> As long as your kids are enjoying the experience and you're ready to stop if it becomes too much for them, you're probably doing good.
I’m sure you meant it in the kindest way - that respects your kid’s interests and abilities.
But being raised in a more rigid culture, this was not the case for me, and having a forcing function helped me develop foundations in areas I’m not naturally strong in.
I was a gifted child, and the way most gifted child lose their luster is they are given too much free rein to ignore things they’re not good at because they’re so exceptionally good at their narrow areas.
Many of the brightest kids I knew who amounted to nothing had this problem: they’re smart but they always give up when they encounter anything that doesn’t come easily to them. Maybe there’s ADHD involved but the core of it is that humans always want to do things that come easily and avoid things that are hard. I know many of them suffer depressions and end up in manual data entry jobs and jobs where they are underemployed.
But you need structure and persistence to do well in anything. In my case it was math. I did well in elementary school but high school math didn’t come easily to me (my giftedness was in languages). I was going to resign and study the humanities — nothing wrong with that, that is a worthy pursuit of its own - except my dad knew it was a cop out and I wasn’t giving my best. He was right, and he had the backing of the culture. He told me he would support me in anything I chose to do, but he was more concerned that I “gave up too easily without trying my best”.
So instead of giving up, I gave it my best shot and used my languages skills to get good at math. Math is one of those foundational skills that pays dividends in life, no matter what you choose to major in later. I kept trying and failing (it didn’t come naturally to me) but somehow after reaching a certain level, math clicked for me and made sense. It’s all about incremental improvement and pushing through the troughs.
(I now have a PhD in numerical optimization — not bad for a humanities and languages kid.)
Kids (and adults)don’t know what they’re capable of and many give up too eagerly because they “have lost interest” (common refrain). But I say adopt a growth mindset. Sometimes there are paths that are open but parents close them too quickly. We still have limits, and I for one will never be a world class mathematician (because I’m not naturally talented) but I am a far sight better than that kid in high school who thought he couldn’t do math.
Would I have done better going into the humanities? Maybe but I wouldn’t have the job I do now which allows me to do the breadth of things that I do and to emigrate to the country I’m in.
I agree with most of what you're saying. What I had in mind is if you have a kid that's not gifted, then trying to force them to learn reading at 2 will probably do more harm than good, when they could be learning to read just fine when they start school. At that point, unless they're showing signs of a learning disability, I'd absolutely be in favor of pushing them a bit.
I don't want a kid that's, for want of a better metaphor, at exactly 100 on the IQ chart to feel stupid because they failed at a reading program designed for 120+ IQ kids. Actually I don't want anyone to feel stupid and worthless, even if they're 80 IQ, but that's a harder problem.
I know that Maia Kobabe, author of the graphic novel memoir "Non-Binary" that's apparently among the most banned books in American schools, talks in said memoir about how e couldn't read at age 11 (apparently Waldorf schools go by "they'll learn when they're ready"), then Harry Potter came out and e suddenly had a successful motivation to learn to read (apparently Waldorf was right in this case). Now, e holds a masters in comics, and judging from the text in er memoir, e has no problems with reading and writing these days. (And yes, I respect people who use Spivak pronouns.)
I've also read a book by a therapist for autistic children where he talked about one case where the family was following some kind of ABA program to the letter and the kid was really not coping. They were starting to scream and have breakdowns the moment it looked like a "lesson" was coming up and was generally upset or angry most of the time. The new therapist's idea was if the program is working that badly, stop using it like that and do something else - and the kid's behavior improved soon to the point where they could start learning new things at their own pace. That's an extreme case of what I don't want to happen, ever.
The real tough skill for a parent is being able to distinguish between a kid who's giving up at the first sign of difficulties, and a kid that's genuinely overwhelmed and unable rather than unwilling to do what they're supposed to do at that time.
> The real tough skill for a parent is being able to distinguish between a kid who's giving up at the first sign of difficulties, and a kid that's genuinely overwhelmed and unable rather than unwilling to do what they're supposed to do at that time.
I appreciate this, and it's not easy for sure. Every kid is different and they all learn at different paces.
I'm more speaking to the problem of limiting beliefs, which were a shackle to me and to many kids who failed to launch. I think even kids on ASD spectrum have some limiting beliefs -- it is a spectrum, but our tendency is to over-accommodate rather than encourage growth.
Knowing where the limits exactly lie is really difficult -- the cases you mentioned above are Goldilocks cases where folks got it just right. Most of us have bias toward either overaccommodating or forcing -- I'm more in favor of a benevolent form of the latter i.e. not giving up on trying different things, adjusting to their pace of learning of course, but still believing that the kid can do better than they think. I'm against pressuring the kid to do anything of course, but gentle nudges, helping the kid develop a minimum foundation in the tools they'll need for life, I think we can do without burning the kid out.
I can't remember the studies but I seem to recall that better outcomes were predicted for kids who were neurodiverse but had people who kept believing they could do better and kept encouraging them (as opposed to resigning to the fact that they'll never be normal, which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy).
I meet folks on the spectrum frequently and although I know something in their brain makes it difficult for them to follow social cues, I try to treat them as normally as possible because I believe that many (not all, but many) of them can achieve higher social function than they believe. It's a spectrum and nobody really knows where on the spectrum they truly are.
I always recall this dialogue by Eliza Doolittle in "My Fair Lady":
"I should never have known how ladies and gentlemen really behaved, if it hadn't been for Colonel Pickering. He always showed what he thought and felt about me as if I were something better than a common flower girl. You see, Mrs. Higgins, apart from the things one can pick up, the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated. I shall always be a common flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me like a common flower girl, and always will. But I know that I shall always be a lady to Colonel Pickering, because he always treats me like a lady, and always will."
But I do truly take your point that there is a difference between a kid who's giving up and a kid who is overwhelmed.
I also did badly in math for awhile, was forced to do it, then got really good at it again.
Sometimes people have stumbling blocks in their learning, or they just need someone to sit their butt down in a chair and say "study for 3 hours every day until this makes sense."
Not even IQ can substitute for hard work.
(I do have a few friends for whom math came naturally and they never had to study throughout college, but they are a tiny tiny minority!)
I’m sure you meant it in the kindest way - that respects your kid’s interests and abilities.
But being raised in a more rigid culture, this was not the case for me, and having a forcing function helped me develop foundations in areas I’m not naturally strong in.
I was a gifted child, and the way most gifted child lose their luster is they are given too much free rein to ignore things they’re not good at because they’re so exceptionally good at their narrow areas.
Many of the brightest kids I knew who amounted to nothing had this problem: they’re smart but they always give up when they encounter anything that doesn’t come easily to them. Maybe there’s ADHD involved but the core of it is that humans always want to do things that come easily and avoid things that are hard. I know many of them suffer depressions and end up in manual data entry jobs and jobs where they are underemployed.
But you need structure and persistence to do well in anything. In my case it was math. I did well in elementary school but high school math didn’t come easily to me (my giftedness was in languages). I was going to resign and study the humanities — nothing wrong with that, that is a worthy pursuit of its own - except my dad knew it was a cop out and I wasn’t giving my best. He was right, and he had the backing of the culture. He told me he would support me in anything I chose to do, but he was more concerned that I “gave up too easily without trying my best”.
So instead of giving up, I gave it my best shot and used my languages skills to get good at math. Math is one of those foundational skills that pays dividends in life, no matter what you choose to major in later. I kept trying and failing (it didn’t come naturally to me) but somehow after reaching a certain level, math clicked for me and made sense. It’s all about incremental improvement and pushing through the troughs.
(I now have a PhD in numerical optimization — not bad for a humanities and languages kid.)
Kids (and adults)don’t know what they’re capable of and many give up too eagerly because they “have lost interest” (common refrain). But I say adopt a growth mindset. Sometimes there are paths that are open but parents close them too quickly. We still have limits, and I for one will never be a world class mathematician (because I’m not naturally talented) but I am a far sight better than that kid in high school who thought he couldn’t do math.
Would I have done better going into the humanities? Maybe but I wouldn’t have the job I do now which allows me to do the breadth of things that I do and to emigrate to the country I’m in.