Starting to think about college for our gifted kid
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Anonymous
| This is the most sensible thread on gifted children I have ever seen on DCUM. OP: you are getting very good advice here. |
Anonymous
Some gifted kids excel at one or two things and can have trouble maintaining focus across all courses. But honestly OP I think that, to the extent you can, help foster a love of learning rather than a love of good grades. |
Anonymous
| Find a good role model for her and make sure she uses her intelligence in the right places. |
Anonymous
| Many - but certainly not all - gifted children also have a learning disability or ADHD. They might struggle with executive function skills or maintaining sustained focus in non-preferred subjects, so their grades don’t match their standardized test scores. |
Anonymous
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Also, praise effort and growth not that she's "smart". Gifted kids can fall into being afraid to take risks or feeling something is wrong with them when they do come up against something that doesn't come really easily. Read up on "growth mindset vs. fixed mindset"
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/passive-aggressive-diaries/201112/fostering-growth-mindset-7-ways-nurture-your-gifted-child |
Anonymous
No. Not a love of learning. Foster a love of working hard and a love or organization/time management. --Mom of a profoundly gifted kid taught to "love learning" who is now in high school. |
Anonymous
No, there weren’t quite a few profoundly gifted kids in your class. Profoundly gifted kids are extreme outliers — highly unlikely that you’d have more than one. Not surprising if you didn’t have any. |
Anonymous
| If she's profoundly gifted, apply for her to become a Davidson Young Scholar. (http://www.davidsongifted.org/Young-Scholars) There are free services, and the parent community is a fabulous resource for this kind of question. |
Anonymous
Some people I know think they are smarter than other people (and their parents tell them they are) and have trouble taking instruction from others because they think they know more than everyone, but there is still IMO a lot they can learn from others. They have high IQs but cannot hold down jobs. |
Anonymous
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OP here. These responses have been extremely helpful. Thank you to all of you that responded.
So far my daughter loves school and is doing well overall but I can definitely see how she will be surprised when she finds something difficult to pick up immediately in school. She's a bit of a perfectionist and hard on herself and although she doesn't have any indication of a learning disability, we are realizing she struggles with anxiety at times. The advice to focus on growth mindset and on hard work are good ones. We still have a lot to learn about how to support her. For those of you that had similarly gifted kids, did any of you have them skip grades? It's something her teachers have brought up on several occasions but that we dismissed. After the recent meeting with her school, we are thinking about it more seriously. |
Anonymous
I was a profoundly gifted kid (now a successful and happy but certainly not world-beating) adult and I did skip a grade. It was a disaster. We stuck with it for years and things really came to a head in 6th grade, which it turns out is common for kids like me. I think skipping grades can work for some kids, but they need to be the true one in a million outliers. I wasn't one of those. I was just very good at tests, and very good at thinking quickly. It sounds like your daughter isn't, either, if you only just realized she's gifted based on standardized tests rather than from having her learn to read at 18 months or something. Engage her, work with her, move somewhere with a good gifted program if you need to. But please don't have her skip a grade if you want her to come out the other end of high school well-adjusted and with friends. |
Anonymous
| Colleges don't ask for "giftedness"... They ask to see your accomplishments. So the question isn't whether your child is "gifted" (or not), it's what has she done with her it. |
Anonymous
This is really helpful, thanks. We always knew she was bright but since she was our first sort of didn't know what was normal. She did know all her letters and their sounds at 14 months and was full on reading by the time she turned three. But according to the results of some testing done recently, apparently she is an extreme outlier. I didn't even know that being "profoundly gifted" was a thing much less how rare it was until I started googling. In any case I think we'll provide some at-home enrichment and otherwise focus on making she is well-adjusted and hard-working and doesn't give up. I really don't want to have her skip grades. |
Anonymous
+1 Same here with skipping grades, though it was rectified early enough that I went to middle and high school with age-appropriate classmates. In my personal experience as a "profoundly gifted" child, there was an early and persistent emphasis on how different I was from my peers and I allowed that to become my narrative. In your bolded statement above, you mention your daughter is already showing signs of perfectionism and anxiety; if anything I would take this as an indication to dial back your emphasis on her giftedness at this time and focus on continuing to develop her social and emotional skills. Her academic skills are already there and will likely continue to be there, and there will be plenty of time and opportunity to develop them in middle/high school. You will not lose any ground on gaining her admission to an elite university if that's her desire. Obviously this advice comes from an extremely biased place, and I don't know your daughter specifically, but I've known enough gifted children to see that focusing on their academic progress to the neglect of their social and emotional life tends to be a disservice in the long run. |
Anonymous
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Actually, moving to a state with an excellent public university system is a great idea if your work lives allow for it. As a pg kid, I really benefited from living in CA, with cheap and easy access to community college and UC classes and libraries from an early age.
Personally, I grew up with what others might call a strong work ethic but it wasn't really school-focused. School was a relatively low bar which I cleared easily and then got on with doing things that interested me. So I’d say I was responsible wrt schoolwork but the Energizer Bunny wrt my own interests/projects. And what provided that energy was not a work ethic so much as curiosity and a delight in figuring things out. Basically, for a pg kid like me, school was not where most learning happened. Libraries mattered more. In some cases, extra curricular mattered more (speech and debate and math team, for me). Museums mattered. Films mattered. The newspaper mattered. The woods mattered. Even the kitchen mattered. School is not that interesting, but the world is fascinating. And school can be a useful way of discovering (vs pursuing) interests and playmates/partners in crime (another advantage of living in a college town during MS and HS — it was easy to find kids who loved to read and think and talk and explore). Ironic thing for me is when I had a kid of my own, I set out to find DC a more challenging school than the ones I attended. Big mistake. DC lost the free time I had and got used to a regime in which obligation, competition, triage, and stress dominated the school environment, and school became mostly where DC learned. DC excelled in HS, got into a great Uni, and continues to do well in college, but DC’s work/play distinction is much sharper than mine and, as a result, there’s less drive and less joy. If I had to do it all over again, I’d send DC to public school for HS and provide more space and time for a choose your own adventure approach to intellectual life. |