Reply to Stop telling kids they are "gifted."

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Any therapist who works with elementary/MS kids will tell you this is becoming really corrosive. There are a ton of kids really feeling the pressure to remain in gifted programs as they grow older [b]but who were heavily coached in preschool or early elementary[/b] and are just nice, normal kids who are having lots of anxiety issues related to this designation. At MS, sometimes before, it often takes the form of antisocial behavior. 
[/quote]

Well, there's your problem.

[b]Telling your child s/he is gifted, or not telling them, won't hinder them for lif[/b]e.  Kids have been in gifted programs for decades, and some have anxiety and some don't.  The label is not the problem, it's what the parents and child do with the label that's the problem.  [/quote]

Telling your kids they are gifted is not good for them.  It creates the mindset that they are succeeding by innate talent instead of hard work and practice. The first time they get to a difficult place in their studies, kids labeled "gifted" tend to give up and quit because they expect to be able to do it on the basis of innate talent rather than hard work.  Labeling kids "gifted" makes them academically and emotionally  fragile.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/14/science/praise-children-for-effort-not-intelligence-study-says.html

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-prime/200911/the-problem-giftedness

[/quote]

This. I cringe when people tell my son how smart he is. I want him to learn to work hard and give his best effort. I don't want him to assume that everything will come easily to him. I'm a teacher and see the effects of kids who've been told how gifted they are. A lot of times those are the kids who give very little effort as long as they get high scores on tests and are disinterested in strengthening any relatively weaker skills.[/quote]

I think this is a good part of where the studies break down.  People seem to assume that every gifted child wants to be academic.  We have this conception that if you are Andre Agassi, you somehow must love tennis.  How many kids are really interested in strengthening an academic skill?  Certainly, some are.  But if education was not mandatory or socially encouraged, how many kids would choose learn algebra?  I suspect that those same kids would not care about improving thier skills, even if they never heard the word gifted.  For some people, school is and will be a thing to be endured.

Is the gifted label responsible for every outcome?  To the partent of the high-anxiety, ESE teacher.  I am sorry that your daughter has struggled so heavily with anxiety, but from my completely lay perspective, I fail to see the connection.  It sounds like your daugther created her own anxiety, rather than having an enviromental stressor create this for her.  Perhaps I am wrong, but I can't imagine that anyone was giving her a hard time about a 98%.  And if that is the case, then chances are, your daughter was going to have this even if you had homeschooled her and never knew that she was so intelligent compared to others.  Again, perhaps I am wrong and the school/program/peers was a major driving factor, but I think it is pretty unusual, even in intense academic programs, to regard a 98 as not successful.

For my own part, I can say that the gifted label changed my life completely, but I grew up in very different circumstances than DC.  I lived in an interior state that did not particularly value education.  Most of my high school class mates went to college, but only 4/200 ish went more than an hour away.  That radius would not include any school that you have heard of, absent some random connection or perhaps a scheduling fluke of a college sports.  DCUM would uniformly gasp in horror at the lack of engagement that my parents had with my education.  For example, the day that I took the SAT, I woke up at 1 a.m. in order to drive 45 minutes to get the newspapers that I would deliver.  I then drove back home and spent a couple hours delievering papers, before driving 75 minutes away to the nearest testing site (the area is ACT-centric).  But I only did any of that because years before someone told me that I was smart and backed it up with support.  Absent the gifted program, I would probably be a well-read (in fiction only) truck driver.  At that time in my life, I really needed somebody to believe in me and convince me to expect more from myself.

I certainly understand the desire to praise effort and not talent, but even that needs to be moderated.  No amount of work on my part was going to make me a professional athlete or musician.  And while an unhealthy obession and identity as "smart" is not good, the inability to relax is no better.  If you constantly drill home that anything is achievable with work, then it isn't difficult to see a generation without empathy.  After all, if anything is achievable with work, then any failure is must be because of a lack of work.  Of course, that isn't true, but it is the kind of misperception that could sink in just like "I'm smart so I don't need to work hard." Or "I don't need to work on this math, because I am good at reading".  Will/drive/ambition is as valuable as any other positive attribute, but like all the others overemphasis leads to some twisted results. [/quote]

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