Don't Be This Parent.

For those pushing and hoping for higher IQ scores for their kids.  Please understand this is not to be cruel, but it is a hefty dose of reality.  Your child is what he or she is and that is enough.


Recently an article came across my desk regarding a woman who had conned and wiggled her son's scores so that he would seem to have a ridiculously high IQ.  She stole someone else's SAT scores, etc.  He was, briefly, a novelty.  She thought she was opening doors for him. 

The child, though, started acting out and crumbling under the pressure of the lie he was being forced to live.

You see, being an Outlier is not a goal that one can achieve.  It is not something one can do or earn.  It just *IS*, like having a specific hair color.  Even if you dye your hair, eventually the roots show.

An interesting note about the hair color analogy:  Redheaded genes are not just about hair color.  It also, apparently, makes redheaded folk need more pain medication and sedatives than blondes or brunettes.  Now, would it make any sense to dye a redhead black and think that would affect the amount of pain medication he would need for a broken leg?  No?  Same thing.  You support "nature" with "nurture" but you cannot change genes in a person by making them something they actually have no genetic basis for.

The dumb thing is that:

a)This woman did not understand at all what being an Outlier really meant.  It is not about scores or worth or job opportunities.  It is about how an organ system (in this case, the whole nervous system, not just brain) in the body works. 

I have a cousin whose dad was a wrestler.  The thinking, when my cousin was small, was that perhaps my cousin would also be a wrestler, but my cousin ended up with the metabolism and speed of a jackrabbit.  He can consume an amazing amount of calories and as soon as he does you can see the sweat start to form on his brow as his metabolism revvs up.  He spends calories like a new lottery winner in Vegas and does not retain any for weight.  He was made a runner, not a wrestler.  And that is ok. 

The woman who tried to bolster her son to look like he had a higher IQ than he did would have been like if my uncle had tried to keep my cousin in a near-hypothermic state to slow down his metabolism so he could gain weight to wrestle.  It makes no sense to force any organ system of the body to do what it really was not capable of doing.  My cousin's body does not receive and process calories like a wrestler.  This boy's nervous system does not receive and process stimuli like an Outlier.  It was a dumb, and tragic, thing to do.  You cannot make your child more capable of processing stimuli.  You can bombard them with stimuli, like flashcards and such, but you cannot make them use that stimuli in Outlier ways.

b)  Besides the brief media stir up if your child is at the furthest end of the bell curve, no one cares if your child is an Outlier--in fact, it often stirs up negative reactions.  It does not win you parenting points.   It was a genetic thing that may have come from you....or not.  Might have come from your spouse or been a fluke or come from a great great great granddaddy

c)  The truth is going to show through at some point.  The boy broke tragically.  He could not sustain the rouse because he was not built for it.  It was like embedding goose feathers under the boy's skin and proclaiming he was the first flighted human.  Eventually he was going to find a cliff he had to jump from, and he was going to plummet and crash.  All because of a lack of understanding of what an Outlier is and the myths and false pride that is linked with the idea of  high IQ.

Why are we harping on this?  Because it is not fair to kids to put this pressure on them.  Their minds are engines that will only go as fast as they can go.  If you have an Outlier, you know that you do not push them to, say, be sensitive to tags in their shirts or wet socks (ugh!), or make them cry at the thought of social injustice in Africa at the ripe old age of 5.  Outlier kids just DO these things, pulling the parents into the Outlier path (shout out to you--you know who you are!), not having the parents push them onto it.

I get it.  We all want our kids to succeed, to have the best in life.  But we cannot do that by making them something they are not.  They can either succeed in what they are born to do or fail in what we push them in.
I feel sorry for the boy.  I actually feel sorry for her too as she obviously is a woman in need of help.  But it bugs the mess out of me that this happened because it did not have to.  If Outlier (gifted) education was not so fraught with emotional connotations that it cannot be discussed accurately (leading her to think she could fake it in her son) and if there was less competition placed on kids, this might have been avoided.

If a child is an Outlier, he needs what my cousin needs:  (mental) fuel to burn.  If your child is neurotypical, he needs what my uncle needed:  a mat (life) to become excellent on.  My uncle has no more worth than my cousin, any more than a runner is any more an athlete than a wrestler, any more than an Outlier has any more worth than the neurotypical.