Don't let your child's gift of giftedness go to waste

Saturday, July 6, 2002

Gifted children might struggle growing up, because they know they're different from their comrades in age, and the difference might well be resented. But girls and boys do not struggle in the same way.

Barbara Kerr, author of Smart Girls, and Sanford Cohn, co-author with her of Smart Boys, spoke about the development of gifted children this week at a Mensa conference in Phoenix. They are professors of psychology in education at Arizona State University, and, not coincidentally, former gifted children themselves.

I know a lot of people don't care for the term "gifted," but it's just a label. It refers to children with IQs measured at roughly 140 or even higher, children as far from the average as those who test at 60 or lower. If you consider to which of those groups you would prefer to belong, or have your children belong, is it so unreasonable to describe them as having received a gift?

Not all gifted children struggle. On the contrary; the earliest studies of gifted children, begun by Lewis Terman in the 1920s, showed they were fortunate in other ways as well; better adjusted socially, more athletic, healthier. It hardly seems fair, does it?

But that's on average. What about the ones who don't or can't fit in?

The first difference between gifted girls and gifted boys is identifying them. The girls, Kerr says, typically are precocious readers, easy to spot for that reason. Parents are surprised when their 3-year-old daughter starts reading them the newspaper headlines over breakfast. The parents of the boys are surprised because they never seem to do quite what they're expected to. And they don't sit still for psychologists to administer boring assessments.

The boys are more creative than other boys, the girls more adventurous than other girls. They're more like each other in some ways than either is like other children of their own sex. And the schools, for the most part, don't know what to do with them. The language is revealing; children are called "profoundly" or "severely" gifted -- as if it were a disability.

Schools, and sometimes parents, worry that identifying their children as gifted, and educating them with others like them, will lead them to become vain and arrogant. But being in a group where you have to work your hardest just to be average is rather more humbling than coasting along at the top of the class without ever opening a book.

In elementary school, the girls' strategies play into teachers' expectations. They might become like Cinderella, who says to her unpleasant relatives, "I've done everything you ask of me. Now leave me alone to dream."

Kerr dramatized the Cinderella girl, who buys a big binder to hide behind, secretly reading The Mists of Avalon, while dutifully answering math questions when called upon.

Oh, that spoke to me . . . but not quite. Yes, I read constantly in class, or did my homework. But I didn't hide. By fifth grade, at least, I had a conscious and well-developed plan for training each year's new teacher to leave me alone except when I wanted to be noticed. They'd walk by, glance down to see what I was reading that day, nod approvingly at The Complete Poems of Byron or whatever, and get on with their lesson plans.

Boys, on the other hand, might adopt what Cohn calls the Bartleby strategy. When it comes to schoolwork, they simply prefer not to do it. Why? For one reason, because they know that they get points on the playground for not cooperating with the teacher, especially if it's a woman.

The problem is especially acute for boys whose parents hold them back a year so they'll be bigger and more successful athletically. They're already ahead of their classmates intellectually, and that widens the gap.

"You're not going to develop socially in a group that hates you," Cohn said.

Starting in middle school, many gifted girls begin to alter their behavior so they will fit in better (that was not me). The boys, instead, fit in less and less; they might vanish, for instance, into a technological netherworld, or someplace even darker.

Of course these are stereotypes. They don't apply to everyone, or to everyone equally. But stereotypes don't come out of nowhere, either; they are the casual approximations of real statistical generalizations. Kerr writes that most parents who think their children are gifted are right. And most of those children will do well, though perhaps not as well as they could if they had more suitable opportunities. But some will struggle, and if your child might be among them, don't let the gift go to waste.