Raising Future Adults

When my sons were little, they sometimes wanted me to play board games with them. It helped them to have an adult helping them understand the rules and a third person to play with. I liked playing board games with my kids. It was a way to spend time with my kids and have a little fun with them. We were playing for fun, so we sometimes altered the rules a bit. One rule we followed was "Youngest goes first." which in practice meant we went in reverse chronological order. My younger son went first, my other son went second and I went last. Any advantage there was to going first went to the person whose age was a tactical disadvantage. It helped even things up a bit and put us on a more even playing field. When we played Civilizations and my youngest wanted to be Egypt, we let him even though Egypt isn't normally included in the three person version of the game. On one occasion, this went badly sideways because I ended being Africa for some reason. This meant he and I...

The title of this piece -- Social and Emotional Issues in Gifted Youth -- was a hot topic in gifted circles back when I was involved with The TAG Project . My recollection is this is why the conference I participated in was called Beyond IQ -- because it was concerned with such issues, not just intelligence and academic performance per se. This really resonated with me. My oldest son always had social issues. I have always liked him and he and I get along well, but he makes other people really crazy and finds social stuff hard to deal with. Pulling him out of public school at the age of eleven to homeschool helped enormously. Making him cope with a bunch of ill-behaved classmates all day, every day was too much for his already feeble social skills and he was just cranky and difficult all the time while in school, especially that particular school which had serious issues. I didn't have IQ test results for him, but I had academic grade level placement results from when my oldes...