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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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."

Kurt Vonnegut says it more eloquently than I ever could:

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.