Raising Future Adults

From my last post on this site: One recurring theme: Bright kids of a certain age are just smart enough to jump to crazy conclusions rooted in lots of knowledge for their age but little real world experience. This seems common in the roughly toddler to preschool age range. I can readily think of a few examples of this from my oldest son's early years. The easiest one to tell is his ladybug freak out. He was about four years old and we were living in a third-floor walk-up in Germany. There were some really tall trees outside his bedroom window and one day there was a small ladybug invasion in his bedroom. He was inexplicably just terrified of the handful of yellow-and-black ladybugs on his bedroom wall. I actually laughed out loud because it seemed comical, but then I took him out of the room and closed the door and made sure he was protected from being around these bugs even though they were harmless. I kept the door shut to his room for a few days and he slept in my room u...

I began blogging because I was a homeschooling mom and I was on a small email list of a few hundred people called TAGMAX. It is part of The TAG Project and is aimed at providing support for parents homeschooling their gifted kids. In practice, TAGMAX was filled with parents of children who were especially challenging to both parent and educate. These children were either Twice Exceptional [1], highly gifted or both and were, thus, poorly served by school gifted programs.[2] In many cases, the parents had turned to homeschooling as a last resort, after all else had failed. Gifted homeschoolers are distinctly unlike the anti-intellectual religious crowd that so many people associate with homeschooling and which seems to give homeschooling a really terrible reputation overall. I was actually there to support my own efforts to teach my kids under circumstances where online support was very important to me but I ended up being a source of support to others and, for a time, was part...