Birthday Madness: When Intensities Collide

My triplets turned five last Friday. To say that they were bouncing off the walls and swinging from the chandeliers last week is clichéd and not entirely true; it has been two years since I last came into the kitchen and found one of them hanging from the chandelier. But, they were crashing into everything, crawling on the tables, and melting down in emotional puddles.

Most kids get excited about their birthdays. Intense kids get more so. Intense triplets go wild. It was like sharing the house with small monkeys pumped full of amphetamines.

Meanwhile, hiding in his room, was my eldest son, seeking refuge from the storm and wallowing in self-pity. He is just as intense as they are. At Christmas, he leads the wild rampages. But when they have a birthday and he doesn’t, that same intensity leads him to conclude that he is unloved and never will be.

I was not able to help them manage their stresses. I was overwhelmed myself. In addition to wanting to make the birthday celebrations perfect for the triplets, I was preparing to submit pages of my novel to my writing instructor for a final critique. My nerves were on edge. My patience was thin.

The morning of the party, I was baking cupcakes with my manuscript next to the mixing bowl, still making corrections. The kids were weaving through the kitchen, sometimes elated, sometimes in tears, always emotional. The triplets had been wearing new clothes from their grandmother for two days and exploded en masse when I insisted they could not wear them to the party because they were dirty. If I was going to get back to baking and editing, I was going to have to wash the clothes before the party – an extra task on a day that already held too much.  I did eventually manage to wash and dry the birthday clothes and frost the cupcakes.

In the last moments before driving to the party venue, my husband loaded the kids into the car while I finished making changes to my manuscript and emailed the final version to my instructor.

I was exhausted and the party hadn’t even started.

The kids had a great time at the party, but I was not a good host. I had no reserves to draw on to make conversation with the parents I did not know. I let the first child leave before I remembered we had loot bags for the guests. I introduced my husband to the people he already knew, but not the people he didn’t know. I’m not sure how I made it through.

By the time I got home, I was crashing hard, and it would take me two days to recover. The triplets still had the exhilaration of present opening and the depression of realizing that important items on their wish lists had not appeared in the pile of gifts before they would eventually sleep, but they woke the next day almost recovered. My eldest had a day or two of recovery before he would find some emotional balance again.

Two days post party, my eldest taught his siblings how to play one of the board games they had been given and all was laughter and fun. After the triplets had gone to bed, there was even time for a mother-son game of Magic: The Gathering.

Somehow, we had all survived intact.

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Kate can usually be found writing about writing at www.katearmsroberts.wordpress.com.

What? I’m So Weird Because I’m Highly Gifted?

All my life, I have felt different, weird, not like other people. I knew I was smart, I wore my heart on my sleeve, I handled criticism very badly, and I thought about more things, more deeply than most people around me. But, I didn’t know why. And then, a year or two ago, I found a label that fits. And I still can’t believe it.

It turns out that I am highly gifted with underachievement issues stemming from Overexcitabilities, Perfectionism, multipotentiality, lazy work habits due to being under-challenged as a child, and Imposter Syndrome.

I first suspected after reading the following in “The 10 most commonly asked questions about highly gifted children” by Kathi Kearney:

• Many gifted adults today have long had a nagging sense that they were “different” or didn’t fit in a school, but did not know the reason why.
• For many complex reasons, exceptionally gifted children are not always high achievers.
• Gifted girls may let their abilities go “underground” during junior high school, and may adapt to their environments in other ways so that they will not appear gifted.
• Of all the special problems of general conduct which the most intelligent children face, I will mention five, which beset them in early years and may lead to habits subversive of fine leadership: (1) to find enough hard and interesting work at school; (2) to suffer fools gladly; (3) to keep from becoming negativistic toward authority; (4) to keep from becoming hermits; (5) to avoid the formation of habits of extreme chicanery

After reading that article, I found myself looking into the differences between moderately gifted individuals and those who are more highly gifted. And I found myself revisiting the intellectual achievements of my life. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it so say that in addition to other suggestive but not easily quantifiable data points, I discovered that my score on the SAT, for which I did not study, is just shy of the admission requirements for at least one high-IQ society open to people with documented IQ scores in the top 99.9 percentile, putting me squarely into at least the highly gifted category.

I still don’t really believe it, but every time I read an article about the vulnerabilities of highly gifted children as opposed to moderately gifted children, I recognize myself and wonder whether I could have been raised and educated in a way that didn’t leave so many scars. I had started hiding in plain sight by the time I was 5 and it took me 30 years of underachievement to understand why.

I want to know, what can we do to encourage identification of highly-gifted children before they start shutting themselves down?

Some Challenges of Being Gifted and a Parent

If you search the web for “gifted parent,” you will find many resources aimed at parents of gifted children. It is much harder to find resources to address parenting as a gifted adult.

Parenting as a gifted adult can have challenges that relate specifically to the giftedness of the parents.

For example, observe how the 5 categories of intensity known as Dabrowski’s Overexcitabilities might make parenting more challenging.

• Psychomotor: Children crave the physical and mental presence of their parents. As a parent with psychomotor overexcitabilites, slowing down enough to really notice what is going on with your children may be challenging. Or maybe it is hard to slow down enough for kids to follow what you are saying. Maybe you have have trouble speaking in the short, direct sentences that are easy for developing minds to process. Maybe it is hard to stop talking and let the kids have a chance to speak.

• Intellectual: Parents with intellectual overexcitabilities run the risk of analyzing everything their children do, never being able to simply enjoy a moment. Reading all the parenting books and the scientific research on education and parenting may be interesting, but if it detracts from paying attention to the child in front of you, is it helpful? Or imagine the parent who when asked a question says, “Let’s look that up” and reads the relevant Wikipedia page and all of it’s hyperlinks even though the child’s question was answered in the first sentence. What about the need to feed an exhausted adult brain with something intellectually challenging?

• Emotional: General parenting advice often starts with advice to maintain your calm presence at all times in order to provide a stable ground for your child. Emotional overexcitabilities make that exceedingly hard advice to follow.

• Sensual: Hypersensitivity to sounds can make challenging young people a challenge. Children make noise, their toys often make noise. Children are messy; parents with heightened aesthetic responses or sensitivity to textures or smells can find that mess stressful. Finding art and music that appeals to children and parents may be tough.

• Imaginational: A parent who can always imagine the worst-case scenario may become over-protective out of fear.

Overexcitabilities are not the only characteristics of gifted parents that can prove challenging. This is only the beginning. There are few enough resources to help struggling gifted adults out there at all. Finding parenting specific resources is almost impossible.

I am curious to know what wisdom you either have or would like to get about the impact of parental giftedness on parenting. Maybe we can become a resource for those who need advice or companionship. Please share in the comments.

Intellectual Overexcitability in Action

To be intellectually overexcitable according to Dabrowski’s theory of Overexcitabilities is to love an intellectual challenge and to be driven to solve problems, ask probing questions, and engage in theoretical anaylsis.

This weekend, my parents and I had a conversation that demonstrated how these intellectual passions can manifest themselves. Between us, we have 7 degrees from Oxford, Harvard, Dartmouth, Cornell, London School of Economics, and the University of Sussex. I expect our average IQ is at least 140. My mother relaxes by doing the most difficult cryptic crossword puzzles she can find. I also love puzzles. When my mother and I took up Sudoku, my father became interested in questions like ‘How many Sudoku puzzles are there with only one solution?” It is a family with intellectual overexcitabilities.

Last weekend, the three of us took my four kids to the Ontario Science Centre. The Ontario Science Centre is large, busy, and loud. Before the kids could settle into exploring any one activity, they had to adjust to the crowds and the volume. They rushed through the building without seeming to take anything in. Eventually we arrived at a contained area with familiar exhibits and they began to relax.

From here, the adults tempted them into new areas where they spent time interacting with new exhibits. Eventually, they absorbed all that they could take and started running around again. This was our cue to finish up and make our way to the car.

I was exhausted, having spent four hours counting children, confirming my parents could see the ones I couldn’t, and managing my own sensitivities to the fluorescent lights and the volume. The children were drained and zoned out for the drive home, watching the world pass by at highway speed, and hardly talking. If I had been the only adult in the car, I would have driven meditatively, focusing only on the driving, relaxing into the present moment, and enjoying the silence from the back seats.

But, I was not alone.

My father remarked that the Science Centre doesn’t reflect his definition of “science,” and we were off. I was re-energized. The adults in the car dove into a passionate conversation involving these topics:

• What understanding of science is embedded in the design of the Science Centre?
• Is the Science Centre’s purpose to teach science or to stimulate interest?
• How did we learn science?
• What is my father’s definition of science?
• Does defining science as “a body of knowledge based on evidence and models” sufficiently encompass our understanding of scientific methodologies or must acceptable forms of evidence be defined?
• How does one teach methods of scientific research?
• Why are high school laboratory curricula frustrating to bright students interested in science?
• What sort of data did we falsify for lab reports in high school when our experiments didn’t work as expected, but we knew what the results should have been?
• Did the science curriculum we had as students give short shrift to engineering?
• How are science and engineering different?
• How do visits to the Science Centre fit into a homeschooler’s science curriculum?

The conversation was fast and emotionally charged. The most in-depth part of the discussion focused on the definition of science, and we did not settle the question of whether one could simply mention evidence and models or whether one had to define what constituted acceptable evidence and models.

We concluded that the design of the exhibits we had seen reflected a focus on engineering, not science; playing with the exhibits could teach concepts of repeatability and variation while encouraging the kids to explore and ask questions; teaching scientific methods in school is difficult to do well; and the Science Centre is good for encouraging kids to experiment, notice patterns, and ask questions, but isn’t sufficient as a science curriculum.

30 minutes after my father’s initial comment, we pulled off the highway, and the conversation shifted to other topics, like what to have for dinner.

This is typical of conversations within my family: intellectual, passionate, reasoned, and covering a wide variety of related topics. We can’t let a topic go. When someone wonders aloud why something is the way it is or how it might be different, we have an almost obsessive need to investigate.

And that is Intellectual Overexcitability in Action.