Category: Books

Book Review: A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children

Posted on by Suki

A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children
James T. Webb, Janet L. Gore, Edward R. Amend, Arlene R. DeVries
Great Potential Press, 2007

Parents often wish their children came with an owner’s manual. If there is anything that comes close to being an owner’s manual for parents of gifted children, this book is it.

The authors comprise a who’s who of experts on gifted children. James T. Webb, the lead author, is perhaps the best-known writer and speaker on gifted issues in the United States. His more recent book, Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults (also written with a team of experts), outlines the specific psychological pitfalls gifted children face. The other three authors, Janet L. Gore, Edward R. Amend, and Arlene R. DeVries, add both depth and breadth to Webb’s solid credentials. Together, the authors have worked with gifted children in almost all capacities.

The book serves first as a very good primer for a parent who is facing questions about raising a gifted child. The first two chapters define giftedness and explore common characteristics of gifted children. In doing so, they answer two questions that often accompany a parent’s first forays into the gifted literature: First, is my child gifted?, and second, how is my child different from other children?

The authors point out that the diagnosis itself can cause problems for gifted kids and their parents. From dismissive comments by other parents such as “all children are gifted,” to misunderstandings from educators like “bright children don’t need any special help,” gifted children and their parents face a lot of opposition as soon as their children are identified.

The second goal of the book is to teach parenting and educational approaches that work as an approach to all children, but are even more important when working with the needs and intensities of gifted children. Chapters on communication, motivation, and discipline outline an approach that takes into account both the child’s age-appropriate emotional needs as well as respecting the child’s unusual ability to process and understand information.

The parenting sections of the book expand into gifted-specific problems: How do the parents of gifted children help them in relationships with their peers? How does having a gifted child affect the relationships of siblings? How can a family’s values support a gifted child? And most importantly, how can a marriage survive the complexities of parenting a gifted child?

A Parent’s Guide only touches upon aspects of aspects of raising a gifted child with twice-exceptionalities such as learning disabilities, mood disorders, and ADD/ADHD. Parents who suspect that their gifted child may suffer from concurrent problems will do well to read Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults after getting an introduction to the issues in this book.

Finally, the book devotes chapters to the educational needs of gifted children, as well as working with other professionals. The educational section gives a blueprint for looking at schools — what to expect in traditional schools, private schools, gifted programs, and gifted schools. There is a short section on homeschooling, a popular choice for parents of gifted children. More useful is the information offered about teacher training for gifted issues (most teachers receive no training), gifted programs in schools (which may or may not serve a gifted child’s needs), how to work with the school administration, and how to advocate for your gifted child.

A Parent’s Guide is a great starting point for educating yourself about the needs of your gifted child and the possible pitfalls you may face as you raise and educate him or her. However, more important than the actual information in the book are the pointers to how to learn more about giftedness, schools, and your child’s emotional health and educational success. If you’re just starting down the road to helping your gifted child, especially a younger child, this book offers a straightforward “owner’s manual” that will guide you through the challenges you and your child will face.

On Moral Fiction

Posted on by Suki

I have a book, pages yellowed and stiff as if I’d been born much earlier than I was actually born, that my brother gave me when I graduated from college. He inscribed the front page, which is why I know when he gave it to me. Otherwise, I’d have to depend on my memory, which is a bit stiff and yellow about the edges, too.

The book is John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction. I don’t know if anyone reads Gardner much anymore. I know that men of a certain age, who were already stiff and yellow about the edges when they were my writing professors, loved John Gardner. I never had much use for his fiction, which seemed to be speaking to an audience much older and male than I was, but I did like this book. And I was touched that my brother would give it to me as I finished school and was about to embark on my life of art.

Fast-forward a few years, and my brother is in advertising, and I’m a homeschooling mom, but the book hasn’t lost its relevance. I skimmed it and found that my young self had helpfully underlined all sorts of important bits. Amazingly, they sound just as important to me now as they did then.

Gardner wrote, “Nothing could be more obvious, it seems to me, than that art should be moral and that the first business of criticism, at least some of the time, should be to judge works of literature (or painting or even music) on grounds of the production’s moral worth.”

He goes on to say a lot of things, but the main point I took from his argument, and have held onto ever since, is that whether you try to or not, any time you create a work of art you are making a moral statement. So since it’s unavoidable, you might as well think about what moral statement you’re making, just in case it turns out you’re making a statement that you don’t really want to stand behind.

This comes up now because my kids and I have spent the last two years – the time in which both kids have been homeschooling – listening to lots of audiobooks together in the car. When my son was in school, it was too hard to share books because his sister and I would want to listen while he was in school. But then our lives coincided a bit more and it became a project of sorts. We have listened to three series that I think Gardner would have had strong opinions about, had he lived to read them.

First, we listened to all of Harry Potter in the space of a few months. It was an interesting exercise – HP started to invade my thoughts about everything. It is clearly a series that has a lot of compelling content. But in the end, after all that build-up, I felt like we experienced an enormous group shrug. OK, well, good thing it’s over now so we can listen to something else.

It’s not that we didn’t enjoy it – we all did. But in the end, it seemed like there was so little to sink our teeth into. Harry, as a friend of mine pointed out, really didn’t “grow” that much as a character. He started out pretty good, he stayed pretty good, then in the end his goodness triumphed over evil, just as predicted.

It wasn’t an immoral tale, certainly. But I was left wondering, Does HP give us anything to aspire to? Have we learned anything? Do we feel better equipped to face the challenges of our lives? The answer was that resounding group shrug. It was a good tale, worth listening to, and I don’t think it damaged us to listen to it. But if Gardner is right, HP’s ambivalence is a statement in itself, a message where one was not really defined.

The second series we got into started simply because we found out that the author had published the first novel as a homeschooled teen. That sounded interesting, so we decided to check it out. The series, Inheritance, is all the rage with young teens I know. It certainly was a gripping tale, full of swashbuckling fighters, glorious dragons, lithe elves, and Icelandic-style scenery as a backdrop. Our hero, Eragon, is a farmboy who becomes a sort of accidental hero after he finds a dragon egg. Eragon has to grow immensely into this role. Nothing is ever easy for him. (Believe me – by the 50th time you read that Eragon felt some part of his body give way as he did some amazing deed… you get the point that he’s suffering!)

We were stymied in finishing the series, however, because I refused to buy the audiobook and the last book had a long waiting list at the library. So while we waited, we started on our third series, which we’re just finishing. This series, Tiffany Aching by Terry Pratchett, has a lot of surface similarities to Inheritance: made-up land, lots of magic, fairy folk. There the similarities end, however. Pratchett is a master writer with a slew of adult novels under his belt. His books not only feature a sly, intelligent humor that makes you sure this man knows what he’s doing—they are also firmly grounded in a moral universe of Pratchett’s making.

We finished Inheritance because we’d come so far and we needed to know how it ended. By the end, we were referring to it as “Blood and Guts” due to the enormous amount of violent imagery. The author would often pause to have his hero bemoan the amount of violence he was required to engage in—a nod toward morality—but then again he would rise up to drive his sword through an endless parade of bodies, telling us in gory detail about the sinews snapping, the fluids draining, the surprised looks on the doomed faces.

The other thing that hit me wrong about the series was indicated by the name: This series of books is all about how you can’t change your destiny. You are who you are, you are fated to be swordsman or victim, and you play your part no matter what. In the end, Eragon has learned many things, but the biggest lesson he’s learned is that none of his struggles changed anything. He’s on the white ship sailing off to his destiny.

I have to say that I found this a repugnant message to give young readers. As Gardner said, whether you mean to teach a lesson or not, what you choose to put into your fiction teaches a lesson. And the lesson learned from Eragon’s travails is that some of us are just born with great drama, and it doesn’t matter what we do to the little people on our rampage across history.

It’s so interesting that the end of Inheritance was sandwiched in between visits with Tiffany Aching. Tiffany is also a farm girl who gets caught up in something much bigger. But on every step of her journey, Tiffany pauses to think. She notices how her actions affect people. She makes decisions, and she takes responsibility for her decisions when they hurt other people.

The first three books are largely free of any gross violence. The fourth, I Shall Wear Midnight, starts with a shocking scene. A 13-year-old girl is beaten so viciously by her father that she loses the baby she’s carrying. Plenty for me to cringe at as the book opened and we listened in the car. However, by then I trusted Terry Pratchett, and he has not violated that trust. He is a writer who wields his pen with great assurance. There is no ambivalence about right and wrong, no sense that there’s no reason to fight, never a suggestion that someone can’t grow into being something more than they are today.

My kids had probably never heard anything so personally, horribly violent as they did at the beginning of Pratchett’s final book in the series. Nothing in HP or Inheritance was so personal and true to life. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into discussions about just how and why a 13-year-old gets pregnant! But I don’t regret letting them listen to it. By the end of the book, Tiffany has unraveled the mess, not to make it perfect, but to make it as good as she can.

And that’s why she’s good, and why she’s moral, and why, if I wanted my kids to emulate any of the many people we’ve gotten to know in the last year—Harry, Ron, Hermione, Eragon, Arya, Roran, Rob Anything, or even Slightly Bigger Than Wee Jock Jock (gotta read Pratchett to understand!)—my vote is for Tiffany. She’s a hardworking, imperfect, thoughtful person. She’s not always nice, because she knows that nice is not always the most important thing.

But she is moral, as are her books.

How to kill a great book

Posted on by Suki

Last year for his birthday, a friend gave my son a movie theater gift card. My son’s school has kids from this side of the hill and the other side, two different counties with two different area codes.

It was a great gift. Unfortunately, we don’t have that chain in our county. So it sat there and bothered me for months. I hate loose ends! Finally my sister (who lives in the East Bay) and I cooked up a plan for us to meet halfway and use our gift cards.

That is how we ended up at Where the Wild Things Are in a very uncomfortable IMAX theater in Santa Clara.

When our son was a baby, we decided that we’d raise our kids without TV. The seminal moment was on a Thursday night. Back in 1999, Thursday night on NBC was a must-see for us. So as usual, we sat down in front of the TV to watch. Usually a dedicated nurser, our son kept popping off and looking at the screen. He wasn’t even a year old yet, and TV was so distracting he couldn’t eat.

We turned it off.

Then I did what I always do when I want to know something: research. I found out that when kids are watching TV (no matter what kind of TV it is), their brains basically turn off. I found out that preschool teachers can tell which kids aren’t being raised with TV just by the quality of their play. I read about girls being pressured to conform to feminine stereotypes younger and younger, largely because of TV. Obesity, low grades, hyperactivity, you name it.

If you want to read some of the research, take a look at an article I wrote a couple of years ago for Growing Up in Santa Cruz.

In any case, that choice fundamentally changed our family, and we are notably different than most American families because of it. Throughout our children’s preschool years, videos were a very occasional phenomenon in our house. When I started homeschooling my daughter, we did add in a bit more. She is a high energy person, and both she and I need the break during a busy day. But we know what it is: it’s not learning, it’s anesthesia. We’re very clear about that, just as we are about junk food, which we call entertainment, not food.

Though we allow videos now, we’re still very selective. As little violence as possible, no commercial tie-ins when possible (it’s hard enough to go to the store without my child whining for the latest Dora toothpaste!), no Disney because Daddy hates them so much. OK, a bit of Disney: old Disney like the Shaggy Dog, Pixar movies because our son loves the animation.

And generally, we avoid watching remakes of really great books. Really, I’m never sure if there’s any point to that, past easy marketing. A great book seldom makes a great movie. Sometimes we get a movie based on a book and talk about the difference. Our son is working through the Harry Potter movies slowly. He acknowledges that the book is always better. He has never developed a taste for video violence so he can’t watch them before bed.

With all those caveats you know I’m not the right person to write a review of Where the Wild Things Are if you happen to be someone who loves TV and video. But review I will:

It’s really OK. There was no level of violence that I found particularly aggregious, and they did a great job with the massive, shaggy costumes that they put real actors into. It was sort of like Nightmare on Sesame Street, to tell you the truth.

My problem with it wasn’t what I thought it would be. It was simply this: They tried to explain a great book, and when you explain a mystery, you kill it. Did we really need to know why Max got sent to his room? We could all picture it (I could, even though I was a generally docile child). Did we have to know that his mom and dad were divorced, mom had job troubles, mom had a new boyfriend, sister was mean to brother?

I really don’t think we needed any of that backstory, because when we read that book as a child, we know the backstory, and the backstory is ours. My parents were not divorced, and when we had money troubles, the kids didn’t really know about it. But we still got sent to our room. We still imagined our revenge, our escape. I understood Max. I didn’t imagine my room growing trees — I imagined living in our house turned upside-down and walking on the ceiling. But that never made any difference to the book.

If you go to this movie, your children might be transfixed, like my daughter, on the edge of their seats, eyes shining with excitement. Or your children might be somewhat bored, like my son, who waited patiently through all the backstory, and then once the Wild Things came onto the screen, we knew where it was going to go, and he didn’t really care about the Wild Things’ own highly detailed backstory, which I haven’t even described.

In the end, like so many short stories puffed into feature film size, the movie would have been improved with lots more curled-up, digital bits on the e-floor of the computer.

I’m not saying, don’t go, but then again, I will say don’t go to one group of people: If you loved Wild Things for those few pages where Max’s room transforms into a forest, and if your childish mind’s eye could see those trees and hear them creaking as they grew, don’t see this movie.

The only thing they cut is the one thing they should have kept: the power of a child’s mind to transform his world and thus transform himself. Instead, they gave Max the learned helplessness of a world that is out of control, and he is lost in it, waiting to be saved.

A Parenting Book List

Posted on by Suki
People who know me know that I’ve had my share of challenges with my kids. They are both very bright in a book-learnin’ sort of way, which means that I seldom worry about things like test scores. In fact, I’m sure I’ll write at some point about my search for schools that are academically rigorous but don’t stress testing as the end product of learning.
What I don’t want to do with this blog is get into my kids’ personal lives too much. I’ve seen other parents do that and I think it does a disservice to the kids. But last week at a party someone was asking me about resources I’ve run across, and I thought it would be a good idea to write a sort of book (and website) review of materials that might be helpful to other parents.
From their earliest times, I have been interested in figuring out how to help my highly sensitive little people negotiate the world. A book that has some really great advice is The Highly Sensitive Child (isbn 0767908724). I’ve never found that sticking my kids into a category really worked for them or us, but this book applies even if you don’t want to pigeon-hole your child as “highly sensitive.” It has some really great common-sense advice for dealing with your children’s sensitivities — not coddling them but finding techniques to help them succeed in a world that is full of stimulation that they might not appreciate.
Advice I appreciated from this book included helping non-highly-sensitive family members understand the difference between coddling your child and helping them learn to live with their sensitivities. I also liked the emphasis on finding the positive side to something that may seem all negative. When you can’t go out in public with your two-year-old because you don’t know if he’ll freak out at any unexpected loud sound, it’s easy to be negative. But the book helped me to appreciate and even draw on my children’s sensitivities.
The Out-of-Sync Child (isbn 0399531653) is to a certain extent a general manual on child-rearing. What child hasn’t been out of sync in their abilities at any given age? I have tried not to “pathologize” this in my kids as much as possible — I fully expect that an “out of sync” child will go in and out of being in sync his or her entire childhood (and possibly further). But again, whether or not I view a child has having a disorder or just having some challenges that are discussed in the book, the book can be helpful.
My homeschooled daughter benefits from my having read this book every day. I keep reminding myself that it’s OK that she’s not particularly good at certain skills, and that pushing her won’t help. As a strong-willed person, she reminds me when I’ve forgotten and I start to push her. She pushes back… hard! The skills that she lacks are ones that we need to work on, but she’s happier when we work on them slowly and in a positive way. And all the work we do on the things that don’t come easily to her has to be overbalanced with lots of fun doing the things she excels at.
The Mislabeled Child (isbn 9781401302252) is one that I happened upon at a particularly difficult time in parenting one of my children. It taught me to question the wisdom of lumping children into categories rather than looking at them as individuals. The professionals I liked working with were ones who were willing to admit that labels are convenient but not necessarily “real.” Every child can go in and out of displaying symptoms of various disorders, even if they’re perfectly normal. (Someone I know called me in distress one day because her child’s preschool teacher had suggested she get him evaluated for autism. The suggestion was based on the fact that he flapped his hands like an autistic kid when he was excited!)
In The Mislabeled Child they show how often behaviors can be misunderstood: a partially deaf child is labeled learning-impaired, a gifted child is labeled ADHD, etc. While dismissing the use of drugs as a cure-all for behavioral problems, the authors provided an entire chapter on the drugs available and what their effects and side-effects are. That chapter on drugs really made me think about how easily our culture falls back on drugs as a simple cure-all, and helped me take a firm stance in my own situation.
In the midst of a very difficult parenting year last year I wrote an article on PVUSD’s GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) program, run by the talented Lyn Olson. GATE is the bewildered step-child of the California public schools. (You can read the article on my website, sukiwessling.com/familystories.html.) Lyn led me to an amazing website, http://sengifted.org, which serves as a virtual library of information for helping a gifted child stay mentally healthy.
I could write more, but I’m just about to hit my maximum word count! Good luck in your parenting journey…

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