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 of the pro bono staff for The TAG Project. My emails often got strong reactions from people, mostly positive ones.
I got a lot of feedback that suggested to me that there was something special about what I had to say about dealing effectively and humanely with very difficult children. At the time, I didn't really understand why my anecdotes, advice and suggestions seemed to stand out so much from the crowd given that the crowd was generally smart and well educated.
These day, I think this positive reception was largely rooted in me telling people more or less "Your child isn't broken or bad. You just need to handle this problem differently than the experts are telling you." This seemed to get rapid and dramatic results in some cases.
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.
Unfortunately, how the adults around them reacted to such crazy conclusions often made it an intractable problem. There was a certain wisdom to the old practice of saying "It's just a stage. They will outgrow it."
Parents who heard my take on that were sometimes able to rapidly reverse a number of issues that psychologists and other experts had failed to remedy. People began passing my email address on to other parents whose children had been failed by all the experts and it turned into something of an unofficial consulting service, albeit with absolutely no pay so it wasn't sustainable.
My family was living on an isolated military base with a terrible school system and this had pushed us into homeschooling as our only viable option. I continued homeschooling after we moved because it had become apparent to me that most schools had no hope of effectively meeting the needs of my kids.
I had done a fair amount of research on my options. I had looked into finding some kind of in-person support and I was initially using a charter school but there were serious limits to what resources I could find on the ground.
The internet became my lifeline and this led to me eventually beginning to blog. In fact, my blogging began with a friend asking for permission to publish one of my TAGMAX emails on her website and continued because people would ask my permission to forward my emails, so I felt it made more sense to publish them so they could share the link without having to ask for my permission.
My decision to start blogging was not rooted in some big ego or the thought that people should listen to me. I got kind of dragged into it by demand for good information on a particular topic because other people kept asking me for permission to share my semi-private email writing aimed at a fairly small group of people.
My blog was initially just "This is an email I like a lot -- or that other people asked permission to forward around -- that I maybe have edited some." But I didn't really know how to develop the blog.
I didn't know how to write for some nameless, faceless, nebulous audience. Writing expressly for a website seemed largely unrelated to replying to emails on a small email list.
Fast forward roughly twenty years and I've learned something about blogging for an audience, but my initial impetus -- to do a parenting blog -- still languishes. This is true even though one of my biggest successes was this piece called The Hand Licking Incident.
It got about 60k page views in two days, got shared around on the internet and someone emailed me from a city planning type organization[3] to heap praise on the piece and tell me they had printed off copies and passed them around to the board members of their organization. It was a notable milestone for me as a writer in terms of getting traffic and positive reception.
The Hand Licking Incident took me about ten days to write and it got the most traffic any of my writing had seen up to that point. I was extremely happy about how well it did by those metrics, but it didn't make one thin dime[4] and I also didn't know how to replicate the process that had resulted in that particular piece.
I can't afford to spend multiple days on a piece of writing only to make no money, so that's a real kick in the teeth. But more importantly and harder to solve is that I didn't know how to focus my mind again in a way that created something of that quality.
It was written with a particular person in mind, a twice exceptional adult with a lot of childhood baggage who had "befriended" me. That so-called "friendship" boiled down to me doing a lot of good things for them that helped them make their own life better while they were ungrateful and abusive and did little or nothing for me.
This was not an isolated incident. Others had latched onto me over the years, sometimes due to my writing about parenting.
The individual for whom The Hand Licking Incident was written never gave me any meaningful feedback on the piece. I eventually told them to hit the road because I was tired of being bled by a very one-sided relationship with little to no upside for me and no end of demands on my time, energy and forebearance.
On the one hand, I would like to continue to write about raising twice exceptional kids because I see a clear need for good info on the topic. On the other hand, I have a lot of baggage related to trying to do such writing which tends to attract abusive people into my life[5] while not paying my bills.
But recent events[6] have had me thinking a lot about this blog and how to effectively develop it, at long last. Over the years, I have grown as a writer and maybe I am really ready to finally do this right.
The main point of The Hand Licking Incident was that trust is earned and you need your child to trust you, especially when the chips are down, especially if they have more problems than average. The Hand Licking Incident was the one and only time that I was in danger of permanently losing the trust of my oldest child, but I eventually made amends and proved that when push comes to shove, I can still be trusted by him.
After he became an adult, my oldest son said that I was the only adult in his life who saw him as having problems rather than as being a problem, so I was the only adult he felt he could really trust and rely on. That trust was essential to being able to help him sort his problems and make his life work.
I don't believe in the idea that "Some kids are just born bad." I believe that children are the raw material out of which we forge functioning adults. They don't come to us as a finished product that just needs to get taller or something.
Both of my children have some social challenges. I don't see that as a personal defect per se.
We used to say "That child is shy" or "That child is slow to warm to people" or "That child is a wall flower." These days those types of labels have mostly gone out of fashion and they have been replaced with labels like ASD or ADHD or selective mutism.
What was once some variation on normal has become medicalized and termed a disability. Often, the parents have similar traits to their "disabled" child and actively seek to loudly deny that they qualify for a similar label.
A large part of being able to function effectively in human society is learned behavior, even though it isn't always taught per se. Some children pick it up from the people around them without needing much explanation and others don't.
In recent decades, I think we are seeing a lot of learned behavior of a sort that would be better if no one ever learned such.
Certainly, there are more disabled people as well, if only because the miracles of modern medicine allow people to survive who would have once died very young. But I don't think that fully accounts for the seeming tidal wave of people who have some medicalized label or other instead of being called "shy" or similar variations of normal but not highly social .
The world has changed a great deal in recent decades. People are having fewer kids on average, which means children are growing up with fewer siblings, cousins and neighbor kids to help them practice social skills with others of a similar developmental level.
They spend more time in front of the TV or playing video games or at a computer and less time interacting with other human beings directly. I think no one should feel surprised that they trend towards less socially savvy than previous generations without needing to give them some medicalized label because of it.
I don't agree with the general conclusion the world has drawn that we are having an epidemic of issues like Autism Spectrum Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder. I think in the aggregate our children are likely not all that different from the children that were born a generation or two back but they are being born into a radically different world, one for which evolutionary history has ill-prepared us.
Rather than change our parenting tactics, we accept failure and then blame our children and call them defective. This comes at a fairly high cost to both individuals and society as a whole.
I think parents need better info and I think they need to do more explaining of social things to the kids because of this general lack of opportunity in childhood to practice social skills safely with friends, family and neighbors. This blog is my attempt to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
It's my attempt to say "The kids are mostly alright. Like in past generations, some of them aren't all would-be used car salesmen and glad-handers and they don't need to be. It's okay if you need to actively teach them social skills and it's okay if they aren't magically soaking it up like a sponge from the world around them."
There is a paucity of opportunity to soak it up compared to when I was growing up. That's not all bad though because it wasn't uncommon for some of what kids soaked up back in the day to be bad habits, not good ones.
And I think the kids will continue to be alright if we can resist trying to break them and stop trying to force them into some pre-determined mold driven by what is convenient for society. Maybe I can play some small part in helping parents find better answers than that.
If you value this blog (or other works of mine), please support my Patreon or leave a tip.
My opinion: This inability to get any of their needs adequately met tends to result in incredibly dysfunctional and angry adults. They tend to get told they are just "bad" kids who aren't really trying and they wind up with a lot of baggage, bad habits and a giant chip on their shoulder.
[2] School gifted programs tend to be designed for moderately gifted students in the range of about 115 to 130 IQ. If your child's IQ is above that, it likely won't meet their needs.
Such programs also typically are ill prepared to deal with gifted kids who have some kind of disability as well. At least when my sons were school aged, most school faculty and staff seemed to think kids were either special needs or gifted and could not conceive of a child being both at the same time.
[3] Before life got in the way, I wanted to be a city planner. I'm fairly open about community development work being "my dream job." I imagine that was a factor in this person reaching out to me, but I didn't know how to turn that into an effective networking opportunity or stepping stone of some sort. Still, I was thrilled to pieces to hear from them.
[4] In theory, my blog writing is supported by tips and Patreon membership. In reality, I barely make anything and it ends up being an exercise in futility for someone who is disabled, can write, needs an income and yadda.
[5] Twice Exceptional adults are fairly often really screwed up people who were treated abusively as children by a world that believed it was extremely important to force them to conform their behavior to some norm without trying to understand why they did the things they did or what they needed. Sometimes, they read about how I was an awesome mom to my own twice exceptional kids and how I was able to accept my kids, "warts and all," and they conclude this somehow means that I will "love" being treated abusively by them.
Crazy is as crazy does, I guess.
[6] Recent events includes but is not limited to this HN discussion.
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 of the pro bono staff for The TAG Project. My emails often got strong reactions from people, mostly positive ones.
I got a lot of feedback that suggested to me that there was something special about what I had to say about dealing effectively and humanely with very difficult children. At the time, I didn't really understand why my anecdotes, advice and suggestions seemed to stand out so much from the crowd given that the crowd was generally smart and well educated.
These day, I think this positive reception was largely rooted in me telling people more or less "Your child isn't broken or bad. You just need to handle this problem differently than the experts are telling you." This seemed to get rapid and dramatic results in some cases.
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.
Unfortunately, how the adults around them reacted to such crazy conclusions often made it an intractable problem. There was a certain wisdom to the old practice of saying "It's just a stage. They will outgrow it."
Parents who heard my take on that were sometimes able to rapidly reverse a number of issues that psychologists and other experts had failed to remedy. People began passing my email address on to other parents whose children had been failed by all the experts and it turned into something of an unofficial consulting service, albeit with absolutely no pay so it wasn't sustainable.
My family was living on an isolated military base with a terrible school system and this had pushed us into homeschooling as our only viable option. I continued homeschooling after we moved because it had become apparent to me that most schools had no hope of effectively meeting the needs of my kids.
I had done a fair amount of research on my options. I had looked into finding some kind of in-person support and I was initially using a charter school but there were serious limits to what resources I could find on the ground.
The internet became my lifeline and this led to me eventually beginning to blog. In fact, my blogging began with a friend asking for permission to publish one of my TAGMAX emails on her website and continued because people would ask my permission to forward my emails, so I felt it made more sense to publish them so they could share the link without having to ask for my permission.
My decision to start blogging was not rooted in some big ego or the thought that people should listen to me. I got kind of dragged into it by demand for good information on a particular topic because other people kept asking me for permission to share my semi-private email writing aimed at a fairly small group of people.
My blog was initially just "This is an email I like a lot -- or that other people asked permission to forward around -- that I maybe have edited some." But I didn't really know how to develop the blog.
I didn't know how to write for some nameless, faceless, nebulous audience. Writing expressly for a website seemed largely unrelated to replying to emails on a small email list.
Fast forward roughly twenty years and I've learned something about blogging for an audience, but my initial impetus -- to do a parenting blog -- still languishes. This is true even though one of my biggest successes was this piece called The Hand Licking Incident.
It got about 60k page views in two days, got shared around on the internet and someone emailed me from a city planning type organization[3] to heap praise on the piece and tell me they had printed off copies and passed them around to the board members of their organization. It was a notable milestone for me as a writer in terms of getting traffic and positive reception.
The Hand Licking Incident took me about ten days to write and it got the most traffic any of my writing had seen up to that point. I was extremely happy about how well it did by those metrics, but it didn't make one thin dime[4] and I also didn't know how to replicate the process that had resulted in that particular piece.
I can't afford to spend multiple days on a piece of writing only to make no money, so that's a real kick in the teeth. But more importantly and harder to solve is that I didn't know how to focus my mind again in a way that created something of that quality.
It was written with a particular person in mind, a twice exceptional adult with a lot of childhood baggage who had "befriended" me. That so-called "friendship" boiled down to me doing a lot of good things for them that helped them make their own life better while they were ungrateful and abusive and did little or nothing for me.
This was not an isolated incident. Others had latched onto me over the years, sometimes due to my writing about parenting.
The individual for whom The Hand Licking Incident was written never gave me any meaningful feedback on the piece. I eventually told them to hit the road because I was tired of being bled by a very one-sided relationship with little to no upside for me and no end of demands on my time, energy and forebearance.
On the one hand, I would like to continue to write about raising twice exceptional kids because I see a clear need for good info on the topic. On the other hand, I have a lot of baggage related to trying to do such writing which tends to attract abusive people into my life[5] while not paying my bills.
But recent events[6] have had me thinking a lot about this blog and how to effectively develop it, at long last. Over the years, I have grown as a writer and maybe I am really ready to finally do this right.
The main point of The Hand Licking Incident was that trust is earned and you need your child to trust you, especially when the chips are down, especially if they have more problems than average. The Hand Licking Incident was the one and only time that I was in danger of permanently losing the trust of my oldest child, but I eventually made amends and proved that when push comes to shove, I can still be trusted by him.
After he became an adult, my oldest son said that I was the only adult in his life who saw him as having problems rather than as being a problem, so I was the only adult he felt he could really trust and rely on. That trust was essential to being able to help him sort his problems and make his life work.
I don't believe in the idea that "Some kids are just born bad." I believe that children are the raw material out of which we forge functioning adults. They don't come to us as a finished product that just needs to get taller or something.
Both of my children have some social challenges. I don't see that as a personal defect per se.
We used to say "That child is shy" or "That child is slow to warm to people" or "That child is a wall flower." These days those types of labels have mostly gone out of fashion and they have been replaced with labels like ASD or ADHD or selective mutism.
What was once some variation on normal has become medicalized and termed a disability. Often, the parents have similar traits to their "disabled" child and actively seek to loudly deny that they qualify for a similar label.
A large part of being able to function effectively in human society is learned behavior, even though it isn't always taught per se. Some children pick it up from the people around them without needing much explanation and others don't.
In recent decades, I think we are seeing a lot of learned behavior of a sort that would be better if no one ever learned such.
Certainly, there are more disabled people as well, if only because the miracles of modern medicine allow people to survive who would have once died very young. But I don't think that fully accounts for the seeming tidal wave of people who have some medicalized label or other instead of being called "shy" or similar variations of normal but not highly social .
The world has changed a great deal in recent decades. People are having fewer kids on average, which means children are growing up with fewer siblings, cousins and neighbor kids to help them practice social skills with others of a similar developmental level.
They spend more time in front of the TV or playing video games or at a computer and less time interacting with other human beings directly. I think no one should feel surprised that they trend towards less socially savvy than previous generations without needing to give them some medicalized label because of it.
I don't agree with the general conclusion the world has drawn that we are having an epidemic of issues like Autism Spectrum Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder. I think in the aggregate our children are likely not all that different from the children that were born a generation or two back but they are being born into a radically different world, one for which evolutionary history has ill-prepared us.
Rather than change our parenting tactics, we accept failure and then blame our children and call them defective. This comes at a fairly high cost to both individuals and society as a whole.
I think parents need better info and I think they need to do more explaining of social things to the kids because of this general lack of opportunity in childhood to practice social skills safely with friends, family and neighbors. This blog is my attempt to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
It's my attempt to say "The kids are mostly alright. Like in past generations, some of them aren't all would-be used car salesmen and glad-handers and they don't need to be. It's okay if you need to actively teach them social skills and it's okay if they aren't magically soaking it up like a sponge from the world around them."
There is a paucity of opportunity to soak it up compared to when I was growing up. That's not all bad though because it wasn't uncommon for some of what kids soaked up back in the day to be bad habits, not good ones.
And I think the kids will continue to be alright if we can resist trying to break them and stop trying to force them into some pre-determined mold driven by what is convenient for society. Maybe I can play some small part in helping parents find better answers than that.
If you value this blog (or other works of mine), please support my Patreon or leave a tip.
Footnotes
[1] Twice Exceptional kids tend to be incredibly frustrated children with average performances. Their strengths mask their weaknesses and their weaknesses mask their strengths. Most adults around them don't think they need anything "extra" to feed their hungry minds and also don't think they need any special help to cope with the things that don't come easily or their generally maddening existence.My opinion: This inability to get any of their needs adequately met tends to result in incredibly dysfunctional and angry adults. They tend to get told they are just "bad" kids who aren't really trying and they wind up with a lot of baggage, bad habits and a giant chip on their shoulder.
[2] School gifted programs tend to be designed for moderately gifted students in the range of about 115 to 130 IQ. If your child's IQ is above that, it likely won't meet their needs.
Such programs also typically are ill prepared to deal with gifted kids who have some kind of disability as well. At least when my sons were school aged, most school faculty and staff seemed to think kids were either special needs or gifted and could not conceive of a child being both at the same time.
[3] Before life got in the way, I wanted to be a city planner. I'm fairly open about community development work being "my dream job." I imagine that was a factor in this person reaching out to me, but I didn't know how to turn that into an effective networking opportunity or stepping stone of some sort. Still, I was thrilled to pieces to hear from them.
[4] In theory, my blog writing is supported by tips and Patreon membership. In reality, I barely make anything and it ends up being an exercise in futility for someone who is disabled, can write, needs an income and yadda.
[5] Twice Exceptional adults are fairly often really screwed up people who were treated abusively as children by a world that believed it was extremely important to force them to conform their behavior to some norm without trying to understand why they did the things they did or what they needed. Sometimes, they read about how I was an awesome mom to my own twice exceptional kids and how I was able to accept my kids, "warts and all," and they conclude this somehow means that I will "love" being treated abusively by them.
Crazy is as crazy does, I guess.
[6] Recent events includes but is not limited to this HN discussion.