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

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a parent say, “My child is gifted but he’s not one of those disrespectful know-it-all kids.” These parents are referring to the gifted gold standard: a child who knows the answers but politely participates in all of the class discussions with the appropriate amount of enthusiasm. Everyone wants this poster child, but they are hard to find, mostly because the traits that make them gifted also make it difficult for them to behave like model students. Parents might try to mold their gifted kids into this ideal, but it comes at a cost.

I learned the price of my son’s struggle to become a model student during our recent college road trip. We were sitting in a lecture hall filled with eager parents and high school students waiting to hear the admissions officer’s pearls of wisdom. Around 2:15, she started to talk. Around 2:25, I realized she hadn’t said anything. I had listened intently for 10 minutes and, as far as I could tell, she only made one point. Her speech was peppered with “
to put it another way” and “I don’t mean to repeat myself but
” I started to get annoyed. I was stuck in a room with 100 other awestruck parents and teenagers waiting for some information on the school’s culture, classes or admissions policies. Instead, I got a lot of words. So, I did what any mature 51 year old woman would do: I passed a note to my son. 10,000 words and still she hasn’t said anything, I wrote on a small notepad. My son’s eyes widened, he took the pen and wrote, I’m chewing gum to stay awake.

The information session went on for an hour and fifteen minutes. She made 3 points. By the time we left the school, I was mad.

“What a total waste of time. I can’t believe we all sat there while she said nothing.”

What he said next surprised me.

“You really haven’t been in school for a while. Now you know how I feel. I always thought it was my fault. I thought I wasn’t paying close enough attention. I thought I might have ADHD. It never occurred to me that they weren’t actually saying anything.”

My son had difficulty behaving like the model student his teachers and I wanted him to be. He is an intense child with a quick mind, excellent memory and excess energy. He got distracted when his teacher repeated a concept he already knew. He called out when the teacher introduced a subject that interested him. When he couldn’t politely deliver on his academic promise, he believed there was something wrong with him.

Thankfully, he had some understanding teachers who knew that he needed more than a warning to stop calling out in class. They helped him develop strategies to focus without squashing his enthusiasm. My favorite was his 11th grade math teacher. My son’s classmates had stopped doing their work because he would call out the answers before they could finish. At the teacher’s urging, my son developed a strategy that fed his competitive nature yet made room for other students to participate. He sat in the front row and rapidly worked on the class problem until he found an answer. Then he wrote the answer in big letters on a sheet of paper and flashed it at the teacher. She nodded or shook her head, thereby acknowledging his work. On a good day, he would put the sheet away and wait. On his more challenging days, he would turn around and show his answer to the students behind him, undermining the whole point of the exercise.

My interactions with my son and his teachers have taught me a few things:

• Gifted students who call out or distract other student are not disrespectful or know-it-alls, they are in the in the wrong learning environment. These students need tools to manage their learning style, not disapproval from their teachers and parents. Judging them just makes them feel bad about themselves.
• Gifted students need to be able to distinguish between those times a speaker is doing a poor job of conveying information (or is giving it at the wrong pace) and when they are having a bad day. Understanding where the problem lies allows them to demand more from themselves and their learning environment.
• A teacher who is successful at silencing an extroverted gifted child loses the opportunity to harness the students’ energy to benefit the class. Energy and passion can be infectious and a positive influence on everyone.
• Gifted students need a lot of self control to succeed in a regular classroom. When I was sitting in the lecture hall with my son, I was the one who started passing notes. At 51, I no longer had the incentive or will to sit quietly and listen. Without the support of parents and teachers, how long before our children come to the same conclusion and check out of the classroom?

I am going to take what I learned from my son and apply it to my daughter. She faces many of the same behavioral challenges he faces, but to an even more extreme degree. She chats, she sings, she calls out. She distracts other students. But now I know that these are challenges that require a group effort to solve. So I will work with the teachers to dispel any misunderstandings about whether she is a serious student or disrespectful. I will try to understand why she behaves the way she does and ask her teachers for help to provide her with the tools to channel her mind and mouth. But I will no longer critique her actions in an attempt to mold her into the ideal gifted student. My daughter needs need parents who understand and advocate for her. The world already has plenty of critics.

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

We were 5 minutes into the student-led tour and I knew the school wasn’t the right place for my son. Our guide led us down the hallway of a beautiful colonial building. The walls were lined with cork board and sheets of brightly colored paper framing announcements and pictures of professors and administrators. “No, no, no,” I thought. “He’s going to hate this.”

I was trying to think like a 16 year old boy, or at least, my 16 year old boy. I had promised myself that I would allow him to set his own criteria when evaluating colleges. I admired how he navigated class selection, extracurricular activities and the work/life balance in his high school. I would not substitute my values for his now that he was looking for a college. So I tried to see the college through my son’s eyes.

It turns out that I was right—he hated the school. While the environment looked warm and nurturing to me, he felt smothered by the level of support suggested by the cheerfully decorated hallway and confirmed by our tour guide. We made a hasty exit at the tour’s end, skipping the information session and catching an earlier train to New York City. On the way out, my son said that he was really glad we made the trip. “I didn’t know if I would recognize a bad fit if I saw one. Now I know. I can trust my instincts.”

Thus began my son’s search for a methodology to assess the colleges we were visiting. What follows are his indicators of college excellence:

1. Personal Freedom

My son is on a quest for autonomy. He wants support at college to be available and encouraged, but not conspicuous. He disapproves of schools with multiple student committees tasked to help freshmen with everything from writing to public speaking skills. If he wants help, he will ask his professor. Jesuit priests in your dorm? Minus 5 points. A campus policy that encourages students to ask professors to lunch and gives them the funds to do it? Plus 10 points.

2. Course Selection

My son asked one question at every tour: “Where can I get the course catalog?” Sure, you can get the same information online, but the sheer size of the book tells you something about the school. Once he got a hold of the catalog, he dog-eared pages and put stars next to interesting classes. Nothing says “I want to go here” more than a beat up course catalog.

Reviewing each school’s course catalog is necessary to counteract the “Quiddich Effect.” My son coined the phrase after hearing that his older brother fell in love with any school that offered Quiddich as an extracurricular activity. Later, he learned that EVERY school fields a Quiddich team (one school now offers PE credit). By reviewing the catalogs, my son found that classes that appear exotic at first glance become less extraordinary when they appear in multiple catalogs.

3. Campus Personality

Why would anyone want to go to a humorless college? Quirky behavior on campus indicates that the student body is creative, doesn’t take itself too seriously and has free time. Top marks went to the school with a pirate a cappella group named ARRR!!! This singing ensemble has a repertoire of sea chanteys and has been known to hijack other a cappella performances.

4. Weather

My oldest son is in college in Chicago. His professor came to class one cold January day with a very red eye. She said that an icy gust of wind burst a blood vessel in her eye—a gust of wind! I find this indicator perfectly appropriate. Flip flops in January will cause a college to rocket up in the rankings.

5. Diversity

My son took one picture during our trip. It was of two groups of students separated by about 20 feet. On one side was a banner with the words “Stop Israeli Apartheid” printed on it. Next to it was the Palestinian flag. On the other side was a banner with the words “Be Part of the Solution” printed on it with the Israeli flag next to it. Students passed back and forth between the two sides, standing in clusters around the speakers. My son was transfixed. He confessed that wants to debate social policy with a Log Cabin Republican and Middle East diplomacy with someone who lives there.

Here’s what isn’t on the list: a prestigious name, famous alumni, notable professors or expensive facilities. I tried to highlight these positive qualities at various times during the trip. At one point, I screamed “Look! David Brooks teaches a class called ‘Humility!’” He looked at me blankly.

We left the East Coast without finding a replacement for the number one position, currently held by a Southern California school. He said that he found number 2, 3 and 4, all interchangeable and clustered substantially below his first love.

I know that he isn’t done looking at colleges, and some of the colleges he’s seen may climb and fall in the rankings as he changes the weight of each indicator. The whole point of the trip was to gauge his interest in particular types of schools. In the end, he showed a preference for schools located in cities or large towns with around 5000 undergraduates in the school or nearby. Now that he has created a methodology to evaluate colleges, he can quickly get down to business adding and deleting colleges from his list.

Oh, and there was one more benefit that came from this trip: he found the graduate school he wants to attend.

That’s the funny thing about dreams. One almost always leads to the next.

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

It’s the only fun part of the college application process: the college trip. It’s the chance for your child to dream before the harsh realities of test scores, class rank and GPAs hit. Best of all, parents are active participants. We get to be accomplices to the dream worlds our children are imagining.

Three years ago, I eagerly anticipated bonding with my oldest son on our whirlwind tour of 6 colleges in the east and one in the Midwest. I memorialized the trip with pictures of him scraping the snow off the windshield of our rented car, waking up with bed head and sampling cannoli in Boston. He was not amused. The defining moment of our trip happened during dinner midway into the week.

“I haven’t seen anyone in so long,” he said.

I not only wasn’t bonding with him, I wasn’t even someone.

I returned from the trip with a more realistic understanding of my place in his world. I could be the travel agent, chauffeur and advisor, but I did not have a place in his dreams. The trip was his opportunity to imagine a life without me. He had already gotten a head start imagining that world.

I tried to apply the lessons I learned from my oldest son to my middle son’s college trip. We would see one school a day (with the exception of a quick trip to New York City) and travel solely by public transportation. The pace and mode of transportation would reduce my stress and allow each of us to immerse ourselves in the experience of looking for a college – separately. For my son, that meant plugging himself into the sounds of Ingrid Michelson and Idina Menzel. For me, it was flipping the pages of The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College.

My son let me set the itinerary. We could only visit 6 or 7 schools, so I made the decision to tour schools of varying size located in suburban, urban and big city locations. This would allow me to gauge his interest in particular types of schools. One of the things they had in common is that they all had strong programs in his areas of interest: International Relations, Politics, Philosophy, Economics, Public Policy and Government. The other thing they had in common is that they are all spectacularly hard to get into. That last part wasn’t one of my criteria; it just turned out that way. Or, more accurately, I didn’t make an effort to balance safety, target and reach schools.

I was breaking the first rule of the college application process: manage your child’s expectations.

I wasn’t trying to communicate an unreasonably high level of expectations to my son, although it could certainly be seen that way. I was curious. Some group of researchers decided that these were the best schools in the country and lots of students appeared to agree with this conclusion. How else do you get such low acceptance rates? Besides, isn’t this an area where a gifted kid can dream big? After my husband and I had spent years finding outlets for his passions, was this really the time to tell our son that the admission odds are set against him and he should be more realistic? Without visiting these schools, they would just be names, spoken with reverence by his friends and their parents. He would not know if the fuss was justified until he experienced these mythical institutions, however superficially.

Luckily, the idea of attending an Ivy League college had already lost some of its luster by the time we left for the East Coast. My son had fallen in love two weeks earlier. The object of his affection is a liberal arts college in Southern California. The town, the campus, the classes and the flip flop wearing student body spoke to him. He now had the gold standard against which all other schools would be compared.

If my son felt pressured by my itinerary, he didn’t complain. In fact, he said that he would have been disappointed had I not taken him to these highly selective schools. He was not ready to inventory his shortcomings. He still wanted the chance to dream. So, bring it on Harvard. Let’s see if the tingly excitement brought on by an Ivy League name can compare to the warmth generated by the Southern California sun.

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

I gave my 13-year-old daughter makeup for Christmas. I slipped powder, a makeup brush and tinted lip gloss in her stocking. At the time, I was aware of the message I might be sending, but I wanted her to stop raiding my makeup drawer when her friends come over. I didn’t want to take responsibility for the purchases, so they went into her stocking. Santa still fills the stockings.

I might have forgotten about my Christmas dilemma if I hadn’t read the New York Times op-ed piece “”  The author reviewed Google searches that used the words son or daughter. According to the author, parents are 2 Âœ times more likely to ask “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?” On the other hand, parents are much more likely to initiate searches relating to their daughters’ appearance. The piece ends with the question “How would American girls’ lives be different if parents were half as concerned with their bodies and twice as intrigued by their minds?”

I think the author makes some assumptions which cause me to question the fairness of his final question. But the article got me thinking about my daughter’s Christmas gifts. Every time I support my daughter’s need to look beautiful, I go through mental gymnastics. I know that she operates in a world where girls are judged more by their ability to entice and nurture rather than to lead and achieve. Any additional attention I pay to her looks or demeanor seems to further that imbalance. But I shouldn’t have to balance one against the other. I want her to be proud of her intellect and her appearance. It’s just that the world is so clearly rewarding her for one, I feel like it’s my job to reinforce the other.

It starts at birth. Consider Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the writer and director of “Miss Representation,” a film that exposes the mainstream media’s message that a woman’s value and power lie in her youth, beauty and sexuality and not in her capacity as a leader. As an advocate for women and the wife of Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, Ms. Newsom received gifts from the White House upon the birth of her children. She received a “Future President” t-shirt when she gave birth to her son. She received no such gift when her daughter was born.

If you think traditional news outlets do a better job of finding the balance, consider the obituary written by the New York Times upon the death of the brilliant rocket scientist Yvonne Brill on March 27, 2013. The lede read:

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. ‘The world’s best mom,’ her son Matthew said.

Don’t get me wrong, I want my daughter to find love and raise a family if she chooses. I will be happy if she learns to cook. But I would feel better about communicating my wishes to her if I knew that Robert Oppenheimer made great pancakes and was devoted to his family.

To complicate things, my daughter has a curvy figure and hair whose volume approaches that of a country western singer. So, on top of the makeup, I worry about whether the current fashion of skinny jeans and short shorts will prevent people from seeing her as a leader. All her life, I’ve been telling my daughter to exercise her own judgment and ignore the opinions of others—except if people think the leggings and Abercrombie t-shirt she’s wearing make her look too sexy. Then, she should change her clothes.

Despite my attempts to balance the messages my daughter receives, she has internalized the idea that female power is bad.

A male classmate gave a presentation on social groups in the school. Her group was identified by their name brand clothing. She felt that the description was unflattering; and she felt attacked, so she approached the boy after class.

“Why do you hate me?” she asked.

“I don’t hate you,” he said. “I hate what you represent.”

“What do I represent?”

“Social power.”

My daughter came home that evening convinced that he had called her a “mean girl.” In her mind, social power equates to mean girl status. I think if I asked most people, they would say that power cannot be trusted to a 13-year-old girl. To those people, I need to ask: why not?

We can’t forget that there is some power in how women (and men) look. While taking a negotiation class in law school, one of my male classmates confessed that he had a hard time negotiating opposite a beautiful woman. Advantage: beauty and brains.

As the mother of a gifted girl, I would like her to grow up believing that intellectual ability, power and more traditionally feminine attributes like beauty and a nurturing character are not mutually exclusive. The problem is that no matter which of these attributes I am reinforcing at any given time, I am still reacting to stereotypes. Luckily, my daughter is rather strong willed. My reactions become background noise to her truth. At 13, I am confident that she has the ability to think for herself. All those arguments I have lost over the years when going head to head with her are finally paying off.

Have you struggled with this concept while raising a gifted girl? Please share your experience in the comment section below.

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

I have a new year’s resolution. This year I am going to give up on being the parent I want to be. I am going to be the parent my children need. I know what my children need: my husband showed me.

My “schooling” happened on a weekday after I picked up my 16 year old from the BART station.

“How was your day?”

“Not very good. When dad get’s home, I need to talk to both of you.”

“Is it serious?”

â€Ôš±đČő.”

I coaxed him to tell me what happened. He refused. He silently wiped away tears on the drive home.

Later that evening, my husband and I sat on his brother’s bed as he told us what happened at school. I am going to spare you the details because I don’t think it’s fair to my son. It is only important that you know that he said something really stupid. This stupid thing took on a life of its own once it was passed from student to student in his small high school. He was called before the Dean of Student Life and told that she would be investigating the incident. If the facts warranted, he could be sent to the Disciplinary Committee and face suspension.

By the time we sat down to discuss what happened, he had moved from sad to angry. He insisted that the investigation was unfair. His friends said they had heard worse stories with no consequences for the offending student. He was in full defense mode, invoking the moral judgment of other 16 year olds.

I could feel my face harden and my posture stiffen. How could he refuse to take full responsibility? How could he justify his behavior? I was imagining my parental lecture when my husband stood up.

“I’m so sorry; it sounds like you had a really bad day. Would you like a hug?”

I was stunned. With my hard face and my clenched jaw, I watched my son walk into my husband’s arms and relax. Then my son admitted that he had been really stupid. He was very sorry.

In that moment, I realized that the smartest thing I did was remain silent. My highly anxious son spent the day beating himself up and couldn’t face his parents’ judgment when he got home. So, he decided to assume an offensive position to protect himself. He didn’t need a lecture. He needed a momentary break from his harsh inner critic.

My children are . They have easy access to the harsh critic that permanently resides in their heads. I may have even unintentionally helped give voice to these criticisms. I jumped on every “teaching moment” and provided commentary to their disappointments. I like to think of myself as a wise and fair role model, full of helpful comments and inspiring sayings. Instead, I was feeding the beast. How does “you’ll do better next time” provide new insight to a child who is disappointed with his English final? How could “see what you can accomplish when you put your mind to something?” provide any additional satisfaction to a child who is struggling with procrastination?

The anxiety that comes with my children’s sensitivity and perfectionism will forever do the dirty work of telling them that they are doing something “stupid.” My job is to remain silent, knowing that they will inevitably access the years of lectures I have delivered on every imaginable topic. I need to have faith that I’m in their head somewhere.

So my new year’s resolution is to talk less and give more hugs. And by the way, he was right. There was no violation requiring a visit to the Conduct Committee. His comment was just plain stupid—no further commentary necessary.

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

Every time I write about my kids, I’m afraid you’ll think I’m a whiner* or a braggart* or smug*. And it isn’t just when I write. I feel the same way when I’m talking with people I know. So I try not to write or talk about their accomplishments. Of course, my fear comes from my own insecurities (my husband tells me I care too much about what people think). But it also comes from the experience of seeing other parents of gifted kids get ridiculed for talking about their children. A neighbor’s child was called “the experiment” because his mother got him extra time in the kindergarten classroom. Blog posts like “” and “” berate parents for complaining about their first-world problems. Most of the time, I try to ignore these comments, put my head down and quietly work on my children’s behalf. My behavior, for the most part, gets my children what they need. The problem is that it robs me of what I need.

I need to feel connected.

I didn’t expect to find a connection when I ran into a 19-year-old boutique clerk with fuchsia hair. I immediately liked this girl after she recognized me 15 years after attending nursery school with my son. While exchanging updates, I told her about his new major: Storytelling. She got very excited and told me about a storyteller/researcher she admired. On the back of my receipt, in big loopy letters, she wrote, “.” I went home and watched the Ted Talk three times.

According to BrenĂ© Brown, connection is what gives meaning to our lives. To be connected, we must be vulnerable. The problem is that vulnerability is also at the core of shame– the belief that there is something about us that makes us unworthy of connection. So, people try to numb vulnerability through drugs, alcohol and food. Less obvious are those who seek to numb this feeling by making what is uncertain, certain; or pretending that what they do doesn’t have an effect on other people. These are the people who are convinced that parents are creating Frankenstein creatures when they get extra time in the classroom for their children. These are the bloggers who are so annoyed by the problems of others that they tell a segment of the population to “shut up.” The beauty of the last two reactions is that they feed right into my insecurities and silence me. I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t always know what to say. My children make me feel vulnerable. Maybe I should just be quiet.

My son is teaching me how to embrace vulnerability. During his ninth grade Identity and Ethnic Studies class, he made a video explaining the feelings he has about his sexual orientation. I was concerned when he posted the video on YouTube, so I checked the entry daily for unkind or cruel comments. Two thousand eight hundred views and two years later, he doesn’t have a single negative comment on his video. He allowed himself to be seen, and people responded with admiration. Fourteen years old and he was already braver than I was at 49.

So this Thanksgiving, I would like to give thanks to those people who embrace vulnerability. Thank you to the mothers who share stories of their gifted children’s personal struggles with an audience of people who may not understand or appreciate their pain. Thank you to the parents who face a potential backlash when they confront teachers and administrators to say their gifted child needs more than the school is offering. Thank you to the children who expose the personal details of their lives on the chance that some other child might benefit from their story. Thank you to the whiners, the braggarts and the smug because you make me feel connected.

*borrowed from the comment section of a blog about parents of gifted children.

Where do you find community as the parent of a gifted child? Please share in the comment section below.

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

My middle son is a junior in high school. It’s time for him to start thinking about college. To help the process along, his school invited a speaker from to speak to the parents and students. She reminded the parents that the search should be student-centered. To make her point she told stories about over-involved parents who push their children aside during college fairs in order to speak to the admissions officers and those who get their pronouns confused when talking about the application process, as in, “We are still in the process of writing our ±đČőČőČčČâČő.”

I have never pushed my children, and I am very conscious of which pronoun I use. That said, I was very involved in my oldest son’s college search, and I plan to do the same for my middle son. My experience has given me sympathy for the parents she ridiculed. It’s a fine line between over-involved helicopter parent and helpful consultant. But whichever side of the line you fall, there will be consequences for your child and a corresponding label of their own.

My involvement in my children’s educational decisions is not unlike that of many parents of gifted kids. For the past 10 years, I’ve been helping my children get the resources they need to challenge themselves and feed their passions. In the past, that meant online courses, tutors, extracurricular activities and schools. Two years ago, it meant helping my oldest son find a college. It wasn’t until he began his college search that I understood how my involvement has influenced the way he thinks about his own education.

“I want a school with a good visual arts program, but I don’t want it to focus solely on the object.”

He wanted to paint, draw or sculpt at a school that didn’t focus on the painting, drawing or sculpture. If you are confused, so was I. Even he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. But that didn’t prevent me from searching for this elusive school. I (yes, I am aware of the pronoun I am using) looked through course catalogues for visual art classes with unique titles, eschewing schools that only offered the vanilla “Painting 101” or “Drawing Techniques.” I looked at their capital expenditures on the arts and made charts detailing their core requirements. We visited colleges on the East Coast and in Southern California where I asked more questions than my son during the campus tours. The accordion files I created for potential colleges bulged.

My search led him to the University of Chicago. He was intrigued by the classes titled “Visual Language: On Time and Space” and “Performing Tableware.” He enrolled last year. When my husband and I delivered him to the campus, we knew that the school would provide a rich academic experience for him. But he wasn’t done personalizing his education.

At the beginning of his second year, he decided that the majors available at University of Chicago were limiting. So instead of settling for a major that mostly provided what he wanted, he decided to invent his own. He is going to declare a major in Interdisciplinary Studies. This do-it-yourself major allows him to combine studies in the humanities. He is going to craft a major in the fields of anthropology, visual arts, creative writing and psychology. The tentative title of his major is “Storytelling.”

Just as there are contrasting labels that can be applied to me, you may be tempted to apply one to my son. On the positive side, you could say that he is self-actualizing. On the negative: he feels entitled. While I will argue the former, I will admit that the latter also applies. My interference in his educational experiences led him to believe that he can expect a personalized education plan that feeds his passions, wherever that may take him. This may mean that he will enter a work force that does not value his efforts and that he will spend his twenties living in our basement. On the other hand, he may have developed skills that allow him to pursue a career his father and I have never imagined. After all, there are people making a living creating Google Doodles. Who knew that was a career 10 years ago?

I believe that my intentions are good and that my behavior furthers my children’s goals. My middle son is going to test that belief. An extraordinary math talent, he doesn’t want to pursue math in college. He wants the educational equivalent of Sid Meyer’s Civilization game series—a program that combines politics, economics, history and philosophy. I am going to do my best not to slip in a math component, but I can’t guarantee my behavior at this point.

I know that I am both over-involved and helpful. I am certain that my children are seen as both entitled and on the path to self-actualization. Which label you apply to my children and to me depends on your perspective. I suppose the only judgment that really matters is my children’s. If later in life they are leading happy and fulfilling lives, then you can call us whatever you’d like.

Have you struggled with the fine line between helpful and over-involved? Please share your experience in the comment section below.

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

There is a right way to approach your school work and a wrong way. The right way is to plan ahead, break the project down into manageable pieces, allow enough time to proofread and edit your work and make sure the final work product looks good. The wrong way is to wait to begin until the night before the project is due, handwrite it (neatly at first, and nearly illegibly by the end) on the pages of a notebook and stay up all night completing it. My middle son took the second approach. But this isn’t a story about getting my son to do his homework the right way. This is about learning to accept his way.

To properly tell the story of my son’s “wrong way” project, I have to go back to the spring, when I attended the with my son. All of the attendees completed a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and learned about their personality types and their underlying characteristics. The facilitator asked the parents and students to line up on various sides of the conference room to join others with the same “type”. For the most part, my son and I were on the opposite sides of the room (no surprise). Most of our differences I understood, except one: how we deal with the outside world. I am a “judging” type. He is a “perceiving” type. This difference turns out to be a big one for us. Judging types like to plan and prefer an orderly life. Perceiving types are flexible and open to new experiences. Perceivers are enervated by deadlines. They take in information until the last minute and then complete their work in a burst of energy. Once I realized that my son was not going to share my love of lists and schedules, I stopped monitoring his work habits. I gave up on encouraging him to complete his school work in the right way.

The way my son completed his final project for his English class embodied his perceiving nature. The prompt for the project was “What is your American Voice?” My son decided to write his memoir. It would be in the form of a diary, written in a journal. He chose to write it in a red leather journal he purchased on a family vacation in France. He began the project the evening before it was due. He completed the 86 page memoir during his study hall, an hour before his English class.

My son was anxious about revealing so much of himself in a school project, so he sent his teacher an email expressing his concern. After reading my son’s work, the teacher emailed him back, and this is what he said:

It’s lovely, really
Your book is remarkably well-written for someone who just sat down and started writing. I guess writing isn’t ALWAYS rewriting. You have a natural gift for storytelling.

In this instance his natural work style worked for him. This is often the case. His rapid intellectual processing, long attention span and excellent memory allow him to produce quality work in a condensed period of time. There are instances, however, when his last minute burst of energy and inspiration isn’t enough. Last week he started running with the cross country team after not running all summer. On the third day, he injured his knee. His body was telling him what his English teacher did not: some tasks require the slow and steady approach.

My husband talked with my son and tried to make the connection between his preferred way of doing things and the possible consequences of his work style. His English project worked out because he is a good writer and he spent weeks crafting the story in his head. He likes to immerse himself in a burst of creative concentration. He also knew the teacher well. His knee reminded him that he cannot always be successful doing what is most natural for him. Running, like other skills (for example, music and foreign languages), require steady and persistent effort.

Last spring at the CDB Seminar I learned that there was a whole group of people who share what I initially thought was the wrong way of doing things. And it works for them, most of the time. Understanding this helped me let go of the need to organize, schedule and generally oversee my son’s life. It also helped my son identify his default work style. Over time, he will need to discover when his work style works for him and when it doesn’t so that he can be conscious about the need to modify it when circumstances require. I’m not really sure I can help him with this. As flexible as he thinks he is, he’s not really interested in trying things my way. In the meantime, I’m hoping that any further insights he may gain will not involve a visit to the emergency room.

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

“That’s not fair.” It’s my daughter’s motto. It is usually followed by a list of reasons why my request (to walk the dog or clean her room) is unfair and unreasonable. Her reasons are complicated, and I sometimes have difficulty understanding them. Her excellent memory allows her to reach back several weeks to describe previous events and conversations that provide evidence of the irrationality of my request. When she does this, I’m at a loss. I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast.

My daughter expects the world to operate in a way that is entirely fair and logical. She hates inconsistency. In her world, the rules are the same for everyone—children and adults alike. A rule and the intent behind the rule must match precisely. She demands precision from herself and those around her. The thought process she uses to support her positions is complex. I understand that there is a phrase to describe this behavior: “logical imperative.”

My daughter has a strong logical imperative. The way she expects the world to operate is often at odds with the way the world (and her family) actually operates. When this happens she argues. She will argue with teachers, coaches, and most especially, me. She is on a quest to mold the world into a place that makes sense. She uses her extreme sense of fairness, her precision and her intensity to accomplish the task. To borrow a concept from The Legend of Zelda, this is her Triforce. With this power, she is likely to rule the world.

Her drive toward world domination begins at home. Small battles occur in our house daily. Most of the arguments happen when my husband and I try to pull parental rank on her. “Because I am the parent” never works with her. Aesthetic judgments need to be backed up by reason. Why should she make her bed when she will need to get into it again that evening? Even federal regulations are open to interpretation. It makes no sense for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to require 12-year-olds to ride in the rear of the car when she (at 12) is as big as her 80 year old great aunt who sits in the front seat.

Blind obedience to a coach has never been her strong suit. I have seen her shout to her coach from the soccer field to let him know she was already “on it.” At circus camp, my daughter took on the juggling instructor and “won.” Already and excellent juggler, she rotated into the juggling group on the first day of camp. The instructor established “clubs” to incentivize the campers. Joining a club meant signing a poster with the words “25 Club” or “50 Club” written on the top. When a camper juggles 3 balls for 25 rotations, she joins the “25 Club.” Fifty rotations got you into the “50 Club.” On her first try, my daughter juggled 3 balls for 50 rotations. Her coach told her to sign her name on the paper that said “50 Club.” My daughter also wanted to join the “25 Club.” Her coach said no. After arguing that this wasn’t fair, she proceeded to juggle for 25 rotations and drop the balls. He still said no. She made her case every day until the day her good friend graduated from the 25 Club to the 50 Club. She finally reached the limits of her (and subsequently, her coach’s) tolerance. She demanded that she be placed in both clubs. Her coach finally relented and order was restored in the world.

While you might find it difficult to be my daughter’s parent, coach or teacher, you would be lucky to be her friend. I saw that last spring during a volleyball game. Her 6th grade team was losing badly during the first set. The coach pulled them aside after the set and belittled them. According to the coach, the team was not serious. They were goofing around. No wonder they were getting slaughtered, they weren’t even trying. They were going to lose. My daughter sat through the diatribe quietly and then caught the eye of her best friend. Her best friend’s face was bright red with frustration and embarrassment. That was the incentive my daughter needed to confront the 60-year-old male coach. She told him that what he was saying was both unfair and unproductive. He was not motivating the team, he was demeaning them. Just because they were having fun didn’t mean they were not serious. They returned to the game and won the last 2 sets. He later apologized.

My daughter will need to learn how to walk the fine line between the fight for fairness and act of letting go. I say the same serenity prayer for her that I say for myself:

God, grant her the serenity to accept the things she cannot change,
The courage to change the things she can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

While my daughter’s insistence on intellectual and moral honesty can make it difficult to find serenity in our home, I take pleasure in her fierce desire to hold the world around her to a higher standard. As the years go by, I will watch with fascination as she tries to make it comply.

Do your kids grapple with issues of justice and “fairness”? Please share in the comment section below!

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

My oldest son didn’t get his first letter grade until he was a senior in high school. His elementary and middle schools did not give grades. In high school, the students only received a single GPA. His assessments were in the form of red lined papers or handwritten comments. By the time he received his first letter grade in the fall of his senior year of high school, it was too late to make any difference; the letters had no meaning and they did not motivate him.

Despite the lack of external grade motivation, my son worked hard and did very well in middle school and high school. He didn’t start that way. In elementary school, he daydreamed. He did only what was required of him in the classroom and no more. I had to ask myself, how did my oldest son go from a daydreaming 5th grader to the top of his high school class without the hammer or carrot of a letter grade? Where did he find the motivation to do well in school?

While looking for an answer, I ran across an . According to this article, motivation is derived from three critical elements: Autonomy, Value and Competence. Research suggests that you will have more motivation if you feel in charge, feel capable and find meaning in the activity. With this new framework, I thought about my son’s last 8 school years.

In elementary school, I felt as though I had to do a lot of prodding because he showed so little initiative. I didn’t allow him to have autonomy. So, that particular element had to be satisfied elsewhere. The second element, value, had to come from the rewarding feeling of a job well done—right? He didn’t agree. He found no satisfaction in an error-free worksheet. That element also had to come from somewhere else. All I had to work with were his feelings of competence. Unfortunately, he felt most competent when doing work he could master quickly, and he shrank from more difficult challenges. Somehow, I needed him to get out of his comfort zone.

So, I know it wasn’t the grades or my parenting that provided the catalyst for my son’s change in behavior. What made the difference? I talked to my son and asked him how he developed the motivation to excel at school. His comments all focused on how his learning experience changed.

Project Based Learning

Project based learning gave my son a sense of autonomy and imbued his work with value. Allowing my son to have a choice in designing a project and the ability to display his unique vision was the key to helping him find meaning in his work. For example, my son designed and built a scale model of a solar house in 6th grade. The project spanned math and science. He used angle geometry to compute ideal overhangs and created a budget for the construction. He studied how the location of the sun in the sky varies in different places and times. He even tested the effectiveness of his design at the Pacific Energy Center‘s heliodon in San Francisco. 7 years later, my son still has the project in his bedroom.

Inspiring Teachers

How do you get a child to value information that he perceives has nothing to do with his day to day life? You either help him find meaning or introduce him to someone who finds it incredibly meaningful. My son’s history teacher was so passionate about the colonists that he would pound on desks and turn over chairs during a lesson. Who knew the puritans could elicit so much passion? His middle school writing teacher, an aspiring novelist himself, provided intriguing, open-ended character prompts as jumping off points for student work. While the teacher provided the inspiration, my son created work that was all his own. His self-evaluation said it all:

“When I’m writing on my own, my work is my own. My writing belongs to my world, slowly weaving meaning in the threads of my life
 My god, I’m building a world, not a string of imitations.”

Meaningful Feedback

The third element, competence, was enhanced by the feedback provided by the teachers. In the detailed written evaluations by his teachers, my son discovered that he was admired for the generosity he showed his classmates as he shared insights and techniques. He was celebrated for his curiosity and ingenuity. When he received constructive criticism, he knew what to do to improve, increasing his sense of accomplishment and at the same time giving him a sense of control over his progress. These words of encouragement and criticism did more for him than an A. His confidence grew with each evaluation.

We all know that the process of learning can be inherently motivating, but as parents, we feel that we have little influence over the process. So, we focus on outcomes. But we do have some influence over what classes they take and why. We can choose to talk about what they got on a test or how they felt about what they were learning. I was put to the test when my son wanted to learn how to perform on the trapeze instead of taking the AP prep class and exam. He’s still performing on the trapeze in college and decided to stop taking math classes. Despite my misgivings, I hope that by allowing him to choose classes and activities that he values and that make him feel competent, he will end up motivated, productive and happy.

What motivates your kids? Please share in the comment section below.

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