Raising Future Adults

Not long after I became staff at The TAG Project , they launched a new email list that had been in the works for a while called TAGPDQ. The last three letters -- PDQ -- stood for "pretty darn quick" and it was aimed at parents of very, extremely gifted children like maybe 160 IQ and above. In order to protect the privacy of members, the list had no archive at all. People with very high IQs somewhat often end up in the news, sometimes at very young ages, if only for academic achievements in K-12. One member once noted on list that they were related to someone very, very famous, so famous that trying to give any meaningful detail of their career could potentially ID them. Talking about kids like mine online is very hard. All social things are inherently hard to talk about for a long list of reasons and one of those is that it helps to have specific examples to cite and those need to be credible examples that your audience will believe . If you have very smart kids an...

I love my sons. I know I love my sons because I CHOSE to get over my crap for their sake, something I didn't know how to otherwise do. I got married at nineteen and learned I was pregnant like a couple of days before my second wedding anniversary. I had married the man in question in part because I was clear I wanted to have kids with him, so I never considered having an abortion. I philosophically just decided this meant I would "rearrange my schedule" and have kids "in the morning" and a career "in the afternoon" of my life instead of the other way around. I was molested and raped as a child and spent my youth making nasty jokes about "ALL MEN." I would say things like "A woman has to outperform men to get any credit at all. Fortunately, that's not hard." And then I had a surprise birthday present from the universe around the time I turned 22 years old. I was gifted a bouncing baby boy. And I realized that if I spent t...