Fjóla’s Reviews > Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child > Status Update

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.

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.

We should stop wanting children to have IQs over 150 and testing them at such young ages, and, most important, resist the desire for children to demonstrate abilities ahead of their age group. Learning to read faster, to memorize words earlier, or to play the piano with facility at an early age are not Rosetta stones for accomplished adult life.

Teaching kids to read in infancy [ ... ] doesn't, it turns out, mean that children's "gifts" will ultimately be enhanced. I found this out in my encounters with adults who as children were trained as musicians or learned math early or competed in chess and were ultimately disappointed in adulthood and resentful of their early training.

The irony is that giving gifted kids -- whether poor or middle class or wealthy -- enriched education can be understood as both a fundamentally meritocratic practice and as an elitist one, all at the same time.

... the resentment of the gifted and of gifted education can be more nefarious than a general distaste for those who think of themselves as special. Some of it can be chalked up to anti-intellectualism. Parents of gifted children may fawn over them, and documentaries and films may represent an enchantment with "genius kids". But ultimately, America dances with the cool kids rather than the smart ones ...

Busy work that simply reiterates rather than advances students' knowledge can make gifted students very oppositional -- what one gifted education expert describes as "real pills in the classroom."