Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Academic "red shirting" - are they really gifted?

This thread got me thinking about several people I know that talk about how very advanced, etc. their child(ren) are because they did X,Y, or Z "early". Then they go on and talk about how they taught their child(ren) X, Y, Z skill(s). I'm talking about the "I wanted my child to learn to read, so I started formal lessons at age 2 and by the time they were 3.5 years old s/he was reading" and other discussions where the parents drilled and/or spent copious amounts teaching the child in a sit-down-and drill type format.

I'm probably going to come off as a jerk here, and I truly don't mean to - I'm just a bit frustrated - but the whole thing just irritates me. I do, generally, believe that a child will acquire *and* internalize a skill when s/he is ready - mentally, physically, emotionally - and not before then. However, when the child is drilled for a year or more on a subject or skill and the parent states the child is "advanced" or "gifted", I'm reminded of "red-shirting". It seems almost a case of "six of one" to me. In one instance the child is held back so that they are older, bigger, etc. than the other kids (I realize these aren't *always* the reasons for "red-shirting" but they *seem* to be the most prevalent.); the child comes across as seeming smarter, more mature, more athletic than many of the other children that started school *on time. Whereas when a child is "taught" (a) skill(s)early then s/he may also appear smarter, etc. than the other kids.

Admittedly, my soapbox is built of a bit of jealousy. A parent can brag that Joey is fastest kid in 1st grade (because his parents held him back a year) and that's okay. A parent can say, "I started teaching Jane to read at age three and now at age five she can read independently". Mostly, I am *truly, most emphatically* happy for the parents and their joy for their child(ren). Sometimes though, (and this is where the "jerky" part of this post comes out even more than it already has) I just really wish I could say, "Well Boo was reading before age two and adding and subtracting up to quantities of twenty by 18 months of age...and I didn't have to drill her or actively teach her anything. Unless you count Leapfrog videos, singing lots of children's songs and Starfall." But I don't say it. I *can't* say it - not the way I described above or even in a more toned down fashion. If I did *I'd be labeled as a braggart, or liar, or fill-in-the-blank.

I'm sure I sound snarky; I feel a bit snarky! It's just so darn frustrating at times to spend so much time supporting others, listening to them gush about their kids when even the most innocuous comment from me re: my kids can get me shunned or end a conversation in a hurry. So I have to pad what I say, limit interactions to fluff, etc.

I'm stopping now, before I really start ranting. (Too late, I know!)


ETA: Disclaimer -I in no way think it's a *bad* thing or somehow discounts a child's giftedness, in any way, if the child's parent teach the child something, because they followed the child's lead based on the child's interests and readiness, etc. My post was limited to those instances when a parent *drills* a child on a skill or subject regardless of the child's interest or abilities and other similar situations. (Basically, "hot housing".)

This post was really helpful. I thought K was for 5 year olds. I kept wondering why the K kids were so big. I was even told well they grow a lot between pre k and K. Yeah like two years worth of growing. So early entrancing is like a 2 year gap? yikes(maybe).

Also Mizzoumommy, DD then 2 spent a lot of time on starfall when I was pregnant and sick with DS. I felt a little better knowing that she was doing something other than watching me loose my lunch. As an extra bonus she learned how to read. Yay starfall.

I like hearing about new things other kids are doing regardless of where they fall on the spectrum. I sometimes have to be careful because I haven't had a good sense of what typical development is in the past and I think things I may have said innocently came across wrong when I first had kids. hopefully I am better about this now.

We like Starfall here, too. It's helped both DS and DD learned to read.

I agree with your entire last paragraph. I hope I didn't come off as not liking to hear about the new things other kids do. I only meant my post in the "I wish I could share more and not have it '[come] across wrong'" sense.

Just recently, I was discussing reading with another homeschool mom whose child is having "trouble" reading. (I put trouble in quotes because the child is 5.5 years old and IMO she has plenty of time to become a fast and fluent reader.) Yet the mother was concerned; so together we brainstormed some ideas to help the mom feel more at ease and confident in her ability to help her daughter read (and homeschool, in general), and ideas for ways to approach (teach) the subject with her DD without her DD automatically balking and shutting down.

Then she asked me, "How did you come up with all of these ideas? Is this how you taught Boo to read? How old is she, again?" So I had to do the "side-step, wriggle" move, (which, by the way, I still don't have completely down). I answered, "Oh, I'm sure I read about most of them somewhere" and without ever answering the questions about my DD, I quickly re-routed the conversation back to the other mom and ways to help her out. I felt that I couldn't give an open (full-disclosure) answer without making the other mom feel (even more)worried about her child or come across as insulting, etc. I left out the part that while I thought most of the ideas sounded good, I never used (most of them) because Boo had pretty much taught herself to read years prior rending most of the ideas obsolete for her (and, now, her brother).

And when she commented, "Doesn't that seem a bit much for a 5.5 year old? Maybe in a couple of years we could add that to our curriculum," and I replied, "Oh, I figured you would just take what you needed and adjust it all to fit your needs." All the while, wondering in my head "Really? It is? I had no idea this was for older kids."

It can be a terribly fine line!

Oh, and to be clear, my last post was geared toward the comparison of "red-shirting" and "hot-housing". I do enjoy hearing about other children's accomplishments and I will always offer a helping hand and act as a sounding board how ever I am able. I dislike hearing a parent go on about how smart their child is because the parent drilled them on reading so the child could read, early. Frankly, I feel badly for the child; I also get irritated, because it's parents like that that give the parents on *this* boards and others like it a bad rap.

This has me laughing, because I often feel like you do, except that Leapfrog & Starfall both seem very teachy. DD3 had taught herself to read some sight words by the time she was 2 (and is now reading at least at a first grade level), but I feel like she didn't really teach herself because I let her play around on Starfall. I feel sort of like one of those people. And now that she is 3 and loves to talk about numbers and math I feel like I am cheating and "teaching" something I shouldn't be if I try to explain a concept. (Never mind the fact that she specifically asks me to teach her.) OF COURSE I don't flashcard or drill or anything even like that...but that line between teaching and letting them teach themselves still seems elusive to me.

My take, FWIW:

If the child asks, you're not hothousing. Not ever. Even if you're teaching. After all, teaching a child who ASKS to learn is never a bad thing. It's really not! I'd hate for teaching to get a bad name when it's child-led! If the child likes Starfall, asks to play it, then I feel very strongly that it's perfectly fine.

OTOH, if a parent is taking the lead because s/he wants to impress friends with everything the child knows, that's hothousing. IMHO, even *that's* only a problem insofar as 1) it isn't about what's good for the child but is about the parent's image, and 2) there's an opportunity cost of all the things a child isn't doing and learning while s/he's being flashcarded to high heaven (or whatever).

And of course, it makes people doubt what HG+ kids can do on their own. I'm with you on that completely!

The fine line with hothousing comes, I think, because sometimes the parents tell themselves they're trying to help the child to get ahead. But in hothousing situations, that usually goes back to wanting to look good to the parent's peers, perhaps just further down the line. Does that 4yo really care about going to Harvard in 14 years or so? If not, that's a parent's goal, not a child-responsive one. To me, that seems misguided.

In short, I think hothousing has little/nothing to do with teaching or not teaching; I think it's about what the parents' primary goal is. Is it to follow the child and help him or her to grow, or to lead the child so as to make Mom and Dad look good in their peer group?

I suspect people reading this forum are in the clear. In my experience, usually people who are hothousing don't think twice about hothousing!

Mizzoumommy... it is no secret that I am anti-hothousing and your posts really sums up a lot of my issues with it. One of my close friends has a daughter 2 months younger than mine and she decided the curriculum for her child never once was it that her DD was interested in the subject. They started with colors than shapes, numbers and then ABCs. It really frustrated me because all I saw was rote memorization from her child. She doesn't take the idea of shapes and use it in her surroundings such as the door is a rectangle but rather can recite the pages in the book. But what really frustrates me is everything is a competition with her. I can't really tell her anything about my DD because next thing you know that was added to her curriculum and the big difference is my DD taught herself most of it and was interested in it... guiding what she wanted to know. She so wants her daughter to be gifted b/c she herself was the smartest in her high school. And I am not saying her DD isn't gifted... only time will tell but drilling your kid doesn't seem right to me. And now that DD is past the basics she can't make that happen for her DD though she tries. The big one is reading. She really tries to force her reading and it is clear that she isn't even close to being ready for it. I made the mistake to share with her DDs first sign of reading which I got will that is the easy thing of memorization like it was no big deal but this was before my child was even 2. Now 9 months later she is still trying to get her DD to read and it isn't working. Yes I have an evil side to me because I can't help but think yes that is the easy part right? But no I don't say a thing to her. I am a big believer that all children develop differently and in their own way and I don't see the need to rush things at all. So now knowing about gifted and looking into what the curriculum is for Kindergarten it has made me hold my child back or at least try to but she learns no matter what I do.

Providing educational materials furnishes ammunition for accusations of hot housing, but the augment has no depth beyond the sound bite. The majority of kids will not figure out elementary level math and reading at age 2-3 just because they are given edutainment products to play with.

My kids loved early elementary level computer games when they were little. My son was approx. 30 months old when we moved to a new house. Our new neighbors came by with their slightly younger son in a stroller for introductions. I was really excited that there was a similarly aged boy nearby and I pointed to an open window and indicated that our two year old was inside, on the computer. I immediately realized how odd that sounded (by their expressions) so I added quickly that we don�t allow him on the internet without supervision.

Interestingly they were among the most accepting of our son�s differences that we ever encountered.

I don't see hothousing as providing educational materials and I don't think mizzoumommy was saying that either. It is the aspect of drilling the kids when they have shown no interest in the curriculum. When a child is interested then giving them that information is not hothousing. My daughter loves sites such as starfall and pbs.org. She is very independent on the computer and has been for months so if she wants to play she knows how to open the site and get into the games. I really don't see that as hothousing. If I forced her to do it then yes that would be a problem. Just like flashcards. If the child loves flashcards then great but if the parents are drilling the kids with them different story.

And to put this thread back on topic of red shirting I forgot to mention my humor in the fact that my DD will be one of the youngest children in her class. Her b-day is August 16th and our state cutoff is September 1st. I can not tell you how many times I have heard from different people that I should hold her back a year b/c of her age. These are people that really don't know my child just calculate her age and quickly jump to how hard it will be for her later in school when all her friends are already driving, etc. I could not imagine holding her back a year given that at this rate she will already be bored in school when she does start.

I have seen a distinction made in the literature between a child who teaches him or herself to read early and a child who is taught to read early. I have also heard that it is possible to teach a "normal" child to "read" at a very basic level through the use of drilling (or through regular video viewing) but that these kids typically do not stay ahead. Whether that is true or not, I have no way of knowing.

I definitely think that it is possible to push children too hard in one direction, and I think kids respond to it in one way or another. MY DD would respond by pushing back, but that is probably because I have taught her that she gets to make her own decisions and that I will love her no matter what. Other kids might respond by working as hard as they can to learn something they're not ready for to please parents they think will otherwise be disappointed. I don't think these kids are being "made gifted," but they are probably traumatized. And it is also somewhat traumatic for me to know that others think I've done that sort of thing to my kid.

Hothousing and red-shirting isn't new. Red-shirting only prolongs the agony of grade school for a gifted child. I see parents blogging on this site who were probably hothoused as kids, and they appear to be hothousing kids that aren't particularly gifted. The gifted ones are autodidactic, and will show up on standardized abstract reasoning tests in the top 5%.

I'll share my story with you. My parents had a grade-school education and we lived in poverty in a shack with no indoor plumbing. I still scored in the 99-100% bracket on grade school Iowa testing. I was self-taught with puzzle books and an adult dictionary and adult encyclopedia set that I'd read cover to cover in second grade. I spent grade school sitting in the principal's office because the teachers didn't know what to do with me, and I was profoundly lonely most of the time. The Iowa tests targeted me into a gifted "enrichment program" along with the son of the school district supervisor and some hothoused kids of prominent local merchants. Honestly, the gifted program didn't make a difference, and I learned about socioeconomic bias in our educational system. I heard "we could do something for her if she were a boy". " she won't fit in our program". "she can't go because she doesn't have the right clothes". "she's not college material [no money]". It didn't matter. As soon as I turned 16, the local community college took me. I aced logic, college physics, math and chemistry, transferred into a university physics program, aced it, and landed a great job that took me out of poverty forever.

The moral of this story is to stop worrying about how well your kid is doing relative to other kids, or whether you're buying the right stuff for them. Get them a computer and internet connection, puzzles, and point them in the right direction. Get them into early college or a program like the Davidson school. I strongly recommend puzzle books that contain the same types of problems that show up on a standardized abstract reasoning test. If they are gifted and they can learn how to solve the puzzles, they'll float to the top.