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

Related posts:

1. Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children
2. Alice Miller and Children of Trauma
3. Gifted program in Mississauga

I had actually been reading the Bible in English since my arrival in Canada. My grandparents were given a copy when they were sworn in as citizens. Since they couldn’t read it, they said I could have it, and I used to read it every day. In grade five, the Gideons came to our public school — in fact, into our classroom with the teacher’s permission — and gave each of the students a pocket edition of the New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs, with a red leathery cover. I used to carry it everywhere and read it whenever I had the chance. Nowadays that sort of blatant proselytism of immigrants and children would probably not be allowed inside a public institution. But I don’t think that I was ever harmed by it — in fact, quite the opposite. By studying the Bibles, I not only learned about Protestantism and other sects of Christianity, but also vastly improved my vocabulary, became familiar with archaic and other literary forms of English, and began to think about problems of translation between languages. So I don’t think the Bible should be kept out of public classrooms, as some people do — it is one of the most important documents in Western civilisation, regardless of one’s beliefs about it, and one can learn a lot from it.

Since I was at a Catholic school, I tried to memorise the Vulgate in Latin and read the New Testament in Greek, but I wasn’t successful. Nevertheless, my exposure to these classical languages would prove very useful later in high school science. Also, I developed the ability to memorise lengthy texts in languages I didn’t completely understand, which would become very useful later as well. After I devoured the books on Roman history and Catholicism, I expanded my interests to history and religion in general. I spent a lot of time visiting libraries and bookstores. In fact, I spent most of my time on extracurricular activities but very little on schoolwork, but I did really well because I was already so far ahead, and I was continuing to study ahead. My parents hadn’t yet caught on to the fact that I wasn’t “studying” according to their definition of studying, but my academic freedom would soon come to an end.

At the end of each school term, there would be a parent-teacher meeting where the parents would come in and discuss their child’s grades and whatnot with their teachers. When I was in Whitby, I would serve as my grandparents’ translator because they didn’t speak English. So I knew what sorts of things were being said about me: “tell David that it’s great that he’s reading all these books, encourage him to explore this-and-that, etc.” They also gave us pamphlets on how to raise gifted children, which I read because my grandparents couldn’t. But when my parents returned from the parent-teacher meetings, they would say things such as “Your teachers say that you’re always distracted by things other than your schoolwork. Stop running around doing all these extracurricular activities.” I am certain that that’s not what they said — but it’s what my parents heard. They always turned a positive into a negative.

When my parents arrived in Canada, my brother and I were at the top of almost every subject — so we must have been doing something right. There were other students who were also ahead in math, but they weren’t very good at art, or they were excellent writers but didn’t know about history, or whatever. But we were good at almost everything, and we got that way by doing all the things my parents didn’t want us to do. As the saying goes: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But my parents insisted on interfering with everything.

We had to hide our comic book collection, because if my father saw it he would scold us for wasting our time and money — but we were doing so well in art class because we were inspired by comic books! So we were allowed to read a textbook on art if it was assigned by the school for a class, but we were discouraged from looking at or producing actual art. And whenever my father saw me on the computer, doing something he didn’t understand, he would tell me to “stop playing games”, even though what I was actually doing was learning about programming, operating systems, and so on. I was in elementary school at the time, and most of my peers would even not learn about these things until university. So my father basically prevented me from getting even further ahead than I already was.

On the other hand, he had some books on computer science from when he went to university or from work, and he would allow me to read those. But they were limited to certain subjects only, basically: programming, databases, and graphics. (He also had some manuals on things like word processors and operating systems, but they only told you how to use them, not how to build them.) Outside of that, my father discouraged me from reading. For example, I couldn’t read books on game theory at home because he thought they were about computer games, which of course were “a waste of time”. But what really angered my parents were the extracurricular books on subjects which they didn’t understand, which my teachers had encouraged me to read because I was ahead of the class.

One of the most common things that you hear everywhere about raising children is “encourage your children to read”. But my parents were just the opposite. They continually discouraged me from reading. Whenever my father saw me with a book, he would ask, “Is that for schoolwork?” Even the asking of the question bothered me. What was wrong with reading books which were not on the school curriculum? The teachers in the gifted program had specifically advised parents to encourage their children to read outside of school! If I answered “yes”, he would leave me alone. But most of the time I would answer “no”, because I had a distaste for textbooks assigned by the school. In the gifted program, even the teachers often ignored the official curricular texts. I would always find interesting books on my own, and bring them in to discuss with my teachers — I found that I learned a lot more that way. But my father would say, “Stop reading and go to your room and study!” Now, in Chinese, the verb “to study” literally consists of the characters for “to read” and “book” — I always found it ironically amusing that he would tell me to stop reading, followed by an order to go to my room and read.

So all the time, my parents were going against what the literature on parenting and gifted children said to do. They received advice and literature on gifted children from my teachers, but they ignored the advice, and I am certain they never read the literature, which said to encourage reading, pay attention to and praise your child’s interests, look for unconventional ways to stimulate and challenge them, etc. These are common sense things that apply not only to gifted children, but I think really to all children. I think the only reason they wanted us in the gifted program was so they could brag about it to our relatives.

I continued to read despite my parents’ discouragement. Whenever they saw me reading, they would try to get me to stop, but I ignored them. My father would raise his voice, and sometimes he would shove me, but I would just leave and go read somewhere else. Both of them would disparage my interests — there are some Cantonese expressions, which don’t really translate into English, but which basically mean “frivolous”, “nonsensical”, “worthless”, “impractical”, and so on. They would nag at me using these expressions: “You’re always reading nonsense”, “Stop wasting time reading about worthless things,” etc.

But the most annoying thing wasn’t that they kept disrupting my studies — it was the fact that they took credit for everything I did while doing so. They would scream and yell at me at home for doing whatever, and then when a teacher or another parent mentioned how great it was that I was doing that exact thing, they would take credit for it, without the slightest trace of a recognition of the incongruity. They were always praising themselves for what excellent parents they were and criticising everyone else’s parenting.

I am very fortunate that I always had excellent teachers. My teacher in grade six, Mr. Watters, taught the class what I now consider to be the most important subject I have ever studied: logical reasoning and the formal and informal fallacies. I was dimly aware of certain patterns of erroneous reasoning that I had encountered over and over (especially in the religious literature I had read). And now I had names for them! To determine the truth of anything, it is necessary to understand and apply logical reasoning correctly and properly. So this was a tremendous boost to my ability to understand a lot of other things. I think this topic should be introduced into the regular school curriculum, because there really is a lot of hucksterism in politics and religion and generally just out there in society, and logic is a really effective defense against being fooled. Another amazing thing that Mr. Watters did was to allow me to do my math homework in hexadecimal. I mean, how cool is that?

There was a shelf in one of the classrooms with books that we could just pick up and read. I was introduced to quantum mechanics at around this time, by a book that was there called “In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat”. From that I learned a lot of the names of big physicists, and went to the library and looked them up, and so on. So I read a lot of physics books, and I learned a lot of things that would later show up in high school. Before this I had wanted to be a mathematician, because I was good at mathematics, but in those years I became more and more interested in both computer science and physics. And I became especially interested in Richard Feynman, because he was a physicist who also directed his attention to computation, and because his books were fun to read. He really impressed on me that the life of a scientist can be very fun and exciting. My parents’ attitude had always been that “fun” and “work” are two separate things.

I thought a great deal at the time about what made a great scientist. I realized that the scientists whom I admired the most were those who dedicated their time and energy towards the betterment of society. All were people who not only made important contributions to their fields, but also did other notable things. Some made science accessible to the public, such as Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman. Others shaped important historical events, such as Alan Turing, and of course numerous scientists during World War II and the Cold War. I said to myself, “Well, there’s obviously no such thing as ‘the number 1 scientist in the world’ — but being a number 1 scientist means promoting science and using science to improve the world.” So by the time I began high school, that was what I had already decided to do.

So near the end of elementary school, I asked myself the question: “what are going to be the main defining geopolitical issues of my generation by the time I became an adult?” I considered overpopulation and climate change and other big issues that were often discussed in the news. But I wanted to find an issue that I could contribute to as a part of my continuing studies into computer science and physics, and one which other people had not yet started paying attention to but would become very important in the future. This was in the late 1980s and early 1990s: the USSR was about to collapse and the Internet was just getting popular.

I realized that the one topic which tied together almost all of my interests was the resurgence of religion in international politics. This may seem completely outlandish, but it made a lot of sense to me. In the United States, Christianity was becoming more intertwined with government — this process had been accelerating since after World War II, when “godless Communism” became the primary ideological enemy. Fundamentalist Christians were trying to inject creationism into science class. Perhaps biologists are best equipped to refute many of their erroneous arguments, but computer science also deals with complex, evolving, and self-replicating systems, and I could see the errors in the creationists’ claims very clearly.

But I thought that it would be the encounter between the West and the re-awakening Muslim world that would have the most impact in the international arena at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I had studied the Crusades, and knew that the conflict between Christianity and Islam was not resolved and was only dormant, and thought that Islam would soon re-assert itself on the international stage. The reasons are too complex to go into here; and besides, these things are now common knowledge. But very briefly: many non-Arab Muslim-majority countries had undergone a process of Islamisation in the 1970s, a decade with two oil crises and which ended with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The 1980s saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq War, the first of which precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union and the second of which led to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, both in the early 1990s. The Internet was also becoming popular at this time. Through it and other mass media technologies — you don’t have to be able to read to listen to the radio or a cassette, or watch a videotape — Western (and in particular, American) culture penetrated into formerly isolated Muslim societies, some segments of which held what are essentially medieval views of the world. And what they saw wasn’t necessarily the best parts of Western culture either!

All of this was very interesting to me. The West took hundreds of years to evolve into societies with certain ideas of individual rights, freedoms, and liberties — with a considerable amount of blood spilled in the process. Concepts such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion (and perhaps more importantly, freedom from religion) developed alongside communications technologies which made the wide dissemination of heretical ideas possible. The Industrial Revolution and the mechanisation of manual labour meant that men moved from farmland into cities, women joined men in the workplace, children could enjoy childhoods relatively free to engage in their own pursuits, and so on. Many predominantly Muslim countries absorbed all of these modern technologies and immediately had to deal with their social consequences, without having gone through all the intermediary stages that Western societies had gone through. And of course the traditional authorities, the religious leaders and so on, didn’t like this and had to contain it. But they couldn’t shut out the technologies, and so what they did instead was to produce their own cassettes and videotapes, put up their own websites, and so on, promoting their views about the world. They had to pro-actively attack Western ideas and Western values, because the best defense is a good offense. So what you had, basically, were men with medieval ideas about the world armed with modern communications technology (and modern weaponry), who weren’t too thrilled about the West.

I realised that information and communication were going to be very important to this encounter between the West and the Muslim world. In the latter were these societies that were closed to the outside world before, where their religious leaders could tell their followers, “this-and-that group of people aren’t true Muslims”, “all non-Muslims are infidels and are our enemies”, etc. And they had a captive audience, because the people didn’t have access to any other information. And then here come these channels through which these people could learn that, just maybe, the outside world isn’t like what their leaders had taught them, that other people have different beliefs — beliefs totally contrary to theirs — not because they are obstinate, not because they are ignorant or haven’t been exposed to “true Islam” or whatever; but there are people who have actually studied and thought a lot about religion and have come to completely different conclusions, for whatever reason. So one of two things could happen. Muslims could learn from the last four hundred and fifty years or so of European Christian history that sectarian violence is a very bad thing, that theocracies tend towards tyranny, that different beliefs should be allowed to compete in the free marketplace of ideas, and so on; or they could ignore all that and learn it the hard way — by repeating the mistakes for themselves, perhaps at the cost of tremendous bloodshed. And the difference between the two was the communication of information, and that was something I could study as a part of computer science. Thus, I began to learn Arabic.

And that was how I ended elementary school: with the intent to study computer science and physics, and a belief that religion, and in particular Islam and the Muslim world, would become very important topics by the time I became an adult — a belief that motivated me to learn more about history and politics and religion and linguistics and many, many other things. And the entire time that I was getting books from the library and studying these things, my parents dismissed my interests as worthless.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children
2. Miscellaneous articles about raising gifted children, from Scientific American
3. The causes of my depression, part 4: the Mentorship Program

Authoritarian parenting is the style of parenting associated with low responsiveness and high demandingness. It is characterised by the assertion of power on the part of the parent and withdrawal of affection and support to coerce obedience in the child. In other words, it is centred around punishment rather than the nourishment of the child’s internal incentives to motivate behaviour. This style of parenting is prevalent in Asian societies, and less common in the West. Its harmful effects are well-documented: the children of such parents are more likely to become socially withdrawn and suffer from emotional problems as adults^[2]. I think that this style of parenting is especially harmful to children who have been diagnosed as gifted. At any rate, at this current moment, the above is certainly an apt description of my state.

I am a part of the “Hong Kong diaspora”, people who have emigrated from Hong Kong to escape from having to live under Communist rule. Of course, like any other group of people, there is a great deal of internal variation, but at the same time, certain commonalities characterise this community. In common with other Chinese communities, there is a rigid belief in hierarchy and a strong work ethic — but of a particular kind. If I had to summarise the culture of the Hong Kong diaspora with a motto, it would be this: “Work hard — but do only what you are told.” The effect of this mentality is that members of the diaspora excel at business and are overrepresented in professions such as engineering, medicine, and any other field where one can do modestly well merely by memorizing facts and following procedure. Conversely, they contribute disproportionately little to literature or the arts or other endeavours requiring unrestrained creativity. (This fact can be attested to by anyone who has ever walked between the arts and engineering sections of any major university campus in North America. The change in demographics — and in the number of conversations in Cantonese — is startling.)

What I have to say about the harmful effects of authoritarian parenting are not specific to the Hong Kong diaspora, but applies mutatis mutandis to other immigrant and ethnic groups as well. When I was growing up in Canada, I noticed that many of my friends and acquaintances also have parents who are the same way. Whereas Chinese parents may favour engineering, Indian parents prefer medicine, Jewish parents prefer law, and so on — but the pressures they put on their children are the same.

The Chinese community is often praised for being a “model minority” which, amongst other things, consistently produces students with better grades than the class average. But this apparent academic achievement is illusory. My own observation, in interacting with my classmates, is that the grades of children with authoritarian parents are artifically inflated. You always find them in exclusive (and often ethnic) cliques copying assignment answers off each other. Well of course they can “answer” more questions and their marks are better than those of students who do their own work! But their actual understanding of the material is considerably weaker. They exist only to study and have no social life outside of their study group. When I say that they are exclusive, I mean that they are exclusive unless they know that you have a higher grade than they do — in which case you’re welcome to join them! I always declined their invitations, because I prefer understanding to getting high marks.

My parents always pressured me to study with other Chinese students only (and preferably ones from Hong Kong). But they didn’t tell me this explicitly. Instead, they continually criticised every non-Chinese friend I had, and would speak nicely only about the ones who had parents who shared their background. (And they always referred to my friends as my “classmates”, even when they weren’t. In fact, I don’t recall them ever referring to anyone as a “friend” — it was always a “former classmate”, a “co-worker”, etc.) But their tactic didn’t work on me, because I could clearly see for myself that it would be detrimental. First of all, why should I limit myself by restricting my social circle? Secondly, if I studied the way these people “studied” — by rote memorisation and copying — I might possibly get a boost in the current assignment, but when the next one came around which built on the knowledge of this one, I won’t understand it as much as I would if I had solved it myself. I collaborated with people, but I never copied. And thirdly, whenever I did interact with these people, they really annoyed me. I would be trying to explain the thought process behind a particular problem to them, and they’d cut me off with “Okay, okay. But what’s the answer?” So they might have above-average marks, but they were poor students.

There were many instances like this, where my parents continually pressured me to do something (or not to do something), and I resisted them. I believe that many gifted children are actually driven away from science and academia (or whatever field their talent lies in) by their authoritarian parents. There is a very heavy emphasis on book learning in Chinese culture, due to the traditional importance placed upon memorisation of texts such as the Analects of Confucius, to the detriment of real learning. I was continually punished by my parents for reading books outside the curriculum, or for learning by actually doing something instead of reading about it from a book.

And here is why I think authoritarian parenting is especially harmful to children who have been diagnosed as gifted. Most of the other children with authoritarian parents listened to or were influenced by their parents. They limited their intellectual horizon by forming cliques with other children who have the same backgrounds and ignoring everyone else, and they raised their marks artificially by copying each other’s homework. They keep this up through high school, and then university — then wham! The majority can’t adjust to having to think for themselves, they drop out (or switch to an easier programme), which thins the ranks of the cliques, which then can’t sustain their marks, then more people drop out, and so on. I knew a lot of people who had really excellent grades in high school but did very poorly in university. Their parents had wanted them to get post-graduate degrees, but they couldn’t — because they had listened to their parents. So they drop out or graduate, and go off to work, which isn’t a bad thing, because it gives them freedom from their parents. The parents end up disappointed, but that’s about it.

But when the authoritarian parent tries to boss around a gifted child, he resists. He thinks to himself, “What they want me to do is wrong, it’s counterproductive, I won’t do it.” The authoritarian parent can’t accept that. The gifted child tries to explain, but discussion is not allowed. The parent raises his voice, or his hand — things escalate. And one of two things happens. It may be that the child’s will breaks and he obeys. Then he is constrained from fully developing his talents, he starts viewing things in terms of percentages and averages instead of learning and understanding, his grades slip for exactly the reasons I have outlined above, and then he is blamed by his parents for failing. Because, in their minds, obedience equals success, and if it actually results in failure, it must be because their child did something wrong. On the other hand, the child knew the entire time what the outcome would be, but was helpless to stop it. Even worse, because everyone had told him that he was gifted, he’s performing below his own expectations, disappointed with himself, and falls into a depression.

I’ve seen the above happen to several people I know who were diagnosed as gifted as kids and who have authoritarian parents. When I encountered them, they were leading very screwed-up lives. Some drank heavily or self-medicated in some other way, or were skirt chasers, or whatever. (Rumour even has it that a former classmate is now a gigolo.) So it’s not easy to be diagnosed as gifted, because the expectations are much higher, and so is the fall.

The other possibility is to resist all the way. I know only a very few people who took this route, and none of them have a good relationship with their parents. But it seems to me that this is the only way I can accomplish what I have set out to do with my life, and so it is the route that I have taken.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Miscellaneous articles about raising gifted children, from Scientific American
2. Gifted program in Mississauga
3. Why and for whom am I writing this?

This may or may not actually be true, but it has the effect of creating a vicious cycle. When I was young, I read a lot of biographies and autobiographies of famous and successful people. In some cases, their parents were not mentioned, or they were deceased. But whenever there was a reference to living parents, their influence was inevitably described as positive. Of course, the sample is biased — people with unsupportive parents have no reason to bring them up and would tend to be disinclined to discuss them.

This places a double burden on the child with unsupportive or abusive parents — firstly, he has to cope with their behaviour, and secondly, he must do so without role models with which he can fully identify. While I was growing up, I always wondered what these people about whom I was reading would do if their families had opposed their work. Would they still have accomplished what they did? It seemed to me that while having supportive parents was not absolutely necessary for success, having disruptive parents would be very debilitating and would prevent anything from getting accomplished.

I could have spent the past decade and a half making more contributions to science and to society. Instead, most of my energy and efforts were taken up with maintaining a focus on my studies while sustaining a continuous barrage of attacks against science and against the culture of science by my parents. But as the saying goes: “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” I have spent a lot of time thinking about science and science-related issues such as its role in and its effects on society. I had really wanted to write publicly about these things, but my parents prevented me from doing so. So I will write instead about my experiences growing up with physically and emotionally abusive parents, and how I coped with it.

I started writing an autobiographical account as a part of my talk therapy with UW Counselling Services. I have decided to make it public, because I think that there are many people out there who can benefit from my experiences. There are, first of all, the young people whose parents are unsupportive of their academic or creative endeavours. When I found myself in that situation as a youth, I really wished that I had someone whose experiences I could relate to. Then there are those who are in the situation that I am in now: unable to concentrate on academic work because of personal problems. The latter is probably rather common — there are a huge number of problems graduate students have to deal with, such as depression, poverty, illness, homesickness, and so on. But I suspect that there are a significant number of the former as well, who are not visible because they feel that they have no one to turn to. I know because I was in that position myself.

I think the parents of gifted children would benefit from reading about my experiences as well. There are probably hundreds of books and web sites on the subject of raising gifted children. They universally agree on the sorts of things such parents should do: encourage the child’s interests, listen to the child’s teachers, and so on. But I don’t know of anyone who has written about what it is like to be a gifted child in an environment in which the parents always acted in exactly the opposite manner to how the parents of a gifted child ought to behave. My observation of other parents while I was growing up was that most of them also behaved in ways which, it was obvious to me, impeded the growth of their children.

Finally, I am of course also writing this for myself. I am in a rut in my studies and cannot move forward. I feel that the course of my life has been derailed by circumstances entirely beyond my control, but I also recognize that I am the only one who can change my predicament. So I am writing about my life publicly to motivate myself to get back on track, to commit myself to this project of change, and so that I would be held accountable for those changes.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children
2. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 3: science writing in high school
3. Writing my Ph.D. Research Proposal live