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A friend of mine who is a teacher pointed out to me that “highly gifted” children were actually special needs children. She used this term because she worked in a highly competitive district where parents were constantly harassing her to consider their children “highly gifted”. Once she used this term, it became easier for parents to accept that their children were doing fine in “normal” class, which was quite good anyways because of the average aptitude of the students.

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> Once she used this term, it became easier for parents to accept that their children were doing fine in “normal” class, which was quite good anyways because of the average aptitude of the students.

Your child could be doing work three grades ahead, learning things that would challenge them and help them grow intellectually. Instead we’ll keep them here with the normal children where at best they’ll learn to shut up and not bother the teacher.

The GP is talking about competitive parents whose kids aren't genuinely exceptionally gifted. The parents are just looking for bragging rights and/or another edge.

Keeping children who’re perfectly capable of doing sixth grade work doing fifth grade work isn’t as bad but it’s still a waste off their time and a lesson in the actual priorities of the school system, which certainly don’t have learning among the top five.

Some parents don't really have the best interests of their children at heart. "Hot housing" children does not make for better future outcomes. It just deprives children of their childhood.

> "Hot housing" children does not make for better future outcomes.

I would welcome any research to that effect if you have it to hand. I am not an expert but if you search gwern.net for “gifted education”, “acceleration” “SMPY” or “Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth” you’ll find many papers on this general topic. There’s nothing there showing negative effects and quite a bit that’s positive.

It's a term coined by researchers and I believe it was used in the name of a book at some point. I can't readily find the book, but I found this article:

https://www.verywellfamily.com/hothouse-children-1449187

I was briefly Director of Community Life for The TAG Project and was a low level presenter at, I believe, a Beyond IQ conference one year a long time ago when my kids were still kids. I'm fairly familiar with the research.

Yes, holding back kids that are actually gifted is harmful to them. So is putting a child on a treadmill to satisfy the ego of the neurotic parents.

No. It isn't fundamentally harmful to children. It depends on how it's done.

One of the major differences between effective programs and harmful ones are the attitudes of the children in those programs. Both the hothouse parents described, and programs for kids "behind standards" push really hard with rote learning, high-pressure, and often punishment. On the other hand, effective programs, both for kids ahead, behind, and at grade-level have richer activities which build love-of-learning.

As a footnote, I looked at the web site you linked to. It cites a bunch of widely discredited Piagetan nonsense.

Most schools are massive daycare centers. Giving gifted kids their own time back—to pursue their own interests—would be more effective and less expensive than “three grades ahead.”

Grinding out paperwork and watching the clock in the 8th grade isn’t any more rewarding than it is in the 5th.

Smart kids just need a push in the right direction.

I'm sure I'm out of touch being old but my school was just fine AFAIK. I can still remember in general, what I learned in every class from 1st grade to 12th grade. I can't remember a single class that didn't teach me useful stuff.

Going backward 12 grade, AP calculus, english lit, programming (mostly self study), auto mechanics (elective), physics. 11th grade applied math, english lit, programming, American history, 9th grade geometry and proofs, yearbook (which taught me how big a project is, how to layout a book, how many students coast, there were basically 3 of us that did 85% of the work), world history, student store (learned what it's like to have co-workers and a job and responsibilities like showing up to school 45 mins early to run the store in the morning), I'm not going to fill it all the way back to kindergarten but is school different now?

I didn't grind out paperwork in 8th grade. I took German, Chemistry, Writing/English, Geography, Typing (yea that was a thing), Algebra

> I can still remember in general, what I learned in every class from 1st grade to 12th grade. I can't remember a single class that didn't teach me useful stuff.

You are very, very far out of the ordinary. Twenty percent of Americans can’t name any of the branches of government. Only 46% know each state has two Senators. About 40% of Americans are basically innumerate [1]. School is primarily childcare and most people forget the huge majority of what they were ever taught because they neither care about it nor use it.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-03-high-adults-unable-basic-mathe...

My public school was teachers taking naps and complaining about their personal problems while feral inner city youths dry-humped to the smooth sounds of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice.

From the stats, I believe my experience is the rule rather than the exception.

In that scenario, teaching “Brideshead Revisited,” AP Calculus, and the history of the Qing Dynasty to gifted children seems more like a cunning globalist scheme to suppress IQ through blunt force trauma.

There are better ways to keep a child engaged than by just giving them more school material. No matter what the material is, if they’re in a regular school, they’re going to get bored very quickly.

Parents of very gifted kids routinely seek out support groups to help them cope. It's absolutely not all upside. Social challenges are a very big part of the problem.

I remember being in one of those “accelerated” programs. If I recall it was for math. I was not in that class for long. It wasn’t that I did poorly in the class, it was the fact that I told the teacher to go fuck herself.

Suffice it to say I’ve never been particularly fond of authority figures. As a child you understand inherently that all people are equal. Why should anyone be above anyone else? At least that was how my childish mind perceived it. Hierarchy is something that learned socially.

>As a child you understand inherently that all people are equal. Why should anyone be above anyone else? At least that was how my childish mind perceived it. Hierarchy is something that learned socially.

I remember when I was very young other children saying exactly the opposite and as an adult I've met young children that are very attuned to one's social standing.

Also there are strong biological reasons as to why it is highly innate but modulated by culture.

I think that it's more about children thinking that everyone is equal in having to keep their word. If you make a promise then you're supposed to keep to it. What often disillusions children is that people in positions of authority often make promises, but don't keep them, yet when it goes the other way around those people will coerce everyone else into keeping the promises to them.

It's a naive position of someone with a nice upbringing without bullies to show that under the veneer there is suppressed brutality of those willing to use violence.

Some gifted kids are especially bad about having strong views about things like justice and morality and equality.

It's part of why I'm on parenting blog number three, which isn't exactly catching fire. My stories about raising my sons and my views on such were seemingly popular, at least with a vocal minority, on an email list that was basically a support group for parents of gifted kids (which is why I originally began blogging at all).

My oldest was accepted to college at age thirteen. The classes he had tried to sign up for all fell through for different reasons and then he told me he didn't really want to take college classes. He wanted me to keep homeschooling him.

I wasn't thrilled. At age 14, he explained Einstein's Theory of Relativity to me, which was helpful to me in understanding some of my college classes. I absolutely wasn't qualified to keep teaching him in some subjects. He already knew more science than I did.

But he also has a serious medical condition and a variety of other problems. So I heaved a big sigh and said "Okay. I can't teach you, but I can keep supplying you learning materials for those subjects and I can still teach you in other subjects, like math."

So, yeah, there's lots of problems you run into with gifted kids, one of them being that some of them have little tolerance for "idiot adults" who may not know anymore than they do, so they tend to not be very accepting of the idea that adults have some right of authority simply because they are older. "Older and wiser/know more" don't necessarily follow.

Edit: Someone asked, then deleted their comment. It's called Raising Future Adults.

https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/

There's not much there currently.

How do the strong views about justice and morality typically manifest themselves in a way that’s negative rather than positive?

I’m not challenging you on that by the way. I see this too and I think I have a pretty good idea what you mean but didn’t want to second guess what you meant, incorrectly.

It's not necessarily that it's negative, though it can be. It's just that it's usually socially unacceptable to take a strong moral stand and turn X thing into a hill to die on (especially if you are five, but not only if you are a child).

Most people cannot and will not live up to the strict moral standards of some five year old on their high horse. When the five year old screams "The emperor has no clothes and you're a liar!!!!" multiple times per day and will not stop when punished for it, it creates a lot of problems.

One of my sons was like that. I homeschooled and I can live up to his expectations for things like fairness and keeping my word. But when adults don't live up to those expectations and they have some tyrannical little would-be civil rights activist on their hands, it sometimes turns abusive because they need the kid to just shut up and give it a rest already and they run out of ideas for how to keep the kid from being a troublemaker. (Alternately, in school, they are constantly in detention or similar.)

Almost nothing in life is actually fair, and obsessing on the unfairness of it all is impractical and self-destructive.

Ironically this view is the most destructive of them all. If people feel things are unfair they should never stop obsessing. If people just accepted injustice and unfairness slavery would exist and the Jews would be wiped out to give two salient examples.

Kurt Vonnegut says it more eloquently than I ever could:

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

To turn it around, a quote from David Foster Wallace, 'Try to let what is unfair teach you'.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/937442-try-to-let-what-is-u...

I don't mean to take the conversational bait, but that story is explicitly not about fairness, it is about equality, and about the dangers of mixing fairness and equality.

In this story, as it is frequently discussed:

Fairness = same opportunities

Equality = same outcomes

If Fairness equals same opportunities, then that implies it would only be "fair" (Fairness) to have a Eugenics program, resulting in every child born being of identically high IQ and other character traits, physical abilities, health and talents.

I am not arguing in favor or against Eugenics - just making an observation.

As a parent of a seven year old who continuously upholds and measures fairness it is really tiring to explain why dad gets to have a larger glass of milk, or why dad has a larger portion of dessert. Fairness is skewed by the one judging what is fair. It is relative and trying to explain relative concepts to a child with no ability to understand relative terms is frustrating. Hence he gets absolute rules and does not understand why.

This doesn’t sound fair, to me, to the 7 year old. Just adults doing adulting by saying “do as I say.” The questions asked seem quite reasonable. There are bigger discussions on fairness we haven’t even begun to broach, racism and classism being a big one for me.

The size of milk is easily explainable. I, a 230 lbs powerlifter am roughly five times larger than you at 50 lbs. My body requires more calories, nutrients than yours does. They can easily see that I am much larger than them, so it makes sense to them. As well as being factual.

I say this because my kids used to ask this often.

Reminds me of this quote from George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

That's what the government wants you to think. The fairest institution we have is the free market. There's no bullshit allowed. Because if you bullshit, you'll lose money. In a truly functioning free market, price is the mechanism by which fairness is distributed.

Free market doesn't take time to turn into unfair markets when exploited by an anomaly. You can't have fairness with humans living in the same place as you.

This isn't always true. The free market with infinite competition might settle on optimal solutions eventually, but there's almost always a gradient that appears due to time. It takes time for changes to propagate through a system and that can be taken advantage of. There's the quote by Keynes that underlines this: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

There is no free market in modern capitalism. Even Smith already warned of the dangers of accumulation of capital and the need for checks & balances to avoid oligopolies and monopolies. It's a winner take all approach (at least in the US and China) that nearly always those with the best headstart win.

Play iterated games.

Thats very difficult to understand when you're young and (largely) self-centered. It definitely has to be explained with a lot of patience and some creativity.

I just wasn't raised with that idea and I saw no reason to raise my own kids with that idea.

My father fought in the front lines of two wars and had a Purple Heart. My mother escaped East Germany in her teens with her infant niece in tow to return the baby to it's mother. Her older sister had come home with the baby to attend their mother's funeral and the East German border guard did not let her take the baby home with her.

I come from people who believed in fighting the good fight and quietly standing up to tyranny in myriad ways.

It's not about obsessing about the unfairness of it all or pursuing self-destructive behavior. It's about honoring a child's expectation for the world to live up to a lot of the high-minded claims of duty and honor and so forth that we talk about and often don't follow through on.

I did my best to follow through as a parent and I think I did the right thing. My son eventually mellowed some in certain respects as he got older and developed a more complex world view and came to understand that sometimes the simple and obvious answer isn't really the best answer. But he was never broken and that mattered to me as a parent, so I'm content with the choices I made. I don't think they were a waste of my time, nor do I think they led my son astray.

A friend of mine thought it was unfair that people were judged by the clothes they wore, and she was going to fight the good fight and wear jeans to all occasions - work, school, dates, weddings, church, everything.

Eventually, she gave up that fight.

That sounds like "bored and has nothing but first world problems and no real idea what on earth injustice actually is" not "I'm really dedicated to justice."

I run multiple websites to help the homeless. This began when I was still homeless myself.

I currently do live in t-shirts and sweat pants, in part due to dire poverty and not because I prefer to dress this way. "Ima gonna fight for my right to live in jeans even for weddings" doesn't really compare to having a Purple Heart or smuggling a baby out of an oppressive regime and returning the child to its rightful mother.

So I think I'm going to disengage here.

It's stuff like this which teaches children to not fight for a better tomorrow.

Obsessing over unfairness is how you form political movements to make things fair.

> Obsessing over unfairness is how you form political movements to make things fair.

Up to a point. Often these movements succeed, and then do they retire? Nope. They turn up the microscope until they can discern ever smaller inequities.

For example, before the pandemic dominated the news, the local paper here ran endless articles on the conundrum of was it inequitable to have gifted classes in the public schools or inequitable to not have gifted classes? The two factions seemed to be about the same size, and neither was able to get an edge over the other.

That you don't care about the discussipn doesn't make it less important. Special classes take up resources so it is indeed a policy decision where to allocate funds.

It’s one of those topics that is so easy to discuss in moral sense simply because there’s nothing immoral about segregating children by their abilities and it only comes down to money.

Discussing money is boring, however. If there was too much of it we wouldn’t be asking the question; but since we don’t have the money we may as well moralise as that makes us feel useful.

State funded mandatory education of children is an outlier in that it actually is fair, or at least it is supposed to be, which seems an important point in a discussion about children.

The fact that it isn’t is due to funding, the private sector, grant maintained etc. combined with varying management competence and, at least in England, an obsession with construing difference as hierarchy. All but that last one seem like implementation bugs in an otherwise fairly designed plan.

I'm curious if you can go into what exactly are the views about things like justice and morality and equality.

I've never had the opportunity to speak to a very gifted kid. Let alone a kid that understands Einstein's Theory of Relativity and being so young.

I know Einstein was considered a pacifist and had strong social views himself. I think everything is deterministic like how Einstein did. My views on justice, morality and equality are shaped by knowing determinism.

I don't consider myself gifted btw. I'm just curious why someone so young would care about the forgoing topics to have strong views on them. What are these views and why?

A lot of the world is pretty bad about things like not keeping their word. You see this come up a lot in fiction, which likely reflects the embittering experiences of the author.

In one of the Jurassic Park movies, the father is blaming the mother for letting the kid sleep with a night light and then there really is a T rex in the backyard and it's just eaten the family dog.

In one of the Aliens vs. Predators movies, the father is dismissively telling the child "There's no monster. See!" and shines the light on the window which illuminates the Alien and it breaks through the window to kill him. Logically, the child was next, but the scene cuts away before the child is attacked. So you get sort of a fantasy depiction of some asshole father getting what they so richly deserve, to the satisfaction of the child who has been dismissed their entire life.

One video game has a meme "The cake is a lie." It's a hugely popular meme and probably because a lot of parents promise desert if the kid behaves and don't necessarily follow through.

Gifted kids aren't necessarily more moral, but they are more articulate, will have a better memory and a bigger vocabulary and are somewhat inclined to be argumentative. A lot of them will call the parents on "But you said..." and will remember it if the parent basically screws them over after being reminded of what they promised.

Kids tend to universally feel that if you said you would do X, that's a promise and you are supposed to keep your promises. Gifted kids just do a better job of remembering that you said X and arguing it with you and tend to have a raft load of other strong personality traits.

The higher the IQ, the more likely they are to qualify for other labels as well, such as OCD, ASD and ADHD. So some of these kids get really wrapped around the axle about things when adults make a promise and then break it and it becomes clear that the adult never really intended to keep it. They were just screwing with the kid for convenience' sake.

The same clear, bright line of logic that makes some kids good at math or science plays out socially as a strong moral position, whether it is intended that way or not. I have a strong interest in social stuff and I am routinely assumed to be talking about morality when I'm often saying something more like "gravity doesn't work that way."

People think social stuff is fuzzy and hand wavy and you can't research it. It's hard to research, but there are some things we know and there are some best practices for determining some things and I just find that stuff interesting. But people almost always feel I am being judgy, probably because most parents raise children with either a guilt model or a shame model.

I didn't use either as a parent. I raised my kids with a model of enlightened self interest and I taught them things like "You have to pick your battles. You don't have to back down just because someone is mad that you did X, but if you don't have a good reason to keep doing X, maybe them being mad is good enough reason to give it a rest already."

So they got schooled about social dynamics in a way that's pretty uncommon.

Anyway, it's not that they really frame it as morality per se. It's more that they do the same thing all kids do -- expect you to keep your word when you make a promise and things like that -- but they are more articulate and have a better memory and are more inclined to argue things for various reasons. For parents trying to take some easy way out and be lazy and say "There will be cake if you are good" when they don't actually mean it, this is endlessly problematic and comes back to bite them, doubly so if the kid is bright.

Well that doesn't sound that bad. I apologize for my ignorance though because I'm not privileged to have kids of my own.

I think just being honest would be the best approach if their memory is good and they somewhat have a higher moral standard. Why not just explain you're in a difficult situation when it happens and express how you expect them to play their part in helping complete the difficult situation.

I hate parents that do the blame & shame or guilt to achieve something. That to me can play into a controlling dynamic that never solves the conflict. I think sincereness when difficulties happen is the best approach because everyone involved likely will remember it. Specially if it works out.

Life is sometimes just not that easy and simple and gifted kids often go through a stage where their mind and experience levels are out of step and it goes weird places.

My oldest son talked late in part because he was frustrated that he couldn't express himself as articulately as his college-educated mother. So he continued using two-word phrases and refused to use sentences because he was two years old and that made some kind of logical sense to him, since he felt like he had mastered two-word phrases but trying to use sentences made him feel dumb. He was sixteen before he really got over it.

My other son, the one with the fairness bug, got very car sick and had trouble eating and it was quite hard to convince him that, no, really, you are allowed to order ice cream for dinner at a restaurant when we are traveling and you are car sick. He had gotten it into his head that it was a bad thing to eat desert without first eating dinner and he would have melt downs about things like that and no amount of telling him "No, really, I'm your mom and I say it's okay" was enough to readily fix it. We would go through a few rounds of things before he would finally decide that there wasn't some problem with making some exception, even though he explicitly had parental permission.

I was fortunate to be a homemaker, so I had a fair amount of time and flexibility for stopping and explaining life, the universe and everything at the drop of a hat for my endlessly questioning little hellions. But if both parents work or you are a single parent, there just isn't enough time in the day and it's exhausting even if there is.

I think I did a good job, but it wasn't easy. It was never easy. And that's why I keep trying to blog about it: Because other parents who mean well and would like to do the right thing aren't getting the answers they need and some of them are just tearing their hair out.

Such parents liked my emails on a particular email list years ago and that's why I began blogging. But it never really quite gelled. I'm hoping it will soon cuz Reasons.

I’m enjoying your stories here and on your “Raising Future Adults” blog. You mentioned other parenting blogs – are they still live? I’d love to read more of your work.

No, those parenting blogs aren't still live. But I run a wide variety of websites, most of which are written more or less on the format of "x topic as filtered through my eyes and life experience."

https://doreenmichele.blogspot.com/p/my-websites.html

I hope to resume writing about parenting soon. It's been very helpful to me to engage in discussion on the topic again.

Thanks! As a mom of a gifted preschooler, I’ve appreciated the chance to learn from your experience of parenting your gifted kids with respect and honesty. You remind me of Aunt Annie, another blogger who’s work has really resonated with me. http://auntannieschildcare.blogspot.com/p/aunt-annies-gifted...

Well, I have, in fact, finally written the post I've been working on of late. Hopefully, this is a new beginning and I will be more consistent henceforth.

https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-beginni...

Thanks for the explanation, Doreen. My oldest is 2 years ahead in math and has been very much obsessed with fairness for the last year or so. You've given me some ideas on how to discuss the concept of fairness, and to bring up the "choose your battles" angle.

However, quite a few of our disagreements have to do with how it's basically impossible to determine fairness because of multiple dimensions of fairness. Do you have any advice on how you have handled that (or might handle it now)?

Honestly, probably the best tip I can give you is that when your bright child is driving you up the wall, the correct answer is (usually) "They're bored. What can I do to remedy that?"

Bright kids, especially twice exceptional kids, often argue to alleviate boredom and not because they actually are that wrapped around the axle about X.

Re fairness: I studied negotiating tactics and taught my sons to negotiate from a very young age. I spent a week when they were like two and four years old (or maybe three and five) coaching them to argue their side for who gets the front seat in the car. This took up to thirty minutes per stop.

After a week, I told them they had five minutes to come up with an agreement and if they couldn't agree, they both went in the back seat. They got very talented at coming up with win-win solutions to quite a lot of their problems because I coached them on negotiation at an incredibly early age and made it a standard in the household.

You might try stocking up on negotiating books and see if that helps any.

While I've only got a single 3yo so far, and I've been mostly following similar approach as you, I find that this approach requires a lot of time (and energy) investment that is sometimes hard to get. My wife also works pretty long hours, so sometimes enduring arguments of the sort is extra tiring.

Not to diminish the work you did, but did you manage to do that along the full time work, or did you have to stop or reduce work hours?

Not to mention that this 3yo is happy to sleep for 7-8h every other night because there's so much stuff to do. :)

As I said elsewhere, I was fortunate to be a full-time homemaker.

Just to give you some kind of picture: I have a serious medical condition, as does my oldest, and both of my kids are twice exceptional, not just gifted. I was also a military wife, which is fairly demanding, and I went to college part-time and intermittently.

When my oldest was twelve, I realized that he argued so much because he was bored. At that point, I began redirecting his attention instead of arguing and life got vastly better and he quit making me crazy.

I was still active on parenting lists and that idea was a big revelation for a number of parents who indicated that announcements that "I'm bored" tended to precede problematic social behavior.

"Idle hands are the devil's workshop" for bright kids. Keeping them occupied is the best way to keep the peace.

Hi Doreen, very interesting. There's a lot of the 'Positive Education' movement (not sure how it's called in the US) in what you describe.

I have twin girls and one the best things I've learned is to let them handle all their conflicts themselves.

It's a lot about accepting their emotions, letting them express themselves, acknowledging their feelings and... Stopping short of giving a solution. 'I'm here for comfort, you're in a safe place, now go find your path'. So, so liberating. They always find a solution, as long as they're fed, not too tired, and not sick. Not always win-win, but choosing which hill to die on, feeling how advantageous is the deal for everyone, sometimes taking a loss to maintain harmony and keep the game going, sometimes taking a yuge loud stand for a tiny tiny thing but once you listen you hear a long litany of small concessions not rewarded and it's time to take a stand. They're far more prone to show generosity and also to assert when they don't want to share. And they're perfectly allowed to change their mind, and to handle the happy or angry consequences. It's kind of wonderful to see how then those skills are useful with their school friends. Kind of a superpower.

More and more I feel parenting is giving a place to come for comfort, teach (by example and some simple phrases) few absolute principles (no violence - you can be angry, you can't hurt others, no stealing, ...) and just be available for reassurance, comfort, to mourn with them and also to try new stuff (lying, new 'negotiation' techniques, sports, music, ...).

Parenting can be a form of therapy. You question yourself a lot. And kids are kind of a mirror of our inconsistencies, our biases. You can embrace it, admit your inconsistencies, show them that 1) one does not have to be perfect to help, comfort and be worthy of inconditional love 2) one can say sorry when wrong 3) one can change and improve when faced with inconsistencies 4) some things are not good but it's not easy to stop when you've been doing it for long - and there lies the difficulty of changing habits, it's hard and can be done, 5) sometimes people fail to follow-through and it's important to be persistent...

It's a challenge to become a better person. Their world is shaped by what they see. Your reward is to shape a slightly better world through them.

Thanks for trying to help and teach, Doreen.

It's really comforting to read that you spent so much energy in trying to help, and then understood when you hit a ceiling and found another way to help. Your kid is really lucky. Most times, the education system just gives up and focuses on the center of the bell curve.

An innate sense of equality without appreciation of power dynamics can make institutional power and authority figures seem adversarial to a certain kind of precocious mind, perhaps younger ones especially so. Learning should be a journey that instills the value of knowledge as well as the labor to acquire it and transform it into useful and amusing ends. Otherwise, a failure to grasp knowledge itself can create a disdain for the entire enterprise of learning and a kind of self-hating self-sustaining self-induced oppositionally-defiant ignorance.

I still love the USA, though.

I too love the USA. I love all Americans, even those whom I disagree with on every axis, but love as people.

But I find myself at a crossroads (or at least, what I feel is a crossroads). What should I do next? Should I stay in a country that taxes me without representation of my views? I think Balaji Srinivasan said it best. In political science, you have two options: voice and exit. Voice is protesting what you find intolerable in a system by voting against policies that negatively affect you. Or, there is exit. Exit is leaving that system entirely, such that it amplifies the dissenting voice. I find myself contemplating exit. I'm actually considering an authoritarian state, Singapore, as a place to emigrate to. Because while my views won't be represented, at least they won't tax me for it. I'm almost sort of okay with that.

You’re only chasing safety. To me it seems you feel like a victim of a street robbery.

“Your money or your life,” the voice behind you asks, weighing options as you weigh yours.

“I’ll take the money, since I’m not overly attached to my current way of life,” you reply confidently, at least you hope that’s how it sounds.

The reply sings. You cry, for a part of you just died. If you’re lucky, you’re still clinging to a convincing enough simulacrum of your former life to enjoy whatever money you were able to keep.

FIN

In all seriousness, I feel like leaving is what everyone else in the country would tell you to do. Anyone who would give up on the experiment of America is foolish to do so. They give up their leverage, power, and credibility in the eyes of their fellow citizens. That may not mean much to you. I’m not saying it should. But if nothing else, throwing in the towel and doing as you say feels like taking your ball and going home. We’re in this together. It’s sink or swim, but a rising tide raises all boats, large and small.

The economy isn’t a zero sum game, but most of politics in this country is winner take all, which isn’t far off. Yet change happens here anyway. The best life for you is one where you can live your best life. No one can tell you what that looks like. Hopefully you recognize it when you see it, and it might be a lot closer to home than you realize.

But hey it’s your choice either way. There’s no shame in being an expat. I’ve lived overseas and it made me who I am as much as any other thing, and I still like me most days. If you’re lucky the door swings both ways. You can always come back. Just don’t let it hit you on the way out.

The culture has changed dramatically in America such that its founding principles and ideals have pretty much vanished. The simulacrum you mention is America itself: a shell of its former self, seeking something vague but unable to articulate what that something is. I'm not sure what you think about it, but a country where its citizenry thinks government can solve all of its problems leads to a very dangerous place to live. You need only look to the vast majority of Latin American countries for evidence of that.

A country that forgets that government was best at solving its biggest problems in the past is equally dangerous.

Gotcha. Perhaps you identify more with the robber in my anecdote’s aims and ends, if not their ways and means? Taxes are about liability but also proportionality and fairness with respect to ability to pay. At least that is the concept. So if you owe someone money, you can dispute that the liability actually exists, or that you are liable for it and not some other party, or you could explain that you are not able to give that which you do not have. I fail to see how you are less able to exercise your rights than any other person simply because of being taxed. It is the same for us all. We’re all taxed, just not equally. You want to be taxed more unequally than you are now, the question is do you wish to be taxed less than you deserve to be taxed? Or do you wish that we all were taxed more equitably?

You complained about not being represented. Yet you are, simply by being in the country. Congress has a burden to represent the concerns of their constituency which includes all persons subject to their rule. This includes undocumented immigrants and criminals. It also includes those we wage war and commerce with, as Congress authorizes and quantifies these actions in the larger context of international and local/state governmental interactions.

So you are represented. It’s a matter of degree but you are alive and talking to us so some kind of freedom. But maybe you just have sour grapes and you’re not getting the outcome you want. So try harder or whine louder. If the democratic process doesn’t hear you, I’m sorry. I really am. It’s not fair. But that’s what fairness in a democracy means. We all get what we want. Just not on an individual scale. Wanting your way simply because it is your way and you think it is right or just in a society is not fairness. That kind of reasoning is awfully close to the logic that leads the robber in my metaphor to defend that which is not rightfully theirs from one who would rightfully retain ownership of it.

You complained about not being represented. Yet you are, you just don’t like the product and want a refund. Well, tough. We can’t give you your social obligation in the form of money back any more than the society can be taken out of you. Well we can, but you wouldn’t survive the process. So get out there. America is the ultimate multi level marketing pyramid scheme. Convince enough people you’re right, and they will give you money and power to keep themselves convinced they made the right choice. Politics is one big sunk cost fallacy but revolution would also benefit the status quo more than the people. There’s just too many dominoes already set up for you to make them fall the direction you want, even if you get to decide when the first one falls and where.

You seem to be advocating for a certain kind of society but you don’t even want to pay your obligations to the one you’re party to now. Why that’s good for you is obvious. Why anyone else would want to live in that society with you I will leave for you to illuminate.

I was transferred to a “gifted” program in 5th grade but I moved back out after a month or 2. It was nice having more rigorous material but it also meant more homework and I was terrible at doing homework. Plus the kids were more dry, less jokes.

> Plus the kids were more dry, less jokes.

Gifted children simply prefer British humour over American humor.

Very well said, thank you. For me, the turning point was learning that:

(1) hierarchies are a partial order: ones manager is ones superior only at work, and not in all aspects of life. It’s weird if they are. It feels challenging when they are subordinate to you on some other axis (e.g. your manager is younger or less socially popular than you) until this axiom sinks in. Becoming a company man is risky once you’ve learned this because you may end up surrendering yourself to the idea that the company hierarchy is total in all aspects of life. Having the boss round for dinner, bowing and scraping, 1950s stereotypes etc.

(2) In a healthy hierarchy power and responsibility go hand in hand. One accepts authority figures in life because they also take responsibility for things working properly. Your manager at work gets to deal with the awkward underperforming colleague, not you. If people gather to you socially, you have a responsibility to bring something positive to their lives.

Learning that hierarchies were there to provide a service to me — something which felt counter intuitive for a long time — was eye opening. It does also make you double down on attacking hierarchies where power is wielded irresponsibly.

I was in and out of "gifted programs" for most of my schooling, if you could call them that. A few of the people in there were generally smart, many not so much. Personally I always hated them. Except for a brief program when I was in 4th grade all they were for us was just am increased workload. Me, being the lazy pos I am, just neglected to do any of the extra work and I focused on my own thing. I remember in 4th grade when I was kicked outthe first time transferring from the accelerated class that had me doing boatloads of dull readings and "paper work" in the accelerated clas to the normal class with a much less mind-numbing workload where I had time to work on what I wanted to when because I finished early. Eventually they would realize I'm moving faster than most of the class, stick me in the gifted class and the cycle would repeat up until graduation. When I was a senior I. I recall my senior year one of the kids who was in the giftedprograms their entire schooling asking me if a 23 was a good ASVAB score. Ibrelaize these programs are going to vary depending on your school district, so for context, this was a mostly lower-middle class and middle class suburb of a southeastern metro. I personally dont think I'm very smart, likely average, maybe a little less than I used to be nowadays, but I consider a lot of these programs a sham.

Yah. I think many of us can relate here.

Starting in 2nd grade I started ditching class and going to the computer lab to write code. For some sort of reason my teacher didn't notice I was missing as long as I was in for attendance during first period. She did realize I wasn't turning in any work, so I got put into some sort of special program I never went to. They didn't expect me to come, because I never came, and my teacher expected me to be gone, giving me all the time in the world to do whatever I wanted.

I took this trick all the way through high school signing up for programs, or more, stating I was part of programs that would let me ditch classes.

However, in 6th grade, the computer lab shared a window with my homeroom, so a substitute teacher made a comment about it. Turns out I had hacked the admin password and was sending mail, in the form of leaving text messages onto the distract administrator's desktop, where we'd chat about all sorts of stuff. The district didn't know what to do with me. Should I be punished? So they changed the admin password, which I immediately broke into, and that was it. I stayed in the computer lab and my homeroom teacher treated that like normal.

When I was a child in elementary / junior high in the early / mid 80s, membership in the enrichment classes was largely dependent on IQ tests. I have very fond memories of these classes! We did all kinds of crazy advanced stuff, and had wonderful discussions. The membership was also quite diverse. However, in the late 80s they started to base membership on academic performance – as you might imagine, this started to skew the membership towards students from more affluent families who weren't really more insightful than the general population, just more diligent.

This a million times over

> if a 23 was a good ASVAB score

For those of us not familiar with the US military, it appears the answer is "no, that's not a good score". Apparently it's a percentile: they did better than 23% of the test takers, and it looks like that wouldn't qualify you to join any branch of the US military.

https://blog.prepscholar.com/good-asvab-score-air-force-army

My son is profoundly gifted, although he's not in the same league as some of those children described in the study. I absolutely consider him a special-needs child. He's been kicked out of two schools (including a "gifted" school) at this point for his behavior, but it turns out his behavior was because he was profoundly bored. His current school accelerated him by 2 grades and now he's more manageable. He's still bored, but at least he feels like his classmates are more his level, even though he probably needs to skip 1 or 2 more grades to match his academic abilities. I'm loathe to accelerate him further because I worry about emotional well-being, being the youngest kid in the class, but this study has given me food for thought. Thank you OP for posting this.

I'd usually bring my own work at school. I liked to build web application, so I used most of my boring school time to architect them on paper. Then when at home, I could implement it. My teachers bothered me a bit, but I was passing the exams, so they couldn't complain too much.

Your kid could have his own little project and do it at school.

You haven't mentioned anything outside of school, so have you considered giving him something on the side?

I would extrapolate that he's very frustrated he understands something faster than the others, regardless of whether it's a few grades beyond him or not. It's ok for school to be a certain speed. Some hobbies have infinite depth, and aren't inherently limited by the pace of school and the routine of school days.

Examples include: games such as Chess / Tetris / Go, literature, learning finance, making things (woodwork, electronics...).

Yah. You can be super bright without being in the category that needs all the support and scaffolding.

My oldest is super precocious mathematically. And has adjustment problems, impatience, social struggles, etc. Massive but undeveloped sense of justice/fairness that borders on fascism, too. He is doing OK, but... it takes a lot of enrichment and support for him to make it and stay sane.

My middle kid is nearly as capable mathematically and stronger verbally... but he's chill, and patient, adept socially, ... good at, and content, slacking. Fits in perfectly in a mainstream classroom without a lot of accommodation.

(The youngest? Who knows. We'll see, he's only 6).

Your middle kid sounds like how I was. If he really is like I was, then please give him the same enrichment and support as your more difficult eldest. The middle one may have learned to slack and chill out and not rock the boat, but it's still a coping mechanism for a problem that needs support.

Hey-- thanks for the message. We get it / try -- when he doesn't successfully weasel out of it (he is good at that).

The flip-side is, social adaptation/easy-going-ness actually makes it easier for his teachers to challenge him, etc.

The oldest reminds me of me, struggles and all. I have to think my middle kid has an easier path of things than I did.

I too was the middle kid. Here's my own anecdotal advice:

I started slacking in school from about 3rd-9th grade.

I found programming between 9th-10th grade during the summer through pretty much sheer dumb luck, timing, and being in the perfect environment.

After that, my grades improved, confidence improved, everything improved.

The school system may not be able to offer your kid the opportunity they need to really find the inspiration that can kick them into drive.

Maybe try to expose them to as many things as you can, and see what clicks?

Another thing is how they learn.

I learned through modding video games and could see instant results, via changing just a few variables, of what programming could do, and would share these with my friends.

This instant gratification and social "confirmation" from my friends, as well as the communities I joined, really pushed me forward. Plus, I really enjoyed it.

Shortly after modding video games, I tried getting into creating websites but didn't quite see the instant gratification or have the social "confirmation" to push me as hard as I did with modding video games.

How about offering some summer courses? There are really nice programs out there and if the kid gets to choose it can be very enriching.

Yeah, that's definitely a good way to do it as long as the kid doesn't feel like they're being forced.

It's sorta tough though with them choosing because if I was in 9th grade again and had the option, I don't know if I'd choose a programming curriculum.

It reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote, "People don't know what they want until you show it to them."

My middle kid is enjoying competitive chess and doing math through Art of Problem Solving, so there's places he does work hard and there is intellectual challenge. And his slacking is good enough to be at the top of his class, so I can't quibble too much.

I'm sure there'll be problems eventually, but, we're ready and up until then we're trying...

Your child is miles ahead of where I was. I was borderline failing classes.

It sounds like he has a solid support network around him. I wish you and your child the best

You see a global move towards "inclusive" education which aims to provide opportunities for all levels of performance and background/conditions, including the gifted. Eg Portugal and Norway are impressive reference cases.

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