Have Gifted Children
How come so many people have gifted children? My friend is bummed out because her genius three-year-old is taking naps at pre-school instead of reading with the “cheetahs.” At my baby shower, my mother-in-law gave me a certificate for child IQ testing.
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 8:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized.
Some parents are so anxious about making sure their kids have every leg up, they can go overboard and take over all of the kids’ leisure time with goal-oriented drills. For example, I ran into a friend of mine at the testing site where we had each brought our 3rd graders to be tested for the public school’s gifted program. She had brought along her two younger kids and, unlike the other tag-along kids who were mostly amusing themselves, she pulled out a deck of cards and started playing blackjack with them. At first I was impressed that she was engaging them in a game, but it soon became apparent that this was an intense math drill.
Even more alarming than the parents who make pointedly offhand mentions of the “special track” their kid is in: the kids who say “I go to the smart kids’ school.”
What I detest is the way parents insert a reference to the “Excell” program (the name of the gifted program in my community), making a comment about some pregnant teacher’s absense or some curriculum controversy, ACTING like they are just chatting about school issues, but really they just want you to know their kid is in “the” program. They would be the last person to have a bumper sticker saying “My kid is in the gifted kid program” but the first one to drop some sneaky reference to the program so that you know their kid is gifted. I prefer overt egomaniacs to the covert ones that act like they are humble but find a way to stick their “one up” to you in a sideways manner.
As a former “gifted kid” I was sent to different, accelerated academic programs, refused by others, and here I am, all grown up, working as a legal secretary, and not enjoying law in the slightest, despite my “being bright” (for some strange reason, several people wonder why, if I’m so smart, don’t I want to be a lawyer. I cannot explain).
My “giftedness” did not add up to degrees, doctorates, publication, or invention. I took from 1995-2004 to get my BA in Writing for Sustainable Community, at 32 years old I’ve just landed my first full-time job, and it’s taking a considerably long time to get pregnant, despite my big brain and ability to know the difference between the words, their, there, and they’re.
I’m not sure where exactly the giftedness went. It probably helped me survive the death of my father at six (I told myself that I needed to be strong for my family), and not become completely dissociative after being sexually abused before the age of seven (I remember saying to myself once “There are two versions of me. I will wait until I am older to deal with one of them so that I don’t get confused”).
I don’t regret looking ordinary in my intelligence as an adult. No Harvard or Yale would have taught me about how my heart works, or what grief is like. No special track at school covered how to feel, how to relate, and how to love.
I’m not a parent yet, and when I tell people I want to homeschool, they question me about socialization and opportunity. But secretly, the only opportunity I care about is one where, as a family, we are free to explore love. We’re all gifted in that.