Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Anxiety

We had a meeting at DD8's school yesterday to discuss ideas for her IEP. Her psychologist was present as well as many of the support staff at the school. While I was blown away by how supportive everybody seemed, my husband and I were a little surprised that the psychologist focused so much on DD's anxiety. We knew from previous meetings with her and a few one-on-one sessions that her perfectionism was serious impediment to her school work. It has always been an issue and has held her back from demonstrating her capabilities. The psychologist strongly suggested that we focus on first providing a supportive environment and strategies that she can employ to overcome her fear of making mistakes. She thought that any form of enrichment would be for naught until we can get her to the point that she feels comfortable attempting the easy work.

I am happy that everyone was recognizing how hard it is for DD in school (even picking up a pencil to write a sentence is stressful for her because she can't cope when her letters do not look perfect), but I am also disappointed for her because I know that it is going to be torturous for her to sit through the 'easy' stuff. We were really hoping that we would talk about the anxiety AND enrichment at this meeting but now we have to wait until November to discuss subject acceleration and the IEP will be incomplete until then. I wish the psychologist had let us know that she was going to focus only on the anxiety.

We came up with a few ideas for helping DD with her anxiety (establishing a way of communicating with the teacher without drawing attention to herself, taking a few minutes break from the activity and using positive self-talk, going to talk to the resource teacher or VP when she felt very overwhelmed, etc.). Hoping someone can offer other suggestions?

On the plus side, DD was so relieved that people are finally understanding how she feels. She said that she cried when the teached took her aside at recess and talked to her, because it felt so good to have people want to help her.

I should also note that DD will have ongoing sessions with her psychologist.

Ok, I'm doing my Heart Rhythm Meditation practice of the above statement, because my anxiety level just went through the roof reading about it. Good for you for surviving a sneak attack and still being able to post. These sort of school meeting used to 'take me out' for a whole month. Can you imagine me, going a month without posting?

Actually this isn't really a bad sign. It's more of an invitation to contact the major player - thank them for their clear compassion and RESTATE what you believe and what you want.

Then meet with the Psychologist and explain that AS HER MOTHER, you have observed that the anxiety is worse when the job is below the readiness level and better overall when most of the tasks are inside the readiness level. Don't expect the Psychologist to know what a 'readiness level' is since I think I made it up. But it's nice because you can draw a little picture with anxiety on the Y axis, and difficulty level on the X axis and show how the middle chunk is the readiness level. It's helpful if you have a few quick stories from home to illustrate from home.

Anxiety is high in the 'way too easy' and 'way too hard' areas, but sort of low with a few spikes in that readiness zone. Explain that when the work is chronically below the readiness zone that the readiness zone shrinks and then everything looks too hard or too easy and we see almost total anxiety. That's what DH and I saw with DS around age 8, anyway.

Ask the psychologist to set up a few experimental learning situations to see if this model - OK, lets call it the 'Anxiety from Reversing Underachievement Model' explains your DD's behavior. Keep reminding the Psyc that you have know your DD her whole life, and that even if every other kid on the planet works under the 'make it easier to increase confidence' model, that your child works on the ARU Model. Try to get the Psychologist to think of a few situations where this can be tested, such as allowing your child to visit a subject that you think she would like subject acceleration for one day, or being part of a pull out that the gifted teacher leads for one day with some bright older kids.

Then go back to writing emails to all concerned telling them that you only partially in agreement. You are interested doing some of what they suggest, (state X,Y,Z) but not all. You are her Mother and know her best and you firmly believe that subject acceleration needs to start, if only on a trial basis, now, and that if the anxiety seems to get worse then you consider that the trial was premature and reverse it.

I think 8 is old enough to ask DD what she wants. If she clearly wants to do some of her school day with older kids then this will be easier. It's ok - maybe - to tell her that these are the behaviors that the school is seeing that makes them want to protect her from harder work - maybe list 4 of them. Tell her that she can get as angry as she wants about the handwriting at home, but if she does it at school then the teachers will get confused. Depends on the kid. You DO know as much as anyone can know about the insides of another person - your DD.

Aimee, if you are out there today, I'd love to hear what you think about this....

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Thanks for the support. We really do love her psychologist.. she is so lovely and has a real connection wtih DD. I just hate that we weren't prepped ahead of time!!

According to her report, she should be doing at least grade 5 work in all subject areas except math, which is grade 4 (DD is just starting grade 3). I can't imagine how poor DD is going to sit through the next two months! We had a long talk with her this weekend and she realizes that she needs to show them what she can do before enrichment will be offered. Funny girl actually asked me if I could buy her a stress ball to help her cope.

I think I am going to have a meeting with her teacher and let her know my thoughts. If it looks like things are improving adequately then we can meet with everyone else sooner. At least we have a lot of people on our side who really want her to succeed and be happy. They said at the meeting that they would do whatever they can to meet her needs (here's hoping they meant it!).

kathleen'smum -
Can you say more about this part of the report? Was it that her achievement tests put her in 5th grade? Did the tester write 'she should be in at least 5th grade work in all subject areas?'

Is your DD at all reluctant to do subject acceleration? My DS is very 'bold' but hated subject acceleration - he felt to singled out, and preferred his full gradeskip.

I'm glad that you have a good relationship with the psychologist. I'm glad you talked to DD, and she is problem solving on her own - Yippee! I'm glad you are going to talk to the teacher. I still want you to call - today - to schedule a meeting with the psychologist to talk about your point of view. There are very real situations where underplacement is the cause of anxiety. If you feel in your heart that this is part of the cause of your DD's anxiety, you must share this with the psychologist.

I'm thinking of some friends who say about their DD in elementary school: 'We always know when it's time for a gradeskip because DD sits in class and acts like an angel, but gets a bald spot from pulling her hair out.' After the humiliation of parenting a 'bold' boy who would never act like an angel in a poor fit classroom, this statement alone started to change my mind about being more accepting of my son's personality. BTW - early updates from his school are that all the adults find him 'polite and respectful.' Yippee!

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Here's an interesting blogpost from Aimee Yermish about the training of mental health professionals in regards to gifted issues you might find interesting:

Thanks, Grinity! (I got here because I spotted someone having clicked through that link, by the way)

Hm. Perfectionism is, fundamentally, an anxiety thing. It's anxiety that what you do won't be good enough or won't be seen as good enough and that either this will mean that you're an awful / incompetent / pathetic person and/or that other people will think you are and will hate / despise / punish / ignore / reject you for it.

What I generally see with anxious perfectionistic gifted kids is that they tend to constrict the space within which they will allow themselves to work -- they will typically *avoid* the enrichment work or become really clingy/dependent while working on it. Things that are too easy are still too easy, but things that are too hard become terrifying, because they're about to be proof that you really are as awful as you think you are. So all tasks become divided into "trivial" and "impossible," with little-to-no working space in between. That tends to make it hard to provide enrichment or other challenging work, because the kid will look like they're fighting as hard as they can to not participate in it. So in that sense, I think we need to consider that as an aspect of the problem.

I think it's not atypical for school folk to say, "Okay, no academic challenge until we've gotten this perfectionism under control," because they're all so afraid of the whole academic challenge thing anyhow and tend to seize on any perceived weakness. It plays right into the "pushy parent needs to back off" model that they like to believe. Plus, it's quite typical for school folk to prioritize "social emotional" issues over "academic" issues, as if the two were the two ends of a see-saw (I should write a blog post on that!), when in fact, they're intertwined.

And I agree that it kind of misses the point. We can give a gifted kid strategies for dealing with anxiety, and that's a good start. But fundamentally, if they know inside that the tasks they are doing are still easy, then they're not getting a chance to expose themselves to the feared situation (doing work that might actually be difficult!) and seeing that nothing actually bad happens. That's a basic principle of almost every form of therapy for almost every form of anxiety disorder, regardless of your theoretical orientation -- you have to experience the feared thing, slowly and in a manageable way, and learn both to tolerate the uncertainty and to experience the fact that you *aren't* awful and that you *can* make mistakes without being punished or rejected for it.

So the goal should not be "cure perfectionism before we provide academic challenge." It should be, "treat general anxiety so that we can include provision of academic challenge as part of the ongoing plan to treat perfectionism so that we can provide more academic challenge when perfectionism is less severe." Not this-then-that, but this-and-that-and-then-more-of-that.

Aimee-- wonderfully said. Awesome advice.

DeeDee

That is EXACTLY what we see with DS6 and DS8. For example, this summer, DS8 took an online CTY critical reading course. He was happy to discuss the books with me, but when it came time to compose his answers to the discussion questions, it could take FOREVER! "Mom, may I have a snack? Mom, may I have a hug? May I sit on your lap? This is too hard. Will you sit with me while I do this?" Once he got on a roll, his answers would take about 15 minutes to write, but there were times when I thought he would never get it done.

The funniest part was that once he had written his answer, he was soooo happy with it, although he had to ask me a dozen times if I thought it was good enough. I saw small improvements over the duration of the course, but the work kept getting harder each week (not a bad thing) and DS frequently went back to the same behavior with many assignments.

Thank you for posting this today. I'm awaiting a phone call from a teacher re: a major underachievement episode currently underway that the teacher emailed me about today and I'm still trying to come up with a plan of action for ds7's multi-faceted problem. Your post addresses one important angle of our situation.

This could have been written about my child. Thanks for posting. I learn so much here, and while I wouldn't wish these struggles on anyone, it is comforting to know that we're not alone.