Appropriate Expectations 4 Kids: Do You Have Any?

mathmom
Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:32:13 +0000

I think I was pretty hands off. We made it clear we expected our kids to use their intellectual abilities, but we were not going to spend our days nagging them or micromanaging homework.

My older son is brilliant, but very one sided. In high school he whipped through his homework (doing well enough to graduate in the top 2% of his class), and then spent hours on the computer. I looked in often enough to know that there was a lot of gaming, but also a substantial amount of time reading about Linux and learning to program in Linux as well as some time where he was earning money programming. I was a little worried he might not know how to work hard once he got to college, but he chose a college where he could spend 90% of his time doing computer programming, math or physics and he’s had no problem continuing to excel, but putting a lot more hours into official learning.

Younger son’s gifts are harder to pin down and he had some minor LD issues, but we used pretty much the same approach. He’s taking two notoriously difficult courses and has admitted that he’s struggling a bit to keep up with all the work. But it’s clear to me from conversations that he is working to the best of his abilities and learning a huge amount. He’s a pretty social kid and I thought it was possible that he might get distracted by the party scene at college, but in fact I think he’s not being social enough.

I think I was lucky that neither kid seems to be interested in drinking or experimenting with drugs and that they fell in with a crowd with the same attitudes. I don’t consider it superior parenting on my part really.