channel towards the UK or even across the Atlantic towards the US. Fuelled by the trend that I observe as well that the volume in high school appears to be steadily cranking up and the intellectual level cranking down - admittedly from a very low level, since In most of the exam driven continental secondary and post secondary systems, no one cares how much work you do or even if you work at all as long as you make the grade (flip side: no one tells you what to work on to that grade, much). So, a system in which a kid might continue to be bored and at loose ends a lot of the time, and have to work hard to find their peeps - but certainly not having to work hard at anything else.
I have read up about colleges that have come up here, like Caltech or Reed, or Swarthmore - wouldn't these be the places to go, where a tiger kid or a hothouse kid or any kid for whom learning =working hard would just flounder, and others be able to actually spread their wings for the first time?

Unfortunately!

Imagine magazine (which one subscribes to or gets for qualifying for the Study of Exceptional Talent) has reviews of colleges "filled with the honest opinions of gifted students who attend or attended the featured school". Reviews from previous issues have been collected on a CD http://cty.jhu.edu/imagine/about/college_reviews.html . Having read the magazine for some time, I see that most of the reviews are positive.

That's a good resource, Bostonian.


I went to a college of this type. While I took a few survey courses that were factoid-heavy, it wasn't a lot, and I found many classes that were intellectutally exciting and not at all about rote anything. This was 20ish years ago and I am far from PG, so everyone else's MMV.