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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a Bachelors degree in nursing. I work PT as an RN.

My son is 14. He is gifted, IQ 135. He is also lazy and gets mediocre marks. When I have talks with him about getting into a good college and getting a good job, he says things like:
How much money do you make? I will make way more.
You are only rich because dad makes a lot of money.

When I talk about him reaching his potential, he says things like: 
Why didn't YOU go to medical school?
Why didn't YOU reach your potential?
Oh, wow you're a nurse, big deal.
Then he will remark that I am not gifted and he is and he is smarter than me.

This is utterly disrespectful and I'm clearly just venting. Any advice?
[/quote]

I'm a mom of four grown kids. One high schooler. Two of mine are "highly gifted", whatever that means.

My thoughts - You created this. Your son didn't turn into a little ass overnight.  You had better get him under control now or you are going to be in for a miserable four + years.

If one of my kids talked to me like that, his entire would come crashing down on him like a brick house.  He would have a matress and basic clothing in his room and that's it.  No phone, no computer, nothing but the absolute minimum. You need to ask yourself why you would tolerate disrespect from anyone, especially a child that you provide for. Also, if one of my boys had talked to me like that. My husband would have jumped to my defense.

You raised a disrespectful brat with an over-inflated sense of self-worth.  It may honestly be too late to turn this around without a lot of help.
[/quote]

Literally every line of this post is idiotic, starting with you quoting "highly gifted," which nobody said, then, even as you are making fun of something you just made up, claiming it applies to your kids.

OP, you didn't do this. He's a mouthing off teenager. Sorry you're going through it.

As for advice on how to deal with it, I think I have some perspective, because I was very similar to him at his age. I don't think he's lazy exactly, I think he's scared and nervous. He is scared and nervous because if there's one thing he's been confident of in his life, it is that he is smart. He can do less work than other kids his age and still get questions right and impress teachers. But now he has suddenly reached the age where effort starts to matter as much as natural intelligence. That's scary to him for two reasons: First, he doesn't know how to apply himself, because he never had to before. Second, and more importantly, he now realizes that there's a chance if he tries his hardest [i]he might still mess up.[/i] That would entirely challenge his world-view because it calls into question whether he is as smart as he thinks he is, and that's the one thing he knows he has going for him. So now he feels stuck: He'd rather be known as a lazy guy who could totally get great grades if he wanted to than risk being a hard working but dumb kid.

(There is a lot of good psychological literature on this, by the way. Psychologists have given kids easy tests, then told one group of parents, after seeing the test results, to praise the kids' effort and the other group to praise the kids' intelligence. They then re-administered much harder tests. The kids who'd been praised for effort handled the adversity well, and the kids who had been praised for intelligence shut down . . . or worse, tried to cheat).

So what can you do about it? It will probably take a while to completely address the issue, but I would try a couple things: (1) consistently praise effort, when he applies it; (2) frame his successes as a result of effort (e.g. "I'm proud of you because you worked hard on this" vs. "I'm proud of you because you are so smart); (3) teach him that even people who unquestionably deserve the "smart" label still worked their asses off for their achievements. You may want to see if he's interested in reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which does a good job of explaining that most famous geniuses engaged in an extreme amount of effort to get where they are. I have a number of criticisms of this book, but its great at teaching this particular point in a way that won't sound like a parent lecturing him

Of course, you should obviously shut him down when he's behaving like a brat, but some of the above might help address the problem over the longer term. Good luck, and thank you for all that you do for your patients.[/quote]

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