This post originally appeared on September 4, 2012, on . It has been republished here with the permission of the author, who is a writer and mother of three. This post is about her gifted oldest son leaving home for college. While it is not an experience limited to parents of gifted children, it is an experience many of you will have. It may come when you send your child to a boarding school because it is what will best fit his or her individual needs, or it might be when your child heads off to college, or it might be after college, when your child decides to move out. After years of advocating for them in school and supporting their unique needs, your gifted children will leave home and must learn how to support these needs on their own. And no matter how much you help prepare them for that, it is still difficult to watch them set out on their own.

On the day my eldest son left for college, my youngest son got his first zit. This had to be some kind of sign, I thought. Time marches on or some such thing.

Maybe this was God’s little joke aimed at a mom whose “baby” is no longer a baby and whose first child was flying the coop. If so: not funny.

So many words have been spilled on this very subject – the first kid leaving for college – that it feels unoriginal to be thinking about it, let alone writing about it. And yet it pierces uniquely.

In the months leading up to Jonah’s departure, I’d find myself crying at unpredictable moments. I’d wander past his closed door, hear the sounds of his guitar playing on the other side, and think: Starting in September that room will be empty and silent. Cue the tears.

As Jonah and I made our cross-country sojourn from the San Francisco Bay area to Brown University in Providence, leaving his two younger brothers (17 and 13) at home with my husband, strange coincidences ensued.

Jonah has always had out-of-the-mainstream interests. Two examples: he became borderline-obsessed with Napoleon Bonaparte in middle school and is endlessly fascinated by 19th-century French history; and his favorite musician is Mark Knopfler, known mostly by people my age as the lead-man and guitarist of the 80’s band, Dire Straits.

A couple of nights before we left home, Jonah played his guitar at an open-mic night at a music club in our hometown of Mill Valley. The song he played was Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” – a fairly obscure choice for non-Knopflerphiles.

A few days later, our rental car stuffed to the brim with Target purchases, we stopped for lunch on our way to Providence. The restaurant was playing music, 60’s Motown-type stuff. Then out of nowhere, we heard the sound of Mark Knopfler’s voice: it was “Romeo and Juliet.” I burst into tears, sending our alarmed waiter scurrying away.

When we got to the Brown campus on Friday, the very first kid we met was a history-obsessed young man from North Carolina with a special passion for Napoleon who, out of a class of 1500 freshmen, also happens to be in Jonah’s history seminar of 20 kids.

On Sunday I attended a parent seminar entitled “Saying Goodbye, Letting Go, and Learning to Live with a Brown Student.” Much of the discussion centered on being supportive without being intrusive. The faculty members and upperclassmen running the seminar did a few skits, re-enacting phone calls that typically occur between parents and children during the first few weeks of freshman year.

As one faculty member, playing “Mom,” phoned her “son” with a variation on the “you don’t call, you don’t write” complaint, parents in the audience laughed nervously. You mean they really won’t call? We were encouraged to give our kids some space; we were reassured that they’d get in touch eventually; we were instructed to let them try to solve roommate issues on their own.

As I sat in the crowded auditorium, I felt slightly better. I realized that while this experience was specific and personal, it was also universal. And it’s exactly what is supposed to happen. We raise our kids from babies to toddlers to children to adolescents to young adults, and then they leave us to begin their own lives. It’s only logical: if they never develop the skills to live independently, we haven’t done our job. Who wants to suck at being a parent?

And yet.

I didn’t feel ready for Jonah to go. I don’t feel like I had enough of his company during those short 18 years. I wish I had more time to see him interact with his brothers at the dinner table; to observe his thought process as he works through a research paper or a discussion about politics; to listen to him play guitar along with Mark Knopfler. I simply loved having him around, and the loss feels huge.

So as I watched him walk back toward his dorm before I left, his roommate’s arm slung around Jonah’s shoulder in a protective and brotherly way, of course I cried. But eventually, I had to drive away and to fly back home.

After all, I need to help Aaron with his college applications. And maybe we’ll see if we can do something about Henry’s zit, like introduce him to face soap. Life goes on. As for Jonah, he can’t get rid of me that easily: I just figured out how to use Skype.

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Lisa is the mother of 3 gifted children and lives outside of San Francisco.

When my oldest son was in 5th grade, he told me a story. He was in the jungle, swinging from vine to vine above a swamp infested with crocodiles. The teachers at his school placed the vines an appropriate distance apart, and he was successfully navigating the terrain. I, however, was moving the vines too far apart. He told me that if I kept moving these lifelines, he would fall into the waters below and be devoured by the crocodiles.

At the time he told me this story, I was pressuring him to put more effort into his schoolwork. He was daydreaming in class and making silly mistakes. He turned in papers with multiple misspellings, although he was a very good speller. He didn’t study for quizzes or even look through his text books when he had an open book test. According to the teachers, he was doing “fine.” I knew he was capable of more. If the teachers would not demand more from him, I would.

I “helped” him proofread his papers and check his spelling. I enrolled him in for math. As he advanced through the program, he became increasingly upset. If he could not answer the questions, he cried. I insisted that he continue. I was making him miserable.

I realize now that his jungle metaphor illustrated a common problem for gifted students: he thought he was smart only if he could master a task easily. He viewed his intellectual ability as something static that he demonstrated by completing tasks quickly and with very little effort. By demanding that he push himself beyond his teachers’ expectations, I was threatening his status as a smart kid. How could he be smart if learning was hard?

My son had a fixed mindset. I learned this at a gifted learning conference in the Bay Area, where I heard Carol Dweck, author of the book , speak. According to Ms. Dweck, gifted students with a “fixed mindset” will see their intelligence as fixed at birth. Their goal is to demonstrate their intelligence. They do this by sticking to tasks they do well and avoiding challenges that might threaten their self-image. Since a “fixed mindset” limits their reach, the goal is to acquire a “growth mindset” in which students believe that intelligence can be developed and improved by working hard. Under the “growth mindset,” learning – rather than performance – is the ultimate goal. Failures are temporary setbacks giving the student a chance to learn.

My attempt at encouraging my son to perform at a higher level was clearly threatening his self-image as a smart kid. Luckily, we live near a school that excels at fostering the development of a growth mindset and serves gifted and talented students. We moved our son there in 6th grade. The school celebrates mistakes and focuses on the process of learning rather than the end product. I recall attending a Physics culmination where the students presented rollercoaster designs. Each student began his or her presentation with the many ways in which the initial design failed. For many of the students and parents, this was the most interesting part of the night. Math homework was often too difficult to complete, so the teacher would use class time to solve the problems and give credit for unsuccessful attempts. The right answer was worth one point out of many. The students received narrative evaluations, accompanied by rubrics, instead of grades, so they always had the opportunity to improve and knew where they should focus their efforts. An A+ no longer set the limit to their learning.

I stopped referring to my children as “smart.” They were hard workers and creative thinkers. They were risk takers. They repeatedly surprised me.

The biggest surprise for me is how this story ends. Next year, my son will be going to a university known for its intellectual rigor. He turned down an excellent school close to home in order to attend a school half way across the country for “true intellectuals who don’t mind working hard for their degrees.” At 17, he moved his own vines.

Have you encouraged a growth mindset in your child? What has your experience been? Please share in the comments section below!

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