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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm looking to hear from parents that have kids where one is clearly amazing at everything: school, sports, music, friends, etc. and have a child that is more "normal" (ok at school, ok with everything else).

Or if you were the child with the amazing sibling, what did your parents do right in this situation?

How do you parent?  When one does really well, I find a compliment for the other one.  But it's getting clear that one will always do much better.

[/quote]

Oh, I have this--I HAD this--and we've managed to work our way out of it so I think this might be helpful:

I've got two DDs, two years apart.  The younger one is higher-performing.  At pretty much everything.  Faster runner, better athlete all around, great at art, both get good grades but younger doesn't have to study.  Also younger one has tremendous willpower and drive, so whenever both kids learn something, she's driven harder to learn it, and also to outdo her older sister.

So I've learned from my mistakes, and I'll give you one clean example to illustrate a lot.

For a while I had them both taking guitar lessons.  DD2 would practice on her own, and for longer, so soon she was far ahead of DD1.  DD1 became demoralized and only did the minimum.

They are not taking guitar any more. I'm done with signing them up for anything that conveniently overlaps geographically or is together in time, and taking the hard way, which is to put them in separate activities.

The key for me on how to separate them did NOT come from me thinking about what DD1 is good at and enjoys.  This is because BUT FOR the fact that she's got uber-sister showing her up, the truth is she's really good at a lot of things.

Here is what I did.  DD2 is a lot like her father.  I thought, what does my DH not do well?  Ha, he's a horrible singer.  So I paid attention to my DDs and noticed…DD2 singing is really not as naturally good as DD1.

So I put DD1 in singing lessons.  DD2 is more physical so she went into dance.

There's more to this story, but you get the idea. (And you don't need your DH to figure this out…just look at if there is anything that the normal kid might do better that the uber-kid, and make it his/her specialty.  And if there is nothing, then put the normal into something anyways, because so many things these days rely on practice, not innate talent)[/quote]

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