My Vexed Relationship with Giftedness

I mentioned the other day that I had a blog post in me about giftedness, and I'm feeling in the mood to tackle it, although it's complicated and messy in my head. A few years ago, I was talking to my therapist about my own history as a precocious child, and how that was good, and how it was bad, and how it shaped my relationship to school and academic achievement, and she said, "Wow, you really have not got any of this figured out. I can tell because usually you speak so clearly, but when you try to talk about this, you become practically incoherent."

I realized that this was something I needed to work on when the Lego Savant was maybe 20 months old, and we were driving to the library. He had a sippy cup in his hand, with alphabet blocks or something on it, and he was saying, "Letter A...Letter L...Letter B." When he said, "Letter X," I knew he was just saying random letters, because there was no X on the cup.

And then I went to get him out of his car seat, and I saw that the sippy cup said Playtex on it.

"Lego Savant," I said, "Can you show me the letter X?"

And he did.

And I burst into tears.

OK, keeping in mind that I tend to be very emotionally labile, my feelings at realizing that the Lego Savant might be on the bright side made me realize that I had some unresolved issues of my own to work on.

I think I've made some progress.

It helps that I've done some reading on giftedness in the last few years, and learned that my story, which seemed so complicated and incomprehensible to me, is actually an absolutely typical gifted-child story: I was precocious in school, and not served well. In first grade, my teacher made an arrangement for me to go to a second-grade classroom for math, for instance. But when I got to second grade (which happened because my mother refused to let me be skipped to third, because of her own negative experiences being accelerated as a kid), nobody was willing to make an accommodation for me. So I did second-grade math again.

This was the beginning of my disillusionment with school, and was followed by the usual litany: figuring out I was smarter than most of my teachers; being marked down for things that were correct, like using a particular kind of literary device in a piece of writing, because my teacher either didn't recognize it or was sure it was a mistake instead of a deliberate stylistic choice on my part; being restricted to the picture-book side of the library in first and second grade even though I was routinely reading chapter books (my mom got this restriction lifted for me); being put into a completely inadequate pull-out program for a year or two; and so on.

A side story about that pull-out program in elementary school: no one told me why I was being pulled out of class a couple of days a week to go play games with a handful of other kids and a grown-up I didn't know. Based on the other kids in the group, I inferred that I was being pulled out of class because I had trouble making friends. I continued to believe this until I was an adult, when my mother, overhearing me tell a friend that I had been so socially awkward as a child that I had had to go to this special making-friends group, said, "Susan! That was a pull-out program for gifted children!" Maybe someone should have told me at the time.

I got a lot of attention for being precocious and for my academic accomplishments, but I also had a lot of anxiety about it. Being smart mattered so much to me that I was terrified of finding out I wasn't smart, and getting good grades was apparently how you proved you were smart. Any grade less than an A felt like proof that I'd been faking it all along. I adapted to the anxiety by becoming an underachiever. My almost-conscious thought process about this was that if I didn't try, then a good grade proved I was smart--because I'd gotten the A without even trying. On the other hand, a bad grade meant nothing, because it could be blamed on the lack of effort.

Of course, I mostly got good grades anyway, and this led to a long-term strategy of putting in only the minimum effort required to get an A. In my first grad-school foray, after I had turned in my first paper, one of my profs called me into her office. She told me that she had had to give my paper an A, because it was an A paper. At the same time, she could tell that I had put very little effort into it, and that it didn't represent my best work. She wanted me to challenge myself to work harder, to try for my personal best.

This made no sense to me at all. Why would you work harder than you had to for an A? Especially when you'd been told your whole life that the goal was to get an A.

There are many reasons that first grad school foray didn't work out. This was one of them.

I won't digress here to talk about my experience doing an MFA at a school that didn't give letter grades...let's just say it was much, much better.

Anyway, I have learned that all of this--plus my inability to settle on one thing to do with my life--is one of the absolutely typical ways that gifted kids respond to school. I'm not special! I'm like the poster child for Gifted with Academic Anxiety!

So, along comes the Lego Savant, with his "Letter X," and my unresolved issues erupt like a volcano.

My own experiences in school are a big part of why I chose to homeschool my kids. I didn't want them to have the kinds of experiences I'd had. And from my reading, and spending some time on discussion forums for parents with gifted kids, I could see that things hadn't changed much. I didn't want my kids to be bored like I was; I didn't want so much of their time to be wasted; I wanted them to have expansive time to do what they loved, something I got only very occasionally as a child; I didn't want their self-esteem to get mixed up with academic achievement in the unhealthy way mine had.

And, honestly, I was afraid that I'd project my own academic anxieties onto my kids, and pressure them to succeed where I felt I had failed. That I might become the academic equivalent of the guy who pushes his kid to play football because his own football dreams never came true.

(Note: I was not actually an academic failure. But, like Anne Lamott, who says she was in her 30s before she figured out that a B+ is actually a good grade, I was also well into adulthood before I figured out that graduating with High Distinction--but not Highest Distinction--from the University of Michigan actually meant I was successful in college.)

Homeschooling has done much of what I hoped it would for my kids. And one of the things I have liked about it is that I have not had to worry about whether my kids were "gifted" according to any particular definition--they didn't need to score above a certain percentile on an achievement test to qualify for services, for instance. We haven't needed to prove anything to anyone. And I could side-step my own ambivalence about the gifted label by simply not needing to deal with it.

And then...

Some things that had happened to me, that I thought were adaptations to school, turned up in my kids as well. Word Boy, for instance, is such a perfectionist that he will melt down if he doesn't understand his math at first glance. At least I've gotten him past the point of hitting himself over it, but still.

Word Boy and the Lego Savant both suffer from anxiety, inflexibility, high sensitivity, excitability, and a degree of emotional immaturity. I threw tantrums well into high school myself, and I thought this was a reaction to how my parents treated me. Now I know that this is also absolutely typical for some gifted kids. (Sorry, Mom and Dad.) Sadly, it is true for the Lego Savant, who one moment can be talking to you about the literary conventions that make movies and TV shows so predictable as if you're in an English literature seminar, and the next minute can be hitting a chair and screaming that he just. can't. cope. and his life is over because we're out of his favorite potato chips and can't get more until payday.

You should see the two of them trying to work across the table from each other. The Lego Savant is talking quietly to himself as he solves some math problems; Word Boy wishes he would just be quiet, already. Meanwhile, the scratching of Word Boy's pencil is driving the Lego Savant mad! And can Word Boy please stop breathing like that?

I make the perfectly reasonable suggestion that one or both of them could go work elsewhere. They both have desks in their bedrooms!

This is when inflexibility kicks in, one of the hardest things we deal with as parents: they can identify a problem, but (especially the Lego Savant) refuse to accept any solutions to it. No, they cannot go work in the other room because they like to work at the table. No, one of them cannot wait and do his seatwork after the other one is done, because they want to do it now. No, they can't just relax and try not to worry about the breathing and the muttering and the scratching of the pencil.

Sometimes, I tell them that if they were in school, they'd be in a room of 20 to 30 kids, all of them writing with pencils! All of them breathing! Some of them with sniffles! Some of them with a tendency to tap their fingers on their desks! Many of them turning pages in books!

This is what passes for a scary story at our house.

What I have been finally admitting the last year or so is that, even though we aren't in school, I can't ignore giftedness as an issue. The kids' constellation of smartness, anxiety, perfectionism, inflexibility, intellectual and social maturity coupled with emotional immaturity--all perfectly typical. And there's a lot for me to learn from the literature on giftedness.

I have very mixed feelings about this. My first attempts to connect with other parents of gifted children were unsuccessful. I couldn't deal what seemed to me a culture of one-upmanship ("My child read at 3." "I'm not sure your child is truly gifted. Mine was calculating cube roots at 2."). And, to be honest, hearing about these kids' achievements threatened to trigger some of my old anxieties about not being smart enough if I wasn't the smartest, now projected onto my kids.

Another digression: How this plays out in my relationship with Raider: Last night, I read him this quote from Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: "It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisors cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers." (p. 101)

Me: That is a great quote. It encapsulates his argument really well and is a perfect description of the problem.

Raider: It's also an example of chiasmus.

Me: I know what that means, but I couldn't have come up with that word off the top of my head.

A pause.

Me again: I love how smart you are. Except at those moments when I suspect you're smarter than me.

Raider laughs.

Raider, for his part, managed to be a gifted kid and grownup with none of the kinds of baggage I have had. He didn't seem to get the anxiety part. He never over-invested in academic achievement; he never thought his grades proved anything one way or another. He knew he was smart, but he didn't over-value being smart. He didn't invest his identity and self-esteem in it. Periodically he gets a newsletter for people who got the same prestigious scholarship he did to college; the "where are they now" section shows that he is almost literally the only one who isn't a college professor. This bothers him not at all. I'm glad to have him around as a model of what is possible.

Back to my kids.

In my efforts to help them deal with their various issues (and to make parenting them easier, which may be a pipe dream), I started reading up on giftedness. I stuck it out on some of the parenting forums. I read some of the parenting blogs even when they make me roll my eyes ("People think we're so lucky to have gifted kids! Ha! They should see our book budget! They should count their lucky stars they don't have to try to keep up with a kid who wants to study quantum physics at age 8!" The faux-plaints are strong in this community). I tried to be patient with the strings of letters and credentials people put after their children's names ("My daughter Snow, 8, 2e, intellectually OE, IQ 146, Lexile 940..."). And I learned more and more about how absolutely typical my very special unique snowflakes are.

Not that all gifted kids are alike, I should be careful to say. Just that mine are good examples of Gifted Kids: Subtype 2A.

One thing that pushed me into being willing to engage with this whole vexed notion of giftedness was when the boys' excellent therapist, who got the Lego Savant over his elevator phobia and had great rapport with the boys, admitted to me in so many words that he was in over his head and didn't know what to do with my kids. I think this was partly a narrowness of focus on his part--he loves the "behavioral" part of cognitive-behavioral therapy, and much of what my kids deal with doesn't respond to behavioral interventions. Partly I think it reflected a lack of experience with kids like mine. I loved that he was willing to admit he wasn't sure what the next step was, and willing to try to educate himself, but at that point, we decided to take a break from therapy.

And things have stagnated. Behavioral interventions have helped, but I think my kids really need to get into the "cognitive" part of CBT. They need help understanding what's going on for them, and how they can choose to change their thoughts and behavior, rather than simply have us impose behavioral restrictions on them. We've used an audio program called Turnaround that I highly recommend, but we need more help than that. And I need to know whether what I want from my kids--that understanding, that internal motivation to change--is realistic at this time in their lives.

This is why, on Monday, I have an appointment two hours away from home with a therapist who specializes in gifted kids with anxiety. Just five minutes on the phone with her the other day felt like a deep relaxing breath--she knew what I was going to say almost before I said it. She is very familiar with Gifted Kids: Subtype 2A (a designation I made up, in case you wondered). She has experience with them. And she knew exactly what I meant when I said that I wasn't sure whether what we needed was therapy for the kids, or parenting guidance for us.

She's too far away for us to work with very regularly. But I can imagine her helping us in lots of ways: parenting consultations for me, consulting with our local therapist, meeting with the kids occasionally, pointing us to the most useful resources. I have high hopes for this meeting. I will be keeping my fingers crossed.

Her office is right over by Lake Michigan, so Raider took the day off work and we're making this Family Beach Day as well. A fun and ediftying day, I hope.

(You may be thinking: You talk about Word Boy and the Lego Savant. What about the Tiny Tornado? Do you think he is gifted as well? I do. But in very different ways. His path is going to play out very differently from his older brothers', I predict, and I'm excited to help him follow it.)