Category: Psychology

The “Gift”

Posted on by Suki
I used a word I don’t particularly like when I was talking to some parents the other day. The problem is, it’s the word that is used, and substitutions for it sound awkward. I was referring to my daughter and how I’d been reading a “gifted homeschoolers” e-mail group (mostly to reassure myself that I’m not alone in the parenting world).
One of the moms replied in the way that one of the moms always does when you use that word. “I think all kids are gifted,” she said.
In the sense that she was using the word, the sense that it has for everyone but those who get caught in the Escher-like upstairs-downstairs of educating gifted kids, she was right. Every single person is unique, and for each unique child, you can find a gift that they can offer the world. Some of them have big fancy gifts like Shirley Temple. Some of them have quieter gifts that they discover over a lifetime.
But I’m stuck with this word that doesn’t exactly express what it means. “Gifted and Talented Education” is the official title for the program in California’s public schools, and “the gifted” is what they call the kids. That immediately makes other parents, whose children are therefore “not gifted,” think that you’re bragging. It couldn’t be further from the truth.
Having been one of these kids, I have no illusions that it’s easier to be who they are than to be someone who is “not gifted.” Each one of our unique humans has a unique set of things to overcome. It might surprise a lot of people that gifted kids are actually less likely to graduate from high school. And even more surprising to many people is that your IQ actually has no strong correlation with success in life. In fact, people who study the gifted say that you’re better off being pretty darn smart (somewhat smarter than average) than really, really smart. Those who are really, really smart have bigger handicaps to go along with their “gift.”
As I understand it, kids who are gifted learners often develop backwards. You notice pretty much right away that they’re different. The other kids go through the stages that they describe in parenting manuals. Gifted kids do…something different. Some of them develop their social skills normally, but most don’t. The schedule flips around. When other kids are learning to get past parallel play and make friends, gifted kids are often more interested in reading dictionaries.
My son was not one of those kids you read about who do amazing intellectual feats early on, but he was clearly different. He went from not speaking to speaking in paragraphs. He didn’t have his terrible twos, but when he was five he started throwing scary fits like he was a two-year-old. At times we feared he was autistic. He made his first friend at the age of four-and-a-half. Our goals for him have never been academic. When a teacher asks what our goals are, we say we’d like him to be happy.
Our daughter is in many ways the opposite. She has always acted outward. Her terrible twos started at 18 months and we’re not sure when they’re going to end. She is unable to handle being in a classroom for more than a few hours at a time if she’s not being constantly intellectually stimulated. If I can keep up with her, we can have great homeschooling days. But it’s extremely hard to keep up with her. Teachers never asked us what our goals were. It was clear that our goal was to keep her able to be in class, till we chose another path. Homeschooling is becoming the educational model of choice for lots of parents of gifted kids.
Both of our kids are typical as gifted kids, but very unusual in the wider world. Parents react to them in a variety of ways. Sometimes parents compare their kids and find them lacking. “I wish my son could read like yours,” said the father of a second-grade classmate. “I wish my son could hit a baseball,” I wanted to reply. But I didn’t, because it’s really important with all kids, not just “gifted” kids, to accept what comes in the package. If my son decides one day to play baseball, I’ll encourage him to do his best.
Other people just don’t know what to do with them. They might assume the children actually don’t understand what they’re saying. One time when my daughter was three, she cursed at my son by saying, “I will stop your circulatory system.” Someone overhearing it said, “She doesn’t know what that means.” But she did. She is endlessly creative with her knowledge of how the human body works, and with her insults. Like Shakespeare.
The thing parents always say about gifted kids is that they’re exhausting. You want to enjoy their “gifts,” but sometimes gifts can get in the way of enjoyment. Everyone is telling you that you’re lucky, and you’re happy that you survived a day with Shakespeare and Galileo breathing down your neck.
Like all parenting, it’s a topsy turvy roller coaster ride. Enjoy!

Love Her and Let Her Go

Posted on by Suki
I received some pearls of wisdom the other day about discipline from a tattooed great-grandmother who works at my daughter’s homeschool program.
My wise woman told me that she never had preschoolers in her care give her trouble about walking in a line on sidewalks. When I expressed my doubt that she’d be able to rein my daughter in like that, she let drop a phrase that has stuck with me. “Oh,” she said, “Your daughter has a perimeter. All kids have perimeters. Your daughter’s is just a bit bigger than most.”
What she meant was the for some kids, you need to let out the slack to rein them in. When you take a kid with a “wide perimeter” and try to force them into the small enclosed behavioral space that you keep other kids in, it backfires on you.
What she also meant was an almost heretical thing to say in modern education: not all kids are the same. No matter how hard you try, some kids are not going to be good at taking tests, some kids are not going to be good at raising their hands quietly, and some kids are not going to be able to catch a ball. In every classroom, you have (hopefully) a good representation of kids who fall somewhere in the middle. But you are always going to have kids that fall outside that perimeter, and what do you do with them?
When you call my daughter on every little infraction of the rules, the infractions increase. Teachers who try to keep her on the straight and narrow fail. A good example is circle time. At her old school, a private Montessori, she was required to come to circle time. The teacher tried everything: giving her a five-minute warning, positive reinforcement, negative consequences, you name it. But she didn’t like circle time much. When she was left to her own devices, she’d sometimes join in. But the more her teacher tried to get her to join, the less she wanted to.
After leaving that school, we went to visit her homeschool program. I told the teacher, “She just doesn’t DO circle time.” No problem, the teacher said. She can join if she wants to. After a couple of weeks in the program, my daughter noticed that no one was forcing her to sit in the circle, and she started to join in…when she felt like it.
The fact is, in our society we recognize that rules don’t apply equally in many ways. It’s illegal to beat someone up, but if you both agree to wear gloves, follow some rules, and do it in front of an audience, you can try to knock someone out and not get arrested.
So what does it mean in a classroom, or in a family, when you admit that rules don’t apply equally? It causes problems, of course. In our family, we first have the issue of age. Our two children are four years apart, so rules can’t always apply equally. Our son has to do many things alone that our daughter gets help with — and conversely, our son GETS to do many things alone that our daughter would love to be able to do. There’s also the issue of “perimeters.” Our son has a very, very small perimeter. I spent much of his preschool years working on helping him to be more confident. When he was small, he spent time outside of the home literally attached to the adult he was with. When I dropped him at preschool, I would “hook” him onto his teacher so that I could make my escape!
It’s taken me years to be comfortable with the fact that my six-year-old needs the opposite treatment. She really needs to feel like she has the ability to make her own choices, depend on her own body, and have her own opinions. This means I have to turn off the mother who hooks her son into each new environment, and find that mother who expresses confidence in her daughter then looks away, or at least pretends to. If I send my daughter across the street to get the mail from our box, she does it well and confidently. If I watch her, that, to her, expresses my lack of confidence in her.
This is very hard to translate to a classroom. Her Montessori teacher constantly sent the message that she didn’t trust my daughter, and my daughter received that message loud and clear. When I told the teacher she had to let go a bit more, she said, “But the other kids will see that I’m not applying the rules fairly.” I agree that this is a problem. But I see the difference when adults work with my daughter. The ones who want to rein her in fail. The ones who “get” her and are able to give her space while also guiding her in the right direction, do fine.
One year I had her enrolled in two different preschools, one private preschool, and the Watsonville Adult School program in my son’s school. She was having big problems at her main preschool, but not in the other. I asked her teacher at the Adult School program one day about this difference in behavior.
Her teacher (a former motorcycle gang member) let drop her own pearls of wisdom. “Your daughter’s a strong girl, and I like strong girls,” she said. That was all the explanation she needed to give.
Love her, and let her loose.

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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