Image Credit: © Suzette – www.suzette.nu | found here | CC by 2.0
Jessica is with us today discussing, once again, how do we really give our kids the kind of childhood we want for them?
I really love what she has to say, it reminds me of a great chapter from one of my favorite books, Nuture Shock: New Thinking About Children.
Like nearly every parenting issue, there’s a lot of gray area here and not a whole lot of black and white- I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Here’s Jessica with her story…
Last year, at the beginning of second grade, my son was flagged for his school’s gifted program.
At the parent-teacher conference, his beaming teacher showed us his test scores and other academic markers. He was leaps and bounds ahead of his classmates, showing comprehension several grades ahead. She told us he was exceptional, and that she wanted to have him tested right away.
I was sold. Immediately. My husband, not so much.
When we got home, he got right to the point. He wasn’t interested in anything that might stress out our (then) seven year old. He wanted him to just be a kid. And he didn’t want him being told – directly or otherwise – that he was smarter or better than his classmates.
At the time, I thought he was overreacting. I had been in honors and advanced placement classes myself, and I figured this would just be a curriculum that would challenge and interest our son.
But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered. I know he’s a smart kid. He’s a math whiz, which impresses journalism-major me (and all that particular degree implies), but he’s a reader too. He has a great vocabulary, and he’s a really impressive speller. He asks thoughtful questions that simultaneously impress me and stumps me, and half the time we have to jump online to find the answer.
But here’s the thing – I’ve never had the sense that he was bored at school. He’s never had behavior issues, and he has loads of friends. So what sort of “challenge” did I think he needed?
Right around that time, I read about a study involving fifth graders and a grade-level performance test. One group was praised for being smart.
The other group was praised for working hard. Both groups were given an eight-grade IQ test, and get this: kids in the “hardworking” group struggled to work through more problems than kids in the group labelled “smart”, who were more inclined to just give up.
Here’s the takeaway from that: When a kid who’s been constantly told he’s smart struggles to learn something, he’s more likely to quit. He just assumes it’s beyond his understanding. But the kid who’s been told he does well because he works hard? He’ll keep trying to figure things out.
That’s a skill that’s going to come in handy.
Believe me when I say I stopped praising our son for being such a smartypants and started commending him instead for his effort, which, incidentally, was something his smartypants daddy already did.
Long story short, our son bombed the entrance exam, his dad happily recycled the letter telling us so, his teacher adamantly encouraged us to appeal the decision – “I don’t know what happened, but there has to be an error somewhere. I see it in him.” – and, well, we didn’t.
It took some research on my part before I could kick the idea that we were missing an “opportunity.” But I kept coming back to one thought.
When we label certain kids as “gifted,” we’re saying the rest of them are not. And I get it, the term implies the way one group learns and even the way their brains are wired. I understood that, but I wasn’t sure if my son would.
Instead of focusing on the labels, I wanted him to learn how to work hard for something. And the good news is, he doesn’t need to be in a special program for that.
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