Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Do You Want a Gifted or Hard-working Child?

This article hit many of the points that have come up for discussion here. I disagreed with some of his statements(parents are notoriously poor judges of their children's capabilities; if your children truly are gifted, don't tell them) but he made a number of good points. The comments are worth reading too.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...do-you-want-gifted-or-hard-working-child

Nice article, Inky -- thanks for sharing.

He spent a couple paragraphs describing what many here have lamented -- that too much comes too easily for the gifties.

But beyond that, two of his comments jumped out at me also: "... parents are notoriously poor judges..." and "If your children truly are gifted, don't tell them." (WTH? Is he high?)

So my kid is 7ft tall in the 6th grade and dominates his classmates in basketball. But I'd better not tell him he's extra tall... it might be damaging. Hmmm.

I found myself really irritated with his presenting "gifted" and "hard-working" as somehow mutually exclusive. He needed a third choice: "gifted and hard-working."

I won't even comment on his three paragraphs explaining that "Potential Is a Pipe Dream." After all, "potential" is another nasty word we should strike from our vocabulary regarding our children.

And then he closes with the dreaded, "giftedness is actually overrated as a contributor to success." Sigh.

I see this an awful lot -- invariably used by people who make the same leap as this fella, setting up a "giftedness v. hard-working" dichotomy.

I agree -- hard-working will often/regularly/routinely(?) out-perform giftedness. BUT... you catch hold of a gifted kid when he is young, teach him all that hard-working stuff, get him the appropriate challenges -- commensurate with what the hard-working ND classmate experiences -- and watch out.

Which would I choose for my kid -- EITHER hard-working OR gifted? Blechh -- that question is sorrowfully incomplete.

BUT -- out of a more reasonable set of options: "hard-working ONLY" OR "gifted ONLY" OR "hard-working PLUS gifted"? Why, naturally, I'll take option "C" for a bazillion dollars, thank you very much.

I seriously wonder how much experience he really has with GT-ed and/or gifties in general.

Wow. Sorry for unloading all that cynicism tonight.

In all fairness, the good doctor addresses readers' concerns in the comments section. Apparently the "don't tell them they're gifted" line was facetiousness. But he holds to many of his other comments. Kudos to him, though, for venturing into his article's comment section -- I don't see this happen too often.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...nt-gifted-or-hard-working-child/comments

Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw?

I added my 2pworth to the comments. It's interesting that he's a sports psychologist, actually. I imagine that the issues that come up with a child who is highly talented at sport may be quite different in some ways from those that come up for our academically HG kids.

While I agree that it is important to emphasize effort, patience, etc. isn't this another reason why finding more challenging academic outlets (which most likely means letting them know, by placing them in special programs at school, that they are at the minimum, advanced compared to peers)is important for gifted children so that they can experience struggle and not always be at the top of the pack?

I never did any homework before college, then barely did any then. I wrote "A" papers in college and graduate school in a couple hours, but I found other ways to challenge myself and experience failure and success through effort. I am a published writer of poetry and fiction and while writing was easy,submitting work and being rejected was hard. I was effortlessly thin my whole life and wouldn't wish on myself having had to work hard for that even though now when that is changing, I am lazy in terms of diet and exercise. I guess I am saying that I appreciate how easy that part of my life was since so many other parts were very, very hard (do not need to itemize them all but trust me there were plenty).

Just because academics are easy for a child does not meen that they do not experience the dynamic of being challenged, failure, and success through effort in other areas of their life.

With my DD3, she isn't particularly talented with gross motor things, so she can experience failure and frustration there and also feel successful if she works hard to overcome thing. The same thing happens for her with learning emotional control. It is a huge challenge for her to control impulses, wait, stop talking, etc. but when she masters those things, even for a moment, I try to label her success as "wonderful self control" or "patience" etc. so she sees those are things she is doing through effort.

Hard work isn't such a wonderful thing anyway in my mind. It isn't something I value all that much. Don't get me wrong, I put intense effort into some things I have done, but it always felt very concentrated and relatively quick since I hate drudgery and don't want my DD to be bogged down with labor for labor's sake. Maybe this has limited me in some way, who knows.

Is it so horrible that some things are effortless or nearly so for some children? My 22 month old is more physically able than my DD3 and I love that doing physical things from somersaults to climbing things is so easy for her, but feel a little sad that her big sister stands back and watches the "baby" do things she can't do, but it lets her see that everyone has different strengths. I was also in competitive sports and physical things often came easy for me, and I celebrate the fact that my DD1 may have that natural ability, and I am thrilled if she doesn't have to work too hard to master some skills. I was a competive gymnast and they worked us to the bone, and you know what, I don't think I would want my DD1 to be pushed that hard. I'd rather she do something she loved that came fairly easily and she had fun doing.

If DD3 is placed in an appropriately challenging academic program, they will surely find work for her that will make her stretch herself. It is only when a gifted child is forced to sit through day after day of material she learned YEARS ago that they are at risk of becoming a bit "lazy." As another poster said, these things are not mutually exclusive. I do worry that DD3 is so used to learning things being so easy that she is afraid of being wrong and so doesn't want to push herself so I try not to talk about how smart she is as much as say things like, "wow, you really paid close attention" etc.

As for not telling them they are gifed, my 3 year old corrects me, informs me, reminds me, etc. and she realizes the children in her preschool are different than she is, so do you think she won't know something is different by kindergarten? Whether we tell them they are gifted or not, which I am not sure I will, they are smart enough to know it anyway even if they don't have a label for it.

Depends. Perversely perhaps, I think that if it's something the child doesn't really find important, there's no problem if they find it easy. I think if we're talking about something that's a strength area and an interest for the child, then yes, I think it's horrible if the child finds everything in that area easy as a child. That's what happened to me in maths, and it was horrible, because what happened was that I learned (subliminally at least) that this was an area that ought to be easy for me. I had no experience with having to work at it, nothing on which to base a feeling that it was OK to find it hard. The fact that I'd found plenty of other things hard didn't really help (though perhaps it would have been even worse if I hadn't!) However, maths becomes challenging for everyone who goes far enough with it (even the best mathematician in the world, whoever that is, can't do everything without effort at that world-leading research level!) So a natural consequence of liking maths and being good at it was that I was eventually going to reach a level where it was hard. For me, that didn't happen until well into my university career, at which point it was difficult to cope with because I had to undo the categorisation of maths as something I ought always to find easy.

Now in drafting this, I wrote, "maths, like almost anything worth spending your life on, becomes hard...". Yet it's true, some people do go through life choosing to do things they find pretty easy, choosing not to challenge themselves. In other words, some people do find it worth spending their lives on things that are not challenging to them. I actually think that's a valid choice for an individual to make (I remember being taught differently, but that's another matter). Arguably, for those people, it doesn't matter whether they've ever learned to cope with challenge in their strength areas or not. Still, if they have learned that, then they can feel they've really made a choice not to follow a life path that involves challenging themselves, rather than having no option because they are unable to deal with challenging themselves - wouldn't we all want our children to have that choice?

I hate to be cynical, but I noticed that the author is an adjunct professor. Is he all that firmly rooted in academia? Should we take his opinions all that seriously?

I like to read what OTHER highly/profoundly gifted people say about HG/PG students. Their opinions matter most to me, because they've been there. I especially don't agree with the statement that parents are poor judges of their children's capabilities. It must have been fun to be born in eras when parents WERE respected as the foremost authorities in their children's lives, because we happen to LOVE them the most!

I need to read the article, but this was a great post! And not really cynical; I think the cynicism is in thinking, as you state, that these two valuable traits are mutually exclusive!

(and you don't think the truly gifted kid is going to NOTICE he/she's 7 feet tall??)

I'm not sure parents are good judges of their kids' abilities. At least in some cases parents can be way off. I was one of those parents. I really didn't think DS was anything special, I knew he was smart but didn't really think too much about it. When he entered K, when I saw what the other kids could do, in our great school in our great district with many type A parents, I was totally shocked. That was when I realized that DS was soooooooo advanced.

On the other hand there are parents who sent their kids to K with full confidence that their kids would be the best in school, only to find out that their kids are pretty average.

I think the lack of research and careful observation by parents could be the reason.

On the other hand, I also don't get it at all why people make a dichotomy of giftedness vs. hard-working. How many parents of gifted kids actually believe that effort is not necessary? I've never met one. This kind of statements only increases people's prejudice against gifted kids and their parents, and I think it's utterly unfair.

I have always communicated with DS's teachers about acceleration from the point of view of making gifted kids put in efforts: if they are not challenged, how do they learn to take challenges and how do they learn the value of hard-working? But I'm really not sure whether we can overcome the strong prejudice.