My Kid is More Gifted Than Yours. So There.
I survived the Mommy Wars over breastfeeding, managing to be both a fraud who supplemented and a freak who is nursing toddler twins. There aren’t many areas in life I’ve achieved both fraudhood and freakdom. I survived the working vs. stay-at-home debates utilizing the aggressively nutty choice of trying to start my own business in a totally new field for me. But the educational arms race may do me in.
When I was interviewing to teach at private schools one administrator warned me that parents, upon enrolling their child in that particular school’s kindergarten, sometimes asked if this would increase their child’s chance of getting into Yale. Seriously. I attended a workshop on brain development at my kids’ school because I am the kind of dork who finds child development interesting and several parents asked questions that boiled down to “tell me that spending all this money on tuition will make my kid smarter/more successful/more likely to get into Yale.”
Everyone thinks her kids are gifted. Spend time on parenting boards and almost every single child seems to be ahead of the curve. Women whose kids are well within the bounds of normal developmental milestones get worked into a tizzy because someone else’s kid is counting to ten in three languages by one. Everyone has to be gifted. If your kid isn’t gifted he must be plain old dumb because those appear to be the only choices. You have to have a gifted kid who is super duper smart, so smart he makes you worried in that braggy kind of “whatever am I going to do - junior is playing Mozart again” way or you may as well give up. Not reading Tolstoy at 2? You’re doomed to a life digging ditches in Albania.
How do you determine giftedness at 1.5 anyway? Who smears paste in her hair with the most grace? Who eats, or doesn’t eat, the fingerpaints?
We’re in an educational arms race towards a time when all children are gifted and we are already scurrying about like madwomen trying to grab onto whatever advantage we can scrape up to get our kids into the very bestest colleges no matter what. It’s insane. And you have to consciously fight to not get sucked into it. Flashcards, DVDs, they are out there, taunting you with the possibility that if you just used this product your kid might be counting in Urdu too.
Mine of course, already does. Or maybe it’s Gaelic. It’s hard to tell what with all the fingerpaints in her mouth.
Stumble it!
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May 23rd, 2008 09:28
Great Post!
I recently had a debate with my MIL, trying to make my point that preschool is not a necessary prerequisite for college! My kids just turned one, and already I am being asked about preschool! (As a side note, my husband is quite good at memorizing things, and was able to attend Harvard and Notre Dame Law. This means WAY too much to his mom, and I don’t want to be like that!)
Also, I am almost done weaning my kids, and your posts about breastfeeding were extreemly helpful to me in the early months of nursing. Thanks! We made it a whole year!
May 23rd, 2008 10:42
Oh my goodness yes! It is kind of nuts, but I don’t really understand it. My kid is of course brillant and amazing and wonderful in ways that I doubt anyone else on the planet is. Because she’s my kid, and I am crazy about her, so of course I think that. And she doesn’t eat fingerpaints. She eats sand.
I certainly hope she doesn’t have trouble in school, and I would like her to enjoy school. But I mostly want her to be happy.
May 23rd, 2008 11:44
I would like to echo everything Brooke said, especially the part about eating sand.
May 23rd, 2008 14:42
More seriously, there’s a tendency to call our kids either “gifted” or “advanced” or proclaim that they’re on the autism spectrum. They’re either better than everyone else or they’re disordered. And the kids on the spectrum have their own *extra* special gifts.
This need to separate our kids and make them better and different and special annoys the crap out of me. Can’t they just be special and amazing because they’re ours? You know we agree about this, Stacie. That’s why you all should come hang out with us again.
May 23rd, 2008 14:57
Truly. Your comment on your blog about eating sand is what got my brain rolling down this path. My kids are wonderful and amazing and incredible because they are mine and I love them past all reason. They may also end up being academically talented. That may be a good thing. It may not. I care more about their happiness and that they retain a love of learning and feel compassion for others than that they get tagged as “gifted” or slotted into a prestige college.
We fetishize “giftedness” in our culture, often to the detriment of the actual gifted child in question who gets pushed because it is just so COOL that s/he can play an instrument / play a sport / do math / whatever so well and the child ends up with way to much of his or her self-esteem tied up in his/her precocity. Having a truly gifted child, not just a reasonably bright kid, is not something to be wished for IMO because balancing that child’s needs to explore his/her talents with being a happy kid can’t be an easy task and parenting is hard enough as it is.
You need to move closer to us. With the housing market as it is we aren’t going anywhere for a looooong time. And traveling with toddlers is… unfun.
May 23rd, 2008 15:08
Oh… this post speaks to me. My first teaching job was in the gifted and talented program in a very academically-oriented community. Some of the kids were so smart it was scary. There was specific criteria to get into the program, certain tests scores being one of them. Several local ‘educational consultants’ would charge an exorbitant fee to help students score in the gifted range of the test. The kids would spend their weekends and summers being coached, then when they finally tested in the gifted range, on their third, fourth, fifth try at the test, they’d join my program. The community and school pressure to keep the program ultra-challenging was intense. Parents would come to conferences and say, ‘I see my child got an A in your class. What can she do better next time so she can get an A+?’ I felt like I was contributing to these kids’ mid-life crisis.
My daughter’s birthday is two weeks after our school district’s cutoff date for kindergarten enrollment. Already I’ve been asked how I’ll convince the school to take her early. My answer: ‘Life is short, childhood is shorter, she’s going to kindergarten when she’s 5 3/4.’ Gifted program, special program, I don’t care, as long as the kids are nice to one another and she gets to go outside for recess.
May 23rd, 2008 20:40
It is just so meaningless. Nothing drives this home to me more than reading blogs of people with kids the same age as mine. Mine can recoginize most of their letters. Someone elses can speak in complete sentences while someone else’s kids can count to 20. They’re all just different.
May 24th, 2008 11:08
Every child is different and to be honest, the parents of kids who insist that their kids are so “advanced” really piss me off. Who cares how “advanced” or “gifted” your kid is? Is the kid happy? does s/he get to spend time being a kid? Or do you spend all your time drilling him/her with flashcards etc. It’s all so stupid.
The world doesn’t allow kids to be young for nearly long enough. Why push them harder?
May 24th, 2008 22:28
TOTAL AGREEMENT. I love the part about how “gifted” and “dumb” seem like the only choices. It’s a BELL CURVE.
May 25th, 2008 19:54
We’ve taken the three kids and taped their eyes open and put them in front of the TV to watch educational programming 24 hours a day. They’re getting into Yale Dammit!
(And some eerie music plays in the background).
May 25th, 2008 20:39
Chiming in late to say that I totally agree! This reminds me about an article that I read a while ago about “the problem with praise” http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/
It totally opened my eyes. It is taking quite a shift on my part, but trying to reinforce that it is the effort that counts not the results is quite hard.
May 26th, 2008 07:25
This was really interesting, Stacie. My daughter is at our local primary school (K-6) which doesn’t have a G&T programme - it’s too small - although the former principal hired a teacher with G&T accreditation in case they got kids who needed it. But if that kind of competitiveness is there, it’s pretty well hidde n- I think I am lucky.
I sent my daughter to a Steiner preschool/daycare for the very reason that they didn’t “educate” with flash cards and Mozart and tuition - instead, they asked us to send gumboots and raincoats so the kids could go outside and splash in puddles when it rained. I loved that.
The upshot was she couldn’t read when she started school, which is how we planned it, because I was totally bored being a reading Kindy kid. And her teachers are totally happy with her. And she with them. And in year 1, what more can you ask?
May 27th, 2008 10:48
What’s that old saying,”To know what lies ahead of you, ask the one coming back?” is that Zen enought? Anyway, our youngest recently graduated from a small expensive privtate college and our eldest graduated from Georgetown University two years ago. They are both “talented and gifted.” I’ve got the paperwork to prove it! The two *boys* were literally off the charts and I just thought they were “normal” until it was pointed out to me and my husband. But you know what? No matter how smart and *gifted* a child is and believe me, there are many forms of gifted and many stages of developement and styles, there two facts that apply to them too: 1.)There are always a bunch of people that are way smarter than you are. 2.)Smart and gifted never means you still don’t have to work!
As our boys grew up, we took it all with a grain of salt, I remained a pacifist in our Mommy Wars and tried hard to let them grown up in all ways, following their needs, desires, inborn talents, strengths and weaknessess. Not only did they both get accepted into Yale, and Harvard, they were offered scholarships and both chose not to attend either one. People are still amazed that both boys were National Merit Scholars and all the rest, because we, their parents are so “laid-back.” Well, we are. Childhood and babyhood is short, it takes time to grow up and learn and it’s not reflection on us really, how are children do in school…it’s their life, their brains, their successes. We just provide support and protection and lots of cookies and a quiet safe haven for them to regroup and recover. Parents need to step back and make sure they are NOT living through their children. At-all. It’s okay to be proud of them but, believe me, it is their brains, their intelligence, their lives, NOT the parents.
As for early programs…well, I was a stay-at-home Mom, I carried the boys around as I cooked and cleaned and went to the library and gardened, they *cooked* and *gardened* with me, we had no television until they were five and eight years old and we were pretty strict about television, video games, bedtimes and the like. We never forgot they were children, not little adults. EVER.
It’s scary to see how people demand their children to be like adults and then they forget that adults get tired, mess up, make mistakes, and are misunderstood and the rest.
So, let up a bit, really. It’s a lot like growing flowers and gardens, raising children is.
May 27th, 2008 11:06
Jano - I have no concern at all that my kids need some sort of academic pushing to be able to read. I LOVE that their “school” focuses on non-academic stuff. They live with two parents who both love to read and who read to them all the time. They already have favorite books they demand and have partially memorized.
Jae - I think you really nail it. If a kid is gifted you don’t need to push them - they’ll do gifted type things. I just hate that “I’m going to make you gifted if it kills both of us” mentality.