Status Updates From Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma ...

Being gifted is just luck: to be raised in the right environment that balances one’s nature and need for nurture.
We must protect the fundamental experience of childhood and encourage the pursuit of knowledge just for the sake of it.

Competing: aids a child’s mental and emotional development, as well as promotes intellectuality? Or does it plague a child’s young mind?

The clash of standard tests

Is childhood becoming a business?

Babies are the future of marketing.

It definitely lingers too long. Needs some sharp editing (ala a Malcolm Gladwell book), but interesting in a lot of places.

In addition to expanding our definition of giftedness, I think it's important that we also become less frenzied about trying to "make" our kids gifted, even with giftedness defined more broadly. Adults need to refrain from urging and impelling and managing children's lives so that kids don't have the chance to develop their own fascinations and find their own capabilities.

When we use the "gifted" appellation we tend to mean skills in math, reading comprehension, and music, in particular, but these are only some of the skills that can lead to success in adulthood. Paradoxically, by obliging children to be talented in a certain fashion, we fail to appreciate how talented they may be in other ways.

We are currently defining giftedness much too narrowly. By emphasizing the electric wow of children's precocious abilities, and by placing so much stress on their being "special" and expert in certain domains early, we have overlooked a set of additional abilities that are highly valuable in leading complete lives.

As for the experts who argue against the whole notion of giftedness, they have a good point. However, I think the biggest problem in this discussion is not the practice of offering special classes to strong learners, but rather is in the way we reflexively define giftedness in limited terms, and the unpleasant associations of snobbery or elitism that can come with that label.

Conveying to children that they are so "special" and putting them on public display can lead them to feel that any talent they have is bigger than they are and that, in a sense, they are a mere employee of their talent, that they work for the gift and must manage their endowment ... they may well end up feeling that they have little direction and perhaps their lives have little meaning.

One of the things that my research clarified for me was that there are actually very few deeply "gifted" kids with transcendent cognitive or artistic abilities; therefore kids are being incorrectly labeled as exceptionally gifted. The peril is that some children who have been led to believe they are highly gifted will suffer, like Icarus, in their later lives.