Category: Parenting

Using the G-word with kids

Posted on by Suki

This post was inspired by taking part in Natural Parents Network’s Carnival of Natural Parenting: Tough Conversations.

One of the recurring themes that parents of gifted children hash and rehash is the question of whether we used the G-word (gifted) with our kids. It’s hard enough for parents to start using the words in their heads, and then with their friends and adult family members, and especially with their children’s teachers. I’ve never met a parent who likes the word itself, with its connotation of value judgment and ranking. But we use it when we have to in order to get certain things to happen: Understanding from friends and family; better educational practices at school.

Using it with your child, however, is another thing altogether. Unless your child is in a GATE program and knows that she has been designated “gifted and talented,” she is unlikely to run into a need for the word in her daily life. More and more gifted children are being homeschooled, and in case, there seems even less reason to use the word.

Surprisingly, however, parents seem to be split on this issue.

Research has shown that gifted kids generally know that they are different, and that having a word to put to their difference can be easier than living with silence, as if their difference is something shameful. But on the other hand, society is not kind to people who use the G-word. Every so often the gifted community passes around yet another blog written by an irate parent or sometimes teacher about how parents of gifted kids think that their kids are “better,” vilifying the use of a word that we didn’t make up and that causes us discomfort. These pieces tend to follow similar themes: that parents of gifted kids are “bragging,” that gifted kids aren’t different, and most damaging, that gifted kids will “grow out of it,” so why treat them differently now? Parents of gifted kids react by pulling back into our little community, mostly online, of people who understand what a double-edged sword our kids’ “gifts” are.

And yet again, a parent asks timidly on an e-mail list, “So should I tell my kids they’re gifted?” And the conversation goes on.

In my own home, we don’t use the term much. This may surprise people who know me primarily through my writing about gifted children. But in our daily lives, we don’t find much use for it. Since my kids are homeschooled, we don’t take part in a GATE program. And the other homeschooled kids they play and work with straddle the full spectrum of humanity – some of them way more advanced than my kids; some struggling with basic skills.

In our “real life,” I think that experiencing this spectrum is good for my kids – they know that they will be judged by their achievements and by the kind of people they are, not by a number or a label. But twice the conversation has come up, and each time it reflected my children’s personalities and self-awareness.

The first time, I had just started to write about giftedness. My older child, who was in school, came across the book that started my foray into the gifted world, A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children. Looking at the cover, he asked, “What what IS gifted?” I gave him a basic rundown: “Gifted children are those who show advanced abilities or potential in some areas. Sometimes their advanced ability are accompanied by challenges in social and emotional skills. It’s not a word I like, because it makes it sound like people are saying that gifted children are better than other kids, but it’s the term that people use.”

My son pondered that information.

“Do you know anyone who fits that description?” I asked.

“Well… my sister, for one. And my friend who is years ahead in math.”

And there I was stuck with the question: Do I tell him that he, too, qualified as gifted, even though he wasn’t advanced in math like his friend? Or just leave it hanging?

“You’ve probably noticed that school is much easier for you than some of your classmates,” I said. He agreed. “Though you’re very different from your sister, you are also a gifted learner.”

And that was it. He pretty much shrugged off the information, which told him nothing new. Any child can tell you who the fastest learners in a classroom are, and if that information is presented simply as part of “we are all different and have different strengths,” that’s as far as it needs to go.

My daughter took much longer to come around to the question. She knows about my writing career, of course, and knows what my book is called. But perhaps, because the structured classroom can be so difficult for her, she had never made much of a connection between herself and what she had probably learned as the stereotypical gifted child.

But one day she and I were talking about something completely unrelated to giftedness or learning, and she just out and asked the question: “Am I ‘gifted’?” True to her rather strong interest in sarcasm, the word was positively dripping with meaning.

The question that came to me was, what meaning did “gifted” have to her?

“Well, what do you think? Part of giftedness is the ability to learn more quickly than average. Does that description fit you?”

In her case, the question probably brought up much more history than it did for my son. She had had a terrible time in preschool, couldn’t make it in a kindergarten classroom, and once we started homeschooling, had needed her mother beside her as an unofficial aide for a few years during any structured activity.

“I hate studying,” she said. “But I can pretty much learn anything I want to learn very quickly. So I guess it does.”

Yes, I explained to her, she did learn quickly. But like many children who fit the “gifted” label, she also had some significant challenges that we were working on. I didn’t need to mention what those are: the years of therapy and mommy-as-classroom-aide and visits to yet another professional in yet another field of care made it all clear enough.

The one thing I needed to add for her, which I knew that her more socially savvy brother, who’d also spent 6 years in school, didn’t need to have explained, was the information about how using the word made others feel.

“The word ‘gifted’ sometimes makes other people feel uncomfortable, so we don’t use it when we talk to people who might not understand what we mean. You can just say ‘quick learner’ if you need to explain that you’ve already learned something and are ready to move on. Mostly I have used the word to find information that would help us help you be able to do all the things you want to do.”

And as in any conversation, years of background passed between us: how she hadn’t been able to handle a gymnastics class, out on the floor alone, at the age of 5 but was now happily attending a class that I don’t even drive her to. How at the age of six she’d loved her science class and was annoyed that I needed to be there, but now is excelling in a class where I drop her off and go to work in a cafe. How our household, turned upside down by the arrival of a child with special needs, has become – if not calm – somewhat normal in the amount of turbulence we experience on a typical day.

All parents of children who differ from the norm have to face this conversation. Our choice was to wait until our kids were ready for, and asked for, the information. We may have to have the conversation again for each child, but at the moment, they have the information they need and know that if they need more, their parents are there to help.

Dear 20-year-old self,

Posted on by Suki

Dear 20-year-old self,

I remember the day you knocked on the door of the artist. You were a college student, and you were taking a child language acquisition course. When the professor had given the assignment to find a child to observe, you asked, “How do I find a child?” The people you knew were little older than children themselves, and you didn’t know anything about your professors’ private lives. Your linguistics professor hooked you up with a family visiting from Great Britain, a psychologist, his artist wife, and their baby.

Portrait
Portrait of a Contemporary Young Person by Robin Richmond

You were uncomfortable meeting new people. You never told anyone that—it seemed so stupid that even having to make a phone call to a stranger made you break out in a cold sweat. You’d never learned how to ask for help, and always felt like there were rules that you didn’t understand.

In response to this disconnected feeling you had, you armed yourself against the world. You wore unconventional clothing and got “half a haircut”—long on one side, short on the other. You conveyed a clear message that you were angry, unapproachable. After you broke up with a boyfriend, he told you never to stop being disgusted with the way things are—that, he said, is your best quality. (Good job breaking up with him, by the way!)

Like many 20-year-olds, you had spent your last few years at war with your own body. You knew you could never measure up. Other girls responded with anorexia or bullying other girls; you responded with an avoidance of anything that could be called “pretty.”

Though many other experiences have faded from your memory, the time you spent at the artist’s house with her baby has not. The little girl was adorable. Her favorite word was “PUSH!”, which she would say with great relish when she opened a door.

At one of your visits, you wore a ripped t-shirt that said “Bauhaus,” the name of your favorite band. The artist asked if she could paint your portrait wearing that shirt. She was probably intrigued with the ironic juxtaposition between the art movement and the modern angry girl. You thought that sitting for an artist would be a weird thing to do, and you were interested in collecting weird experiences.

That portrait ended up capturing you in greater detail than any of the photographs of that time possibly could. Not just the visible details are there, but the stubborn, set look on the face, the tense hand, the makeup like armor.

Oh, 20-year-old self, I wish I could go back and answer the questions you never knew to ask. I wish I could tell you that it would all come out OK in the end. You’d learn that life happens easier when you approach new experiences with a smile. You’d learn that your physical self was just about as perfect as it would ever get, so you should enjoy it while it lasts. You’d learn to treasure kindness as an attribute both to nurture in yourself and to seek in friends.

Of course, I know that even if I had a time machine and could go back and say these things, there’s no knowing if you’d listen, or more importantly, understand. We live in a culture that worships youth, but I have to admit that if I had to stick at one age forever, I’d choose now over then. I have in no way achieved the perfection that you thought you could force yourself into, but that doesn’t matter anymore.

After all that effort, I just had to give up and be myself, for better and for worse.

Pesticides and child development

Posted on by Suki

Smart Kids with Learning Disabilities is an excellent free newsletter aimed at parents of kids with learning disabilities and ADHD. I have generally found it to be a good resource. In this issue, they linked to an article about pesticides and children.

Did you know that every human tested now has pesticides in their body fat? This is an area of huge concern that, because of the extent of exposure, is almost impossible to test reliably. Because everyone is being exposed, it is our “new normal”—we can’t know what the effects are because we don’t have enough data on unexposed people.

This problem was explained well in the chapter on lung cancer in the very excellent (but big bummer) book Emperor of All Maladies, which is a “biography” of cancer and its treatment. When the first doctors tried to study whether smoking causes lung cancer, they both thought it was a ridiculous idea. Their reasoning was that pretty much everyone smoked at that time, so it couldn’t be smoking causing lung cancer. They had trouble searching out non-smokers for the study, but after a few years as the numbers came pouring in, they were astounded. What everyone thought was an inevitable part of human existence turned out to be largely caused by a common habit. One of the doctors who did the study was a heavy smoker, and he quit the day they started to see the results of their data. He died of lung cancer soon after.

That story is instructive now as we ask the obvious question: Do we have so many kids now being diagnosed with learning disabilities, ADHD, and even things like autism simply because we’re diagnosing more often and more carefully? Were kids always like this, but we didn’t notice? Or are there multiple factors—one of them our exposure to pesticides—causing these disorders to rise in our current population?

The American Academy of Pediatrics is putting their vote on the latter. In their most recent issue of Pediatrics, the AAP has sounded the alarm, stating that “Prenatal and early childhood exposure to pesticides is associated with pediatric cancers, decreased cognitive function and behavioral problems.”

Of course, the first question every parent asks is, “What can I do? Pesticides are everywhere.” In fact, modern humans simply can’t escape pesticides: they are in our water, our air, and even in much of our organically grown food. But we can try to minimize our risks. “Smart Kids” links helpfully to a chapter of Simplifying the Pesticide Risk Equation: The Organic Solution which helpfully explains which fruits and vegetables carry the highest pesticide load at different times of the year. The tables are clearly laid out and easy to post on your refrigerator (or stick in your smartphone, if you’re like me!).

We can’t get rid of pesticides in our daily lives unless our entire nation goes along with the idea, and we know how well such debates are going over in Congress these days. But we can do easy things that may help keep our kids safer.

 

Highly inappropriate, then and now

Posted on by Suki

“That song is definitely not appropriate for children,” my ten-year-old daughter said to me the other day, hearing a song being played in a store.

*

My husband and I have been talking about the books we read as kids. Brave New World. 1984. Of Mice and Men. Great books, all about sex, much of it deviant or definitely-out-of-wedlock sex.

And those were the books we were assigned in school. On our own time, we read anything we could get our hands on. My husband says he read his parents’ pulp novels that they left lying around. I read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret in the third grade. I’d worked my way up from the “third grade shelf” in my school library, and no one thought to tell me that might not be a good idea. From there, I went to Wifey, Judy Blume’s highly inappropriate book…written for adults.

A book that I remember vividly—yet not at all—from my childhood.

As we talked about what we read, what occurred to us is what didn’t happen: Our parents (or any other adult) didn’t get involved. We read these books, and listened to those songs (rather less racy in our time) without parents hanging over our shoulders. Our parents didn’t ask what we were reading, and they certainly never considered reading out loud to kids who could read themselves.

In our family, however, books are for sharing. We only stopped reading out loud to our son last year, around the time he turned 13. And that has less to do with a parenting decision than with lack of time. But we still read books “together”—we suggest books for him, and talk to him about books we are reading. On top of that, I have recently started a literature discussion group for teens—including my son—that is exploring the canon of “must read before college” books—a list that includes those sex-filled books by Steinbeck, Orwell, Huxley, and more.

All of this has led me to a question: Are we more prudish than our parents, who “let” us read anything? Did they only pretend to not know what we were reading? Or did they really not care?

I don’t think it’s prudery: I don’t object to kids reading books out of some sort of “that sort of book shouldn’t be read” type of sensibility. I think it’s something else, something that my daughter hit upon when she declared a song “inappropriate” for herself and peers. Parents today are not separating themselves from kids as much as parents used to. When kids first got into rock-n-roll, parents were scandalized. These days, parents take their kids to concerts and buy albums that both they and their kids like. These days, parents are doing things like NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) with their kids, rather than hiding their writing from their kids. My husband and I were thrilled when our older child started to approach the maturity that we thought he needed to read some of our favorite books.

But I remember when—I think it was a year ago—I was looking for a good book to read out loud with my son and I grabbed 1984. Oh, I thought, he’ll love this. All the questions it brings up about freedom of thought, speech, government… and sex. That’s what I realized as I started to read it. I had pretty much forgotten everything in that book that made it, to put it mildly, “inappropriate” as a read-aloud. My husband had the same reaction when looking at Brave New World as a possible “read together” book.

Both of us realized that our pre-teen brains apparently skipped over everything that we would now deem “inappropriate.” When you are reading to yourself, in isolation, the parts that stick are the parts that resonate with you. And what resonates with a 12-year-old from Brave New World or 1984 is the incredible power that the words conveyed. The strong authorial hand that pulls us into the story. The parts that didn’t resonate with us were the parts that had nothing to do with our experience. My husband says that he didn’t even remember sex as part of Brave New World, though it turns out to figure pretty prominently in the story.

My daughter and I have been listening to an audiobook of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in the car. This is another book that affected me deeply. I probably read it at about the same age as the protagonist as the book opens, 11. And much of it, I now realize, went right past me. I remember the tree, reading on the fire escape. I remember the pickle wrapped in paper, the stale bread, the many trips to the candy store. But when I was considering the book for our book club, I read a variety of opinions about it: “not appropriate” for younger children, so many people said, citing the alcoholic father, the lecherous store-keeper, the racism that the kids innocently take part in.

But none of this is impressing my daughter. She has been listening intently to the strange world of an early 20th century Irish-American girl, almost my daughter’s age. This girl lives to read; my daughter just today read three books. This girl just loves “Jew” pickles; my daughter loves to pull a sour pickle out of the jar and savor it. This girl adores her daddy, lives in Brooklyn, where my daughter’s daddy is from, and sees everything going on in her neighborhood.

My daughter doesn’t seem interested in the drunk father or the lecherous storekeeper. When I asked about the way the kids were talking about Jews, my daughter said, Well, they weren’t saying anything really mean.

Each age understands things in its own way. As adults, we filter what we read through the wider experiences of our lives. But kids look for the things that speak to them. Often, they ignore the things that we deem “inappropriate.”

But even more often, they simply notice them and go on.

“That song is definitely not appropriate for children,” my ten-year-old daughter said to me as we walked through a store, the song playing so quietly in the background I couldn’t pick out the words.

“Why?” I asked.

“Bad words,” my daughter said. She didn’t repeat the words or continue the conversation. She knows what our values are, and until she’s ready to question them, she’s content to know that a song is just not right for her yet. It reminds me of my childhood, when we would seek out “naughty” songs and feel so grown-up listening to them. It never would have occurred to me to talk to my mother about them. In fact, I remember a parallel situation from my teen years: My mother and I walking through the supermarket and my realizing that the Muzak playing on the speakers was “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

“Do you know that this song is about LSD?”

No, I didn’t not say that to my mother. That would have been, well, highly inappropriate.

Facebook thinks I speak Spanish, and other musings about modern life

Posted on by Suki

Hola…

For months now I have been getting e-mails from Facebook, recommending I add as friends people I have never met. People whose first language is Spanish. People who don’t even live in the same country as me.

OK, I speak passable caveman Spanish. I can read and understand, but when I go to speak, all I can think is French. Or German. Or how to say “hello” in Thai. I think they call this tongue-tied.

Also, I do have some friends—as well as some “friends”—who speak Spanish. A few whose native language is Spanish. But when Facebook, a mindless machine made by men (and women, except they are not alliterative), keeps sending you recommendations for Spanish speakers you have no connection with, you’ve got to wonder.

What you wonder is up to you.

It’s HOMEschool…

I am just about to start my first online teaching experience. Two (or is it three?) professions ago, I was a college English teacher. I could never decide what to get a PhD in, so I could never get a tenured position, so I eventually gave it up for graphic design. But I never loved graphic design, which paid the bills, the way I loved teaching, which didn’t.

Luckily, I became a homeschooler. The cool thing about homeschooling is that you get to be many of the things that no one would ever pay you to be. Like, once I did dissections of frogs with my kids. Let me assure you, no one would pay me to be a biology teacher. We had fun, though.

So now, into the sixth year of homeschooling, I get to go back to my original love, teaching English. But the cool thing is, I don’t have to find a bunch of people in my same area, find a place for us to meet, and hope that we’ll all get there every week. Instead, I’m renting an online classroom and we’ll see how it goes.

I just had a piece accepted by the wonderful Life Learning Magazine about how homeschoolers can use the Internet with an emphasis more on the HOME than on the SCHOOL. In no way am I going to run my online class like a high school lit class. In fact, high school lit classes were why I decided never to take a literature class as an undergrad. But the cool thing is, we’re all going to be HOME. It’s hopefully going to integrate fun conversation and thoughtful interaction with our home environment. Oh, yes, we’ll probably get together physically if we can once during the year, but the rest of the time, we’ll be able to find each other online.

Internet Day…

OK, online class sounds great, but the other day my son had an experience that is completely new in this day and age. When we were kids, my husband and I had “snow days” when the snow hadn’t been plowed before it was time for the buses to go out. (Me more than him – I remember the thrill of listening to the radio station and hearing the name of my town in the list. Since it was a relatively wealthy town, we had a dismaying number of snow plows ready to get us to school.) Well, once in my son’s life there has been a snow day: when he was attending a school at the top of Mount Madonna in Santa Cruz County.

But now he’s got a claim his dad and I can’t match: He had an Internet Day yesterday! His algebra teacher’s Internet connection was down. Ten minutes after class should have started, I got a phone call (from “Wireless Caller”, doncha just love that caller I.D.?). His teacher asked if we could let all the students know what happened.

And I was brought back to the days of crowding around the radio at breakfast time.

“Yes!! Snow Day!” we’d all yell, and we’d put on our gear to go out sledding or grab a game to play with a sibling or grab that book we thought we were going to have to leave behind all day…

When I told my son, he didn’t react like that. Just a slow smile. “Bonus!” he was probably thinking. “Internet Day.”

Next time he’s waiting for his teacher and the phone rings, it’s going to be like when I was a kid and I woke to a newly quiet and snow-padded world. Fire up that radio. What’s a radio, Mom?

Dr. Who?…

My husband has been initiating our daughter into the world of Dr. Who. Now, between our two kids, you’d probably peg my son as the potential Dr. Who fan. But like his mother, he has too little patience with sitting in front of an image he can’t manipulate. But my daughter is loving it. She and her father are starting to make Dr. Who puns to each other and give each other knowing looks when her brother and I don’t know what they’re talking about.

When my son was younger, a family member of mine accused me of making him a social misfit.

“If he doesn’t watch bad TV, what’s he going to talk to his friends about?” he asked.

I’m proud now to know that at least one of my children will be able to have a conversation about a TV show. Even if it is a TV show that happened before she was even ovulated.

eAvoidance…

Right now, I’m supposed to be balancing our financial records. This is not a task I relish, though each year, it gets easier and easier. Pieces of paper are only occasionally involved in this task nowadays. Magically, I download my credit card charges and they match the ones on the PDF I see on my screen. Magically, money that doesn’t actually exist moves from one account to another, from our account to PG&E.

Being a modern home engineer qualifies one for all sorts of jobs that didn’t exist when we were kids. Perhaps if I need to, I’ll be able to sell my skills for avoiding household accounts while running an online class when the weather report threatens a Comcast outage of extreme proportions.

It’s all in a day in the life.

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