Giftedness and Underachievement: A Personal Journey

There's a popular misconception that if your kids are gifted, then they are always gifted at everything and that means that they're always high achievers. B1 has certainly put lie to this myth over the last few weeks. Well, over the last year, really.

B1 tested in the highly gifted range a few years ago. This is a child who began walking at 8 months, talking at 7 1/2 months, reading at 2 years and writing at 3 years.

Last year he had a less-than-ideal teacher who pigeon-holed him into a B-average student "if he worked hard". I don't know if she ever vocalised that to him, but she did say it to me and it took all my self-control to stop from leaping across the table and grabbing at her throat.

Regardless of whether she actually said the words to him or not, B1's a sensitive boy and emotionally, he got the message loud and clear. He took on board her feelings about him and I'm pretty sure he began to believe it. This despite all the messages of self-assurance, positive energy and great self-esteem that LomL and I were instilling in him (why are we always so ready to believe the worst about ourselves and so reluctant to believe the best?).

At the end of last year, he'd managed to scrape his way through the year, confirming to his teacher that she had him pegged just right. He was traumatised by her, and frankly so was I. If I was terrified by this ghastly woman based on the relatively few encounters I had with her, it's an absolute miracle that B1 managed to come out of that class as well as he did. How he didn't turn into a neurotic, jibbering puddle, I'll never know.

This year started well though. B1 landed a male teacher (the third one in his primary school life) and was thrilled. So was I. His teacher is the ex-sports master and is a positive, up-beat man who has an innate talent for nurturing self-esteem in young boys.

Over the last few weeks, however, B1's managed to fail both a maths test and a reading comprehension test (I'm still trying to comprehend how he managed that!) and come home with notes in his school diary about disruptive talking in class and a detention. Initially this completely baffled us. Hadn't he had time over the holidays to recover from last-year's teacher? Hadn't I managed to get his sparkling intellect back on track over the busy Christmas holidays? Didn't he have a wonderful, positive male teacher whom he admired this year? Where was this failure coming from?

After going through the initial stages (panic - understanding - sympathy - empathy) I finally arrived at the fifth stage (anger). After trapping B1 in the car on the ride home from school, I metaphorically shone the spotlight in his face and extracted the root cause of this failure. In a tumble of words and emotion it all came out. He had found himself a friendship cohort - a group of mates. These boys were all a little older than him (he's the youngest in his class having been accelerated early on in his education) and have parents who allow greater access to electronic media unsupervised than we do. B1, being the sensitive lad that he is, has always felt a little out of place when they talk about accessing You Tube unsupervised, or playing games like Halo (series) or Spore on their XBox.

It's hard to look cool in this crowd when your parents don't allow you free access to You Tube, don't own an XBox (the Wii is the closest we've got), don't allow you to play violent computer or electronic games and have a school-night TV ban. To compound his misery, B1 was also the only gifted kid in this group.

You can guess what's coming next. Yep. He's been dumbing himself down to camouflage how smart and capable he is in order to fit in with the other kids.

I was devastated when he told me. I've never intervened in his choice of friends. I've never told him who he should or shouldn't associate with, preferring to lead by example. Both LomL and I surround ourselves with people who are smart, funny, supportive and around whom we never feel we have to hide who we are. We have always been confident in our choice of friends and have worn our differences with pride - they are, after all, part of what makes us who we are. So when B1 told me he had been talking in class and not doing as well as he could so his friends would continue to like him, I felt like I had personally failed in parenting him well.

As a slight overachiever, I find it hard not to define myself by what I do; my job. As a stay-at-home mother, I have, over the years, developed what could be considered OCD when it comes to cleaning and am utterly obsessed with being a good parent. Parenting is my primary job, it's something I take great pride in and obtain immense joy from. So when my child tells me his self-esteem is so low that he feels he has to modify who he is in order to have friends, I take it as a personal failing. I have failed to instil a healthy sense of self and pride in him.

B1 is mortified at how disappointed LomL and I are that he's chosen to value himself less than he values acceptance by his friends. Since this dumbing down has been going on for some time, he's now missed important steps in his learning process and we're having to go back to basics. Luckily, he's gifted. Which means he's learning at an astonishing pace, so there's great hope that he'll be back where he should be very soon.

What I can't guarantee is that B1 will value himself more. What I can't guarantee is that this won't happen again in his life. What I can't guarantee is that he will finally see what his brother, his parents and the rest of his family and his best friend see - that he's an amazing, bright, funny, exciting, adventurous, brave, sporty, reliable, surprising, loquacious, eloquent, polite, well-mannered, handsome young man. I hope with all my heart that one day (soon) he will see, at least some of, what we see.

Until then, I continue to support him, love him, pick him up when he's down, dust him off when he's fallen and send him out into the wide world with my fingers crossed, my heart in my mouth and with an encouraging look on my face.

For more...Myth and Truth about Gifted Kids

Family Outings and Other Exhausting Events

This weekend has been one of many adventures. We started on Friday night (after swimming lessons of course) with a 45km trip to watch a film festival. "Madness!" I hear you shout. Indeed it would seem so. You must remember, however, that we live in the bucolic glory of the Perth hills, which entails an accompanying 30km trip to the city. We're pretty used to car trips that take a minimum of 20 minutes and are grateful for the reasonable speed limits that allow us to cover large distances in a relatively short time.

So Friday night began with the mad dash between swimming lessons and the film festival (here's the link if you're interested http://www.fti.asn.au/learn/mmr/), ensuring that children had first been bathed, were appropriately dressed for the chill that would descend and that we had food for a picnic dinner. Most normal parents would have dropped into the nearest fast food outlet on the way and picked up some fat-soaked, sugar-laden salt-lick to be washed down with tooth-decaying fizzy drink. However, I had watched Jamie Oliver's TED Wish recently (and here's the link for that http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html) and successfully managed to imbue myself with even more guilt than I thought possible. So vegetable pilau and tandoori chicken were our picnic fare. Besides, I figured my children should be subjected to the same kind of embarrassment that I was at that age. Turning up to picnics at Perth's outdoor arenas with tiffins filled with chapatis, curries or fried rice in the 1970s and 80s was tantamount to waving a banner and wearing large neon signs on our heads marking us clearly as the immigrants. As if the brown skins, saris and oily hair wasn't enough!

So having inflicted my childhood nightmares on my children, who remain oblivious to the cringe-worthiness of it all (and are actually quite proud of their difference!) we settled into the film show. All in all, it was great fun. There were some wonderful first attempts at film-making and the promise of another career and a different way of viewing the world was cause for real optimism.


Saturday night was another adventure. This time, with friends and their families. A fabulous evening of Salsa (dancing and music) at a local winery was precisely what we all needed. Each of the three mothers there had had a particularly awful week and had managed to argue with their husbands at some point in that time. Letting our hair down and kicking our heels up went a long way towards mending some of those buckling bridges. I haven't danced so much or with such abandon for many years. It was definitely enough to shock B1 and B2 out of their complacency that their parents didn't do "fun" things. I'm not sure they've seen me and the Love of my Life (LomL) dance together...ever! I do believe that it's always good to insert a moment of doubt into your children's lives. Just as they think they've got you pegged, go do something to surprise or even shock them. They'll gain new appreciation for you. And it's good for your soul too.

After two evenings like this, one would imagine that we'd done our dash for the weekend and were ready for a bit of R and R on Sunday. Did I mention that I've long suspected that LomL has ADD? So, far from resting on the day of rest, we hauled ourselves and my mother 130km north to the town of New Norcia. The drive out to New Norcia is through undulating land which is green and lush in Winter and Spring. It's very like driving in Tasmania, and how I imagine the English countryside to look. However, it's Summer in Perth. And a blazing hot Summer at that. The land is dry, parched, dusty and brown. It brings to mind Dorothea MacKellar's anthem, "I love a sunburnt country", in all its glory. This is the "never never" of International imaginings. For most Australians, the country we drove through is rural, reasonably populated and not that far from the city, but it never ceases to amaze me how these rural settings are considered remote by international visitors. Heaven knows what they'd make of places like Karratha, or Roebourne or Leinster! The tedium of our drive out to New Norcia was broken only by the excitement of passing the air-force base and the sight of an Emu. And the return trip was highlighted by a stop in traffic for a small bushfire beside the road.

The town itself holds many treasures. Not least of which is the thought of the austere gentlemen, the Benedictine monks, who set up life in what would seem to be the middle of nowhere at a time when it would have been even more remote from city life than it currently is. We were there on a day when the temperature hit 33C and it made me wonder how those gentlemen managed their daily lives and industry in those sweltering conditions. I marvel at the ingenuity and wherewithal of anyone who could successfully bake bread, mill flour, make wines, do laundry or turn wood in corrugated iron sheds in unmitigated heat.

I know the indigenous population has mixed (and very strong) feelings about the Benedictines and their influence in the area. And I don't marvel any less at the achievements of the extraordinary young indigenous people who worked the machinery, ironed, laundered and milled flour. I understand that these young people were separated from their families, languages and religions and that with the great advantage of hindsight, this was a phenomenal wrong enacted upon them. I don't doubt that we now live in greater privilege and in more enlightened times. However, walking around this part-town-part-museum, pickled for posterity, I was still astounded at how much industry was achieved in such exceptional adversity. There are lessons to be learned here. If nothing else, then the value of industry through adversity is one worth preserving. To quote my old school motto, per ardua ad alta... through work to the pinnacle.

Clothing Camouflage

Image via Wikipedia

This is an old post from another blog site of mine. Apologies if you've already read it, but it still holds currency for me.

Today was one of those days... you know the ones, when you just can't make up your mind whether you feel like a yummy mummy or a frumpy lumpy? The compromise is terrific underwear (that makes you look like a jelly doughnut in a rubber band, but feel like Jessica Alba pole dancing all day) covered up by jeans and a tracksuit top. That way you know that you're so insecure about your looks that you're willing to take the requisite 3 hours and 4 bottles of Vaseline to get into the underwear, while the world thinks you're so comfortable with yourself that you're not bothered with how others judge your appearance.

It's urban camouflage at its paranoid best. The days of "putting on a face" while anaesthetising the boredom with gin and Valium have given way to the clothes neuroses that now dog us thirty- or forty-something mothers. That fine balance of presenting our best face to the world but not getting strap marks from a too-tight bra or blisters from too-tight Manolos is our perpetual Everest.

We're inundated with style tips, knowing our body shapes and dressing for them. We're berated by upwardly-mobile, pretentious, stick-insect women or, better yet, gay men for wearing the wrong clothes for our fruit-shaped bodies. Any attempt to remonstrate against this barrage of rampant consumerism is met either with dog-eyed pity and a pat on the head or with utter derision and a booking on the next round of The Biggest Loser.

There's no use in buying out of the fashion stakes either, it'll come back to bite you eventually. The one day you slink down to school in your unwashed trackpants and the t-shirt that was doing an impersonation of a dustball under the bed, attempting to throw the children out of the car at the kiss-and-drop before anyone sees you, will be the one day when the President of the Ladies Auxiliary button-holes you for a contribution of petit fours for the winter sports carnival while sneaking furtive glances at various high points of your attire. You know she now doubts your ability to whip up a packet muffin, let alone the Nigella-like delicacies you've been boasting of for the last week and a half. In desperation you make a lame endeavour to pull back your hair that has managed till now to look suspiciously like you're channelling Albert Einstein, and smooth over any part of your clothing you can reach without fear of discovering a new strain of flesh-eating bacteria. Suddenly the bravado with which you left home (I'm taking children to school, not strutting down a catwalk) completely deserts you as you mumble excuses, make wild promises about producing 300 miniture opera tortes by next week and screech out of the carpark narrowly missing the Headmaster and 6 Kindergarteners as they scuttle across the pedestrian crossing.

You make it out of there alive, reputation in tatters and swearing never to be caught out again... and knowing you've just been sucked back into the vortex of clothing camouflage.

The Great LEGO Wars and other domestic battles

In my house there is a great war raging. One that inevitably begins each morning with much shouting on my part and much negotiating on the part of B2 with the occasional intervention of B1. One that invariably ends each night with the questions "Amma, what have you done with my...[insert appropriate LEGO creation]? I left it right here this morning. Where have you tidied it up to?".

I'll admit that I do have periodic pangs of guilt that I'm stifling my children's creative instincts, however that quickly diminishes as yet another minute piece of LEGO becomes embedded in my foot while merely walking down the hallway. I've learned now to spot tiny grey LEGO pieces against the grey carpet while vacuum cleaning (to the amazement of both the children, who don't see them even when they're pointed out). My leaping and dodging skills have improved beyond measure and I defy anyone to say they have tougher soles on their feet than I. I'll concede that the Great LEGO Wars have improved my athleticism and visual acuity. What I won't concede, is that it is absolutely necessary to spread the plethora of LEGO items (built and unbuilt) to every room in the house.

A détente seems a long way off right now.

A moment in lateral thinking

Image via Wikipedia

On the way to school today Boy 2 and I were chatting about the "wanted poster" that he had been required to do for homework the previous night. It was a wanted poster for the Iron Man. No not the cartoon character in the red and yellow metallic suit, the one more akin to the robot that lands on Earth from outer space in "The Iron Giant".

B2 had drafted a picture on his poster complete with rivets on the head and shoulder plates and had wanted to glue silver paper onto it to make it look more robot-like. We worked on it together and came up with a fabulous, realistic poster.

Unfortunately we had omitted to erase the pencil marks of the draft before we started. But it wasn't a complete loss. We decided to wait until the morning when the glue would have dried and to erase the pencil marks then.

Our morning was the usual round of chaos and apart from reminding B2 that the poster was there and he shouldn't forget it for school, I completely forgot about it.  It was only after we had arrived at school that it occurred to me we hadn't actually erased the original pencil marks. But all was not lost...

"You'll have to erase those pencil marks when we get into the classroom" I informed B2 with confidence.

"Oh, I've already tried that this morning and the glue had dried over the top of them, so I couldn't" he replied with great casualness.

"Oh no! What are we going to do?" I asked, genuinely panicked that I ruined his beautiful work.

"Don't worry. I just drew some extra lines and made it into another crane that reaches over the top of his head. See?" he piped up gleefully, showing me his poster.

I was truly impressed at his quick and lateral thinking. Not bad for an 8yo!

Shows that I have much to learn from my children.

Reminiscing

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I went to dinner at a family friend's house today. These are people I've known almost all my life and despite changes in our relationship statuses, the birth of children and other changing circumstances, these are people I continue to love deeply. Stepping into the house was like a surreal trip down the rabbit hole; a heady and confusing mix of my youth colliding headlong with my now. Having my children with me reminded me inexorably of the present, but in many ways the evening was like so many I had spent there over the years.

In so many ways I felt like a child still, comforted by the consistency of the house, the food, the people. Perhaps it's an illusion, but it seemed to me that these wonderful people, though older, were still essentially the same as they had always been. They were still the loving, comforting, welcoming people I had always known and loved. And now they were generous enough to extend that warmth to my own family - not the family they had always known, but the one I have created with my husband. How blessed I feel to have them in my life.

I know this is a bit of a departure from my usual thought stream, but it's on my mind at the moment. As I get older, I discover that I have less patience for those who do not add value to my life or the lives of my family. I'm also finding that I truly treasure and cherish those who do make life such a joy. So to them, I say "thank you".

Romulus, My Father

Cover of Romulus, My Father

I just watched "Romulus, my Father" with its exquisite storyline and stellar performances from all the cast. What an extraordinary film; beautifully crafted, superbly acted and artfully directed! It's the kind of film that makes me want to find the book and read it. Here, check it out... http://www.romulusmyfather.com.au/index.html.

The movie brought into stark relief the erratic, variable relationships each parent has with his/her children. It made me marvel at how children, more often than not, survive the destructive relationships and thrive in the loving ones. It also reminded me that children are intrinsically optimistic. Despite exceptionally difficult, tragic or abusive relationships with parents, children so often still seem to be able to find love, connection and moments of great joy. I'm astounded that as adults, they are able to look back and find treasured memories of their childhoods - childhoods that those of us with privileged lives are deeply saddened by.

A reminder that truly, "hope springs eternal in the human breast" (thank you Mr Pope!).