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