Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion How much of what I see is an enriched environment?

All the kids where I live (an expat community) have a wonderfully enriched environment. Lots of very educated parents, many of whom have one stay-at-home parent with lots of time because of restrictions on employment here (and very cheap household help).

I've seen kids both "level out" from age 2 to 5 (i.e. stay advanced but lose the apparent advantage), and my own 5yo get further and further ahead.

Looking back, the difference is how quickly the child learns. A very bright child will learn something early if you repeat it often enough. The outliers learn it when you show them once.

Sounds like you have an outlier, but it's hard to really tell (I feel the same way about my 2yo honestly). About educational opportunities, I agree with polar bear about looking at a location more for the whole family and finding the best fit educationally. Not all gifted boys are ready for early entrance maturity wise, so it may not be a good option anyways. We're relocating in a year or two, and while good schooling for our clearly gifted 5yo is high on the list, family life ranks first.

I agree, I personally wouldn't base my home purely around my kids' educational needs although it would be a biggish factor. That said, we live in a city with a 1.5-million pop and I couldn't go any smaller than that - I love having decent museums, art galleries, public events, visiting speakers etc, for our own sakes as well as the kids'. I wouldn't uproot and move suburbs for a school zone. We've already had one kid through the school system and now know very well that it's a blip in the grand scheme of things. I'd rather stay in the house we love and spend on a private school instead.

As for the innate/enriched chicken and egg situation, I think the giftedness comes first. Yes our house is an very enriched environment but it wouldn't be unless we were all already pretty smart and interested, kids included. My kids get smarter than me around age 11, after that it's them hothousing me

Innate ability and enrichment are an interaction, in the technical, math/stats sense of the word. If you look at this graph , imagine the top line is high innate ability and the bottom line is low innate ability, and the x-axis is amount of enrichment. The y-axis is performance on whatever measure.

Innate ability benefits kids in all environments; and enriched environment benefits kids of all abilities; but kids with high ability benefit more from enrichment (the slope of the line is steeper).

Intuitively, one would expect enrichment to act as a kind of coefficient on LOG to produce a level of achievement, right? All the way to negative enrichment (e.g. holding someone down in a class several sigma below their ability) lowering achievement.

I wasn't aware of this and find it quite surprising, actually. Do you have a link to something that talks about this fact?

No direct data, but it's kind of a general principle. It's like asking, if a person is really strong, is it because they have naturally big muscles, or because they've done a lot of weight training? Well, it's the interaction of the two.

A person with a naturally slight build just won't be able to benefit much from weight training. A person with a robust build may be fairly weak with no training, but with good training they can get REALLY strong.

Put it another way, with little environmental opportunity, perhaps to the point of neglect, a person with natural talent and a person with little talent will look quite similar. It's when environmental opportunity is added to the mix that the differences between the two really show up.

As another example, consider someone who is naturally musically talented. With no musical training, they really won't look much different from someone with no musical talent. But with training, the talented person can go far and the untalented person can't.

Story time with my DS used to be an hour plus a night when he was 2-3. I think he benefited from this enrichment, but how many wiggly 2 year olds are going to sit still while you read "Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe" etc? Probably not a lot. So I agree that enrichment helps all, but will help some a lot more than others. A sunflower will grow taller than a daisy if both are well cared for (both are nice and wonderful though).

Agreed, enrichment has limits. Yes, my kids have a fairly enriched environment but what they do with it is hugely influenced by their personalities and abilities.

This is not a rigorous study but I've taken other kids to the museum along with my kids with highly variable results as one example. Most kids don't want to read all of the information or ask a million questions about every single thing they see while they are there. Heck even my DD isn't as intense as DS when it comes to this stuff and she's pretty far on the right end of the bell curve as well.

Go with your gut, I really underestimated both of my kids for a long time partly because there are a lot of other smart kids around and partly because I knew they were smart but figured they were not THAT smart. If I was moving and all else was even (job/housing/etc) I'd be looking for a range of schooling options. Even now that I know a lot more about their strengths and weaknesses I honestly can't say what they are going to need in a couple years. My 2e DS would not be a good candidate for a full skip and while DD might be, I don't think it would be enough in most ways either. We need options & flexibility. We're just trying to make the best decision at the time while trying to learn what the possible future options are and keeping those paths open in case we need them later.

Your son is only 2, you have some time to go before you test him. The internet is full of debates on "Nature vs. Nurture". I find this topic very interesting and I personally believe that "Nurture" carries a lot more weight than is normally given credit for. But, that is just a personal belief. I agree with MegMeg that a gifted child will go a long way with enrichment - again using the musically talented child as an example - if such a child had an expert teacher, involved parents, practice time built into their schedules, a lot of encouragement and enrichment from early ages then, the child can go far in developing musical talent. Same can be said for creative writing or math or science - enrichment carries a lot of weight.

As for relocating - I suggest that you look for a place that has many opportunities for enrichment in addition to educational choices. Because, if your child turns out to be very gifted, chances are that no school will be a perfect choice and you may have to provide enrichment on your own time after school. Good luck.

So, to focus on the relocation issue...

While I agree that education isn't the only thing you consider when you move, it is a consideration. So here are some things to think about:

http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/StatePolicy.aspx

This map shows the status of gifted education in each state. It makes sense that a state that both mandates and FUNDS gifted education may have more options. Note that states that mandate but don't fund may only be paying lip service to gifted education (hello, Oregon). Click a state for more information.

http://www.nagc.org/resources-publications/gifted-state

This site has links to each state's department of education and gifted department and laws and details.

https://www.hslda.org/laws/

The education of last resort for highly gifted kids is sometimes homeschooling. This site lists the laws for each state. Some states have more religious homeschooling and some more secular. If this distinction matters to you, then I recommend checking into that as well.

While big cities have more educational options, they may also have districts of high achievement striving that can harm access to gifted specific programming. Basically, some districts are so used to every parent thinking their kid is gifted and special that they are sick of hearing about it. Whereas a smaller flexible school district may be thrilled to have a super bright kid.

Remember, in the end it's the school and the principal and teachers that matter the most. My experience is that some people get it and some don't and the ones that don't probably aren't.