Miscellaneous articles about raising gifted children, from Scientific American

I was searching/browsing through the online archives of Scientific American while writing the previous posts, and came across some articles about raising gifted children that I thought I’d comment on, especially with respect to their relevance to my personal situation.

The article “Gifted Children: How to Bring Out Their Potential” by Christian Fischer begins:

Contrary to what many people believe, highly intelligent children are not necessarily destined for academic success. In fact, so-called gifted students may fail to do well because they are unusually smart. Ensuring that a gifted child reaches his or her potential requires an understanding of what can go wrong and how to satisfy the unusual learning requirements of extremely bright young people.

I remember that the teachers and counsellors at my gifted school warned us and our parents about this. They gave us a lot of materials on how to raise gifted children, which my parents dismissed and ignored. So I read the materials myself and implemented their suggestions, not only without my parents’ support, but in direct contravention to their wishes.

About why some children are more interested in school than others, the article says:

Children thrive or struggle in school for a host of reasons apart from IQ, according to psychologist Franz Mönks of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. These include motivation and persistence, social competence, and the support of family, educators and friends.

My parents apparently believed that I would become motivated to do well in school merely because they ordered me to do so. Fortunately, I had the support of my teachers, my friends, and their parents.

The article explains the advantages and disadvantages of acceleration and enrichment for gifted children. About enrichment as an alternative to acceleration, it says:

Thus, providing opportunities for a child to study topics outside the regular curriculum can be at least as valuable as pushing him or her through the required material faster. Gifted kids might get the stimulation they require by, say, joining a chess club, a math or debate team, or another enrichment activity that engages their intellect. Another common technique is to enable a child to embark on an independent project or experiment under the guidance of a mentor.

My parents had always punished me whenever they caught me studying ahead. In addition, they derided my extracurricular activities as “worthless”, and opposed my choice of project when I participated in the University of Toronto Mentorship Program, subsequently dismissing my entire experience with it as “worthless”.

The article links to two others. The first, “The Secret to Raising Smart Kids”, by Carol S. Dweck, describes how a mindset that overemphasises innate intelligence or talent as opposed to effort and perseverence can cause people to underachieve because they become unmotivated to work hard.

My parents neither praised me for being intelligent nor emphasised hard work. In fact, they continually derided the efforts I put into my studies as a “waste of time”, and actively tried to prevent me from going to the university library or reading scientific papers. Fortunately, my teachers and classmates’ friends always praised me for and even helped me with my efforts.

The following sentences from this article are particularly interesting to me:

Animal experiments by psychologists Martin Seligman, Steven Maier and Richard Solomon of the University of Pennsylvania had shown that after repeated failures, most animals conclude that a situation is hopeless and beyond their control. After such an experience, the researchers found, an animal often remains passive even when it can affect change — a state they called learned helplessness.

This was, I think, the state in which I found myself after I entered the Ph.D. program in computer science and switched my topic to quantum computing. I had learned through repeated experience that my parents would punish me any time I became successful at anything, and that there was nothing I could do to avoid their punishment (except not to succeed). Thus, I had an enormous amount of difficulty motivating myself to work on my research, even though I knew that while my parents could punish me after the fact, they couldn’t actually stop me from studying what I wanted to study.

In the article, the author describes the theory she developed which categorises learners into two classes, which she dubs “helpless” and “mastery-oriented”. The “helpless” learners had what she called a “fixed mindset”, and attributed failure to a lack of ability, whereas the “mastery-oriented” ones had a “growth mindset”, and attributed failure to a lack of effort. She summarises a number of studies which showed that the latter group outperformed the former over time, because of their increased willingness to correct their mistakes and try again.

The second article linked to from the first one I discussed above, “Watching Prodigies for the Dark Side”, by Marie-Noëlle Ganry-Tardy, is about gifted children who perform poorly in school. While that description does not apply to me, I found a number of observations in the article interesting.

After describing how developmental disorders such as dyslexia may cause a gifted child to get poor grades, the article notes that a child may react by withdrawing. It then explains why punishment is so counterproductive.

As a defense, the child gradually loses interest in schoolwork and begins to isolate himself from social interaction. Punishment may only make matters worse. With their well-developed sense of right and wrong, prodigies consider punishment undeserved, and they may withdraw further.

The claim that “prodigies consider punishment undeserved” is very interesting to me. I can’t imagine any child thinking that his or her punishment is deserved — and I went to Catholic elementary and high schools! I honestly cannot recall a single instance in my life when my parents punished me and I thought afterwards that it was justified. I don’t believe that this is due to a selective memory either, because if there had ever been an instance when I thought that they were right, it would have been so shocking to me that it would surely have been etched indelibly into my mind.

The following paragraph from the same article perfectly describes a lot of the gifted children of Chinese descent whom I knew:

Child prodigies may also distort their own personalities to the point where they become unrecognizable. Psychiatrists call this the development of a false self. This problem may occur because these extraordinarily sensitive young people often feel deeply the subtle reactions of family members. As a result, they may overinterpret even the slightest sign of dissatisfaction. To please their parents, they deny their own needs and behave in a way they think matches their parents’ expectations. They all but disappear behind a mask of compliance…

Traditional Chinese parents are anything but “subtle” when it comes to expressing their disapproval. And indeed, many of the Chinese kids I knew — and not just the gifted ones — never expressed their own personalities. The paragraph continues:

To prevent this development of a false self, parents should offer a highly gifted child several varied activities and accept without judgment whatever the child chooses to pursue. It is important to encourage a child’s special interests so that she does not lose motivation or a willingness to work.

My parents could never “accept without judgment” anything that I did — they always dismissed my interests with terms such as “frivolous” and “nonsense”.

While browsing the Scientific American web site, I also came across a recent (May 19, 2009) podcast about U.S. President Obama’s message to graduating students at Arizona State University. He was quoted as saying:

“We too often let the external, the material things, serve as indicators that we’re doing well, even though something inside us tells us that we’re not doing our best…”

The podcast notes that a new study about to be published in the Journal of Research in Personality confirms that the achievement of material objectives has no influence on a person’s happiness:

Based on a survey of 147 alumni from two universities, achieving ones’ goals leads to a great deal of satisfaction. But there’s a caveat: it depends on the nature of those goals. The survey was administered twice, once a year after graduation and then 12 months later.

Their research confirmed that achieving material and image-related goals has zero impact on happiness, and can actually lead to guilt, anger and physical symptoms like headaches and stomachaches. But graduates who focused on, and achieved, a level of personal growth, close relationships, community involvement and physical health rated themselves as happier, with fewer physical problems.

My parents were always concerned that I should have a “prestigious” degree, that I should have higher grades than anyone else, and similar nonsense. On the contrary, they always attacked my social interactions and my involvement in the broader university community as a “waste of time”. And in fact, I felt very guilty about doing so well in the Engineering Science program because I had never wanted to enter the program in the first place.

The podcast continues Obama’s quote as follows:

… that in fact the elevation of appearance over substance, of celebrity over character, of short-term gain over lasting achievement is precisely what your generation needs to help end.

I’m talking about an approach to life — a quality of mind and a quality of heart; a willingness to follow your passions, regardless of whether they lead to fortune and fame; a lack of regard for all the traditional markers of status and prestige — and a commitment instead to doing what’s meaningful to you, what helps others, what makes a difference in this world.

Listen to the podcast here.

In the previous post, I described how my father suddenly suggested that I should write an article for Scientific American. One of the reasons that I found this so strange is that I am certain he had never read the magazine in his life.

– davinci