Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion my parents did NOTHING and I went to Harvard

Scary....and sad.

I think we all want this for our children, and I'm sure your DC will benefit from your experience/wisdom. Good luck!

From my experience, just the fact that you've found this forum will benefit your kids enormously.

TwinkleToes,

Brag away! Really ... you will find that this is a place you can do so. I, personally, think you have an interesting story and love reading it. I also think you might feel a little attacked but I certainly was not trying to attack you ... at all! What I saw from your original post was a mother who is questioning if she really needs to advocate for her child since her parents didn't. We can't tell you the answer. But we can give examples of why it would be wise and how school of today is not school of when we grew up and research has come along way since we were children. SI was not even a diagnoses 15 years ago ... okay, technically still not but the word is out and parents of gifted children are more aware of sensory issues. My best friend's DD 15 yr old is PG and has serious problems right now. She is a DC with SI but it took her mother researching her symptoms to stumble across it. When she took it to the doctors they concluded she had it. What if my friend didn't happen on it? Scary thoughts. It doesn't change the fact that her DD is headed towards dropping out. They are now talking about therapeutic boarding school. Because yes her DD could get her GED with no problems but would fail miserably if she went on to community college b/c she has such anxiety and depression. And then we go back to my DD who is only 3... maybe I have been over exposed to the possibilities but I stress out about my DD's anxiety and underachieving.

But to shine the light back on you... you have a story that clearly shows problems with education but you are one, more fitting into the category of happy endings. You might disagree with that statement, but a Harvard degree is impressive.

I believe I read it in Genius Denied. Don't quote me on that and Cym might be able to clarify it more.

Not sure where it's written but I've seen Dr. Webb speak in person twice and he said it both times as a "known" fact.

I have to keep this very short (computer issues), but wanted to say that my parents did nothing and I didn't get into harvard (and if I hadn't been underachieving, I probably could have) (twice, lol). I didn't learn how to think until I was practicing law. Sure, I still went to an excellent law school, but I wasted a lot of years, a lot of time in which I might have learned something, had my parents done somemthing when I was in elementary school. A couple of my kids are already on paths to underachievement, and I'm trying to head it off at the pass. I hope to come back and read the rest of this when my DSL service is back up....

I don't think it's necessary to learn to work and learn to think in school, but if a kid doesn't learn it somewhere they are at a great disadvantage once they would like to achieve anything difficult. There are habits that are traditionally expected to be learned at school, like how to solve problems that don't have obvious solutions, how to work at something until you achieve a product that is good enough (rather than either perfect or just better than everyone else's), how to manage time and break projects down into manageable chunks, how to be a good sport, etc. etc. These skills are difficult to achieve when everything comes easy. Can these skills be learned outside of school? Sure. Sports, competitions, real-life projects around the house, just to name a few. But to put a kid in a situation where they are always the best, where they always knows the answer, are always the first one to complete a project with little effort, it's not healthy. When a kid grows up thinking they are the smartest or that they should be the best at everything they are often in for a rude awakening when they actually need to put forth effort and still can't produce perfection, or even something better than everyone else. See The Goldilocks Problem.

But then I'm with snowgirl, a semi-reformed underachiever. I would just say that if your kid isn't going to learn some of these life skills at school, it's important to find other ways to provide them.

I will look--I've seen it in a couple written forms (maybe Miraca Gross) but definitely heard talks about it: SENG Arlene DeVries said not only is their suicide rate higher, but they don't make mistakes (so they actually succeed more than attempt). We had a gifted HS student recently succeed in my town. Very sad. No one knew there was trouble.

Here's something from M. Gross: "The common perception of the extremely gifted as eager, academically successful young people who display high levels of task commitment has been refuted by research. This research demonstrates that many highly gifted children underachieve seriously in the regular classroom and that by the end of elementary school, many have almost completely lost the motivation to excel (Pringle, 1970; Painter, 1976; Whitmore, 1980; Gross, 1993).

The majority of the extremely gifted young people in my study state frankly that for substantial periods in their school careers they have deliberately concealed their abilities or significantly moderate their scholastic achievement in an attempt to reduce their classmates' and teachers' resentment of them. In almost every case, the parents of children retained in the regular classroom with age peers report that the drive to achieve, the delight in intellectual exploration, and the joyful seeking after new knowledge, which characterized their children in the early years, has seriously diminished or disappeared completely. These children display disturbingly low levels of motivation and social self-esteem. They are also more likely to report social rejection by their classmates and state that they frequently underachieve in attempts to gain acceptance by age peers and teachers. Unfortunately, rather than investigating the cause of this, the schools attended by these children have tended to view their decreased motivation, with the attendant drop in academic attainment, as indicators that the child has "leveled out" and is no longer gifted (Gross, 1993). Gross's Exceptionally Gifted Childrenhas a whole chapter on self-esteem, underachievement,

I am a witness to underachievement in underchallenged HG/PG middle school students. We have 7 kids in my son's class with IQ>145. One is failing, two others crashing fast. 50% underachievement--of course the ones who are failing are all boys.