How to stop my brother from crying...

compmom
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:23:07 +0000

I do not agree that most crying is tantrums. Most crying is done privately, and is a healthy method of staying in touch with oneself. People who don’t cry tend to be shut off.

I think that the poster who mentioned problems as being “wired” in the brain of gifted kids made a good point. This means that parents who are parenting benignly could still find a gifted kid having some distress. The parents need to learn pro-active skills that many parents never need to have, in order to deal with the situation of giftedness (and some of these skills were described well by that same poster, meaning a lot more work and a lot more consciousness than most parents need to have). Help for the family that is non-blaming would probably work best: I don’t think they should be judged too much from online comments.

We raised our kids to value learning versus grades. Hard to do, and the system and our culture made it harder. When they came home with report cards, I did not look at them for days. I told them that I didn’t need a report card to know they were working hard, that I could see it for myself, and that I was glad they were enjoying some of it.

Now in college, they don’t actually look at their grades when available online, but spend vacations reading more on the subjects they just studied. To me, that means their education has been successful, much more than an “A.”

There are cultural differences here, and perhaps this idea violates the culture of the original poster’s family, but reminding children that grades are not really the point, but just a measure of how much learning is happening, might help.

I also kept my kids out of competitions in the early grades, such as the reading competitions where the top reader gets a prize, etc. I told my kids that reading was its own reward, and I told the teacher to please keep them off the poster on the wall that tracked the number of books read. Many kids read short, easy books to rack up points, which was competely ridiculous. Kids motivations get so distorted by all the short-term external motivators in schools: emphasizing inner motivations can help a lot over time.

All kids have tough years when they are emotional. It is hard to tell how bad this really is. I would think that the younger boy must miss his brother, and the change when a sibling leaves can be so disorienting- even more so in this case because the older son took care of his brother and they seem so close. I’ll bet that with a little help, some advice for the parents on parenting a gifted child, and some time for adjustment with the brother at college, that things could very well turn out fine.