Well . . . . since I know the kid in question, I'd argue that I'm a better judge of his needs and whether school meets them, which seems much more complicated than whether he can check out by playing chess in his head. He happens to love playing chess in his head, in addition to loving recess, gym, music, art, subject acceleration in reading and math, his friends, more recess (there were three per day), and the GT pullout where he did powerpoint presentations, research reports on famous scientists, and lots of fiction reading and poetry with high level discussions. I suspect kids with a high level of optimism and ability to self-occupy through thought cope better with the down times in school than most, which hardly indicates that school doesn't meet their needs or that they have a lower LOG or that they are learning bad habits. I consider his ability to deal with the limited frustration by finding other ways to occupy himself a mark of maturity on his part and I encourage it. (It has some real benefits. He had a dictionary at his desk last year and yep . . he loves reading the dictionary too . . . and now his vocabulary is bigger than mine. Caught him explaining the difference between a cutlass and saber to his brother the other day, and he precisely defined ironic for his father after using it correctly which freaked out his professor dad who finds few college students can use it correctly.) Maybe he'll need his check out ability less in his new HG+ magnet situation . . . . but I still can check out in my head and write papers, make lists, and otherwise occupy myself usefully when I'm commuting, or in slow lectures, or waiting at the DMV. Even in professional life with a cohort of seriously HG folks around me, I encounter slow situations and I still occupy myself in thought . . . . something I suspect I started learning in first grade.

I totally agree with this. It's two years after I first really started thinking about GT stuff and reading about it and it took me a long time to decide that rarity didn't matter. Knowing that the kids are all GT and a variety of GT flavors doesn't help me figure out how well they will adapt to school. For us, it's just all about the kid and the fit and that seems more related to personality than to GT-ness in my house.

Regarding testing -- I had to pay for it this year for application to an HG magnet and it just about killed me. Although I love numbers as much as Dottie, I kept thinking about all the fun things I could have done with that money. It was a *lot* of money and we could have gone to . . . . . well . . . . somewhere at least!!

OH gratified....I so envy you!!! I've tried to teach my son to check out like that but nope ... and I'm beginning to realize that it's more about DS's personality and his dissatisfaction with school than IQ. He's MG I think rather than HG but he's quite miserable...or at least he says to me...teacher says he's very happy during the day. I think he should have skipped K and then he'd likely be Ok now or at least, better. I do notice he is getting lazy intellectually and DH even remarked about it so that really worries me.

I didn't mean to offend you. Obviously I wasn't suggesting that I know the child better, and I certainly didn't intend to attack your choices. I know how hard this is. I'm sorry if that's how it came out.

What I *did* mean to say is that in general, I believe that "compliant" and "served" aren't necessarily the same thing, and I think it pays to consider the distinction between the two.

I "checked out" in school by reading novels behind my textbook and writing notes to friends (and boyfriends, as I got older). I happened to love that, too, but I recognize now that it wasn't necessarily good for me. That ability to entertain myself serves me in line at the bank, too, but I think it also left me underchallenged and not good at self-starting for a lot of years. As a result of my experiences and even worse ones from my DH, I don't think that sort of scenario is necessarily harmless.

My opinion. No offense intended. Feel free to ignore.

Hey gratified. I'd like to present a contrary opinion concerning the coping skills you all are talking about. Upfront, I'll say that I respect your position and your child is obviously doing really well!

IMHO, checking out like you describe; I'll refer to it as behavioral disengagement, cause that's what I think it is.
I had a similar reaction to school and used behavioral disengagement as a coping strategy. It's important to note that probably due to my temperment and personality, I used this strategy to the EXTREME!

People use many different coping strategies to deal with stressful situations. Active coping strategies are usually thought of as most healthy. Behavioral disengagement is thought of as an avoidance coping strategy and generally not as healthy as active coping skills.

My sister, who majored in psychology, agrees with you. She feels that a child like yours or mine uses disengagement as a healthy way to cope with an uncomfortable situation in regard to the school setting. Because she is older, she insists that she is right and I am wrong.

But because of my experience, I got very involved with the school when I discovered that DD5 was disengaging in K. Maybe it has more to do with temperment when it comes down to whether or not its helpful or harmful.

I did think this article was pretty interesting. Here's the part that caught my eye, and then the link:


"Medscape: Who is most at risk for long-lasting effects from this or similar tragedies?

Dr. Silver: Importantly, our study assessed mental health history before the tragic events of Sept. 11 occurred. As expected, those who had a history of anxiety or depressive disorders or other psychological problems were most likely to have persistent symptoms in response to Sept. 11. What surprised me, though, was the potency of coping strategies as a predictive factor. Those who reported behavioral disengagement were at greatest risk, above and beyond other factors like psychosocial history. We didn't even find a strong effect for normally protective factors, like higher income or social supports. Income was not related to frequency of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, but subjects with higher income were less likely to report psychological distress."

Sorry, I've removed the link as you need to be able to sign in as a user.


I've read that many highly gifted people suffered from p.t.s.d. after 9/11 whether or not they were there during the attack. I had to wonder if there was a connection because I'm quite sure many highly gifted students defer to disengagement repetitively during school hours for many years.

Anyhooo....just another perspective.

'Neato

It looks like I need a login to get the article so I haven't even read it. So I have no evidence, articles or anything, but I think there must be a difference between entertaining oneself during life's inevetiable down times and what you refer to as behavorial disengagement.

I see what gratified's child is doing is much more in lines with self-comforting and self-control (which are positive traits)rather than checking-out.

The reason that I suspect that giftedness might play a part is because DS wasn't just crying not to go to school, that I would have considered a behavior issue we would have gotten to the bottom of, but ultimately dealt with it differently. He was begging me to make them teach him "real things", those were his exact words "Mom, please, make them teach me real things!". When we brought him home he was so desperate to learn that we had school for 3-4 hours a day because he would ask to keep going with a lesson or for me to keep talking to him and he finished a years worth of math in less than 2 months. It's slowed down some, but he still is scheduled to finish a semester's worth of Singapore math after a month and a half. He still finds science concepts and researches them exhaustively. If he continues like this, I really don't know how a school would accommodate it. He takes the introduction of a math concept, asks a couple of questions and suddenly he's just figured out the concept for the next 2 years worth of work. He is not a high achieving people pleaser, he doesn't sit down and shut up easily (I know I've been begging for the last 6 years, lol).

So, I guess what I mean by "never thriving in school" isn't so much how high his IQ is, but how he learns coupled with his personality. Occasional boredom he can handle, but the chronic lack of mental stimulation he had in Kindergarten was too much. He had done fine in preschool for 3 years, but he had expected school to be different. He had expected that he was going to learn something every day. And at 6 he's jaded and completely disenchanted with school, he regularly tells me he's not going back until he starts college. If this is a personality issue, I feel like at some point he'll mature out of it and we can work around it, if it's an issue of giftedness then he's never going to outgrow it and he'll have to learn how to manage it, but if it's a combination of the 2 (which is my guess), then I'm not sure I see a regular classroom with his age peers ever working.

My question (rhetorical) at this point is how much is gifted and how much is personality? Am I going to spend the next 12 years trying to play mediator between the world and him, sitting on this fence trying to explain the world to him and trying to explain him to the world? Or is there a light at the end of the tunnel, that I can hope one day he'll finally understand what I mean when I say "You can't change other people, you can only change yourself" and "You catch more flies with honey than vinegar"? Giftedness vs. personality.

I'm not sure if any of this makes sense, but I've been editing it for a couple of hours now, so off it goes

I wonder if this is one of those things parents just need to do a gut check on to get a sense on where their kid lies and if their coping skills are leading them down a bad path, or if they still have a strong work ethic and enthusiasm for learning. It certainly is no one-size-fits-all situation.

I definitely employed the techniques 'Neato did to survive school. Looking back, I may have been clinically depressed during my elementary school career. I think this has definitely made me hyper sensitive to my kids school careers.

I personally just don't assume it's harmless, whatever you call it.

That's not to say that I assume it's harmful either, BTW. Just that I think the question is important to ask in the generic sense. (None of this is really aimed at gratified. As I said, I never intended to second-guess. I would never presume.)

It's possible this sort of coping strategy is positive but the situation that requires the coping strategy is not, at least not in the long term. I think that would be my take on it, FWIW.

Important, too, is the fact that my parents and teachers always assumed it was a positive thing that I stayed busy and undisruptive, I think. A big part of this is my own rejection of that assumption.

ACS,

There is no diagnosis going on here, obviously!

You call it what you will, I'll call it what I will, it's subjective.