When Overempowerment Yields Underachievement Strategies to Adjust

When overempowerment yields underachievement—Strategies to adjust

by Sylvia Rimm

At the 2006 National Association for Gifted Children conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was honored to have the opportunity to give a keynote address. My presentation was based on findings from my clinical experiences in preventing and reversing underachievement of gifted children and my recent research with middle school children. Because many parents are unable to attend our national meetings, I’d like to share a summary of my presentation with you, emphasizing what I believe parents can do to present overempowerment and underachievement in their own gifted children.

Underachievement is Not a Mystery

There has been considerable research on the underachievement of gifted children and there are many teaching, parenting, and mentoring strategies that have been proven to be effective in helping to reverse underachievement and motivate gifted children. Because underachievement is learned behavior, it can be unlearned. Underachieving is a bad habit of avoiding effort, but habits can be changed, and motivation can be fostered, taught, and encouraged. Despite the success of various approaches, it’s important for parents to realize that it’s rarely easy to reverse underachievement, because children, circumstances, families, and classroom environments are all complex.

Classic Good Parenting

Classic studies of family environments that led children to high achievement involved parents who were both responsive and demanding. In her research, for example, Baumrind (see Figure 1) labeled this kind of appropriate parenting as authoritative parenting, which she contrasted with authoritarian parenting, which she described as non-responsible, but demanding, or permissive indulgent parenting that was responsive, but not demanding (neither of which was as effective for fostering children’s achievement in school). Most obviously permissive, unengaged parenting also did not foster achievement. Classrooms that are responsive to children’s intellectual, social, and emotional needs also

lead to high achievement. For gifted children, appropriately challenging curriculum is an important component of responsiveness to academic needs.

The V of Love

The V of Love for raising and teaching children is a “commonsense” description that fits well with the conception of authoritative parenting. Parents set the limiting walls of the V, but increase power, freedom, choices, and responsibilities between the walls of the V as children develop and mature. Thus young children are at the base of the V and are given few choices, power, freedom, and responsibilities that match their small size.

Childhood and adolescence can be relatively smooth if children are only gradually empowered. If parents don’t expand the limiting walls of the V, children are over-controlled and have little opportunity to become independently motivated. Authoritarian parents don’t expand the walls of the V.

Parents of gifted children may easily fall into the trap of permissive indulgent parenting as envisioned in an inverted V. The verbal precocity and adult-sounding reasoning or very high IQ scores of high-ability students may tempt parents to “adultize” them early and assume they are more capable of decision making than their maturity allows. When the V is inverted, children are given power, choices, and freedom too early and often make poor decisions that worry their parents. Parents, too late, attempt to set limits for these powerful children. Ordinary limits cause them to become angry, depressed, and rebellious because they feel powerless relative to the power they experienced early. They are overempowered and have developed a habit of complete control. Accustomed to making all their own decisions, these powerful children resent parent or teachers who guide them differently from their own preferences. They are offended by criticism, become defensive, argue only to prove they are right, and underachieve to assert that teachers and parents are wrong. The following letter from a mother of a profoundly gifted child provides an example of an over-empowered, strong-willed child.

I have a seven-year-old daughter who is a major challenge for me. How do you deal with an over-confident child who wants to change the world right now? I think my daughter is profoundly gifted. I home schooled her until this year when she requested that I put her in “regular” school like “normal kids,” so I did. She’s in first grade, but could easily be in third or fourth grade The school just completed an assessment, and I will get the results next month. My daughter feels she shouldn't have to go to school or be home schooled, and she should just be left alone to pursue her own ideas and inventions. She's very angry with me for “wasting her time doing baby stuff” at school. She loves her friends and the social aspect of school, but feels school is beneath her. Her teachers is a wonderful, certified teachers of gifted, but my daughter has recently become disrespectful to her because she caught her teacher making a mistake about something.

My daughter constantly begs me to convert our garage into a science lab so she can do experiments to find a cure for cancer. She packed her suitcase and ran away from home recently. She got to the end of the street before I convinced her to come back. She said I didn’t understand and appreciate her desire to be a famous scientist today—now—not in the future.

I’m very distressed about this and don’t know what to do. Have you seen these types of kids before? What’s the best way to handle them and how do I handle her anger with me?

The Pressures of Giftedness

A great problem for gifted children is that the very same pressure of giftedness can lead to either high-achievement motivation or to underachievement. These opposite expressions of similar life occurrences puzzle parents and teachers. Consider that children with extraordinary vocabulary, unusual thinking, and rapidly developing skills are often surrounded by adults who praise them or describe them to others with words like perfect, brilliant, extraordinary, spectacular, genius, or the conviction that they will sure cure cancer. Those innocent but extravagant descriptors set values and expectations for children in the family and in the classroom.

For some children who have appropriate school and home environments, these words will inspire them to set high goals and work hard toward those goals. They will lean to enjoy the learning and discovery process as they mature. For other children, they will internalize these goals as impossible pressures, be disappointed in themselves, fear risking effort, and will invest considerable energy in protecting their fragile self-concepts for fear that if they made an effort , it would only prove that they aren’t as intelligent or extraordinary as people assumed. I refer to this second group of underachieving children as “dethroned” children because their personalities and behavior change so dramatically from a childhood where they were overpraised and overempowered.

Dethronement

lead to high achievement. For gifted children, appropriately challenging curriculum is an important component of responsiveness to academic needs.

The V of Love

I’m very distressed about this and don’t know what to do. Have you seen these types of kids before? What’s the best way to handle them and how do I handle her anger with me?

The Pressures of Giftedness

Responsive
High + / Low—
+ +
Authoritative / + —
Authoritarian / High
+
Demanding
Low
—
+
Permissive Indulgent / —
Permissive Unengaged

Dethronement

The most difficult hazard of overempowerment is “dethronement.” When another sibling is born or if the overempowered child isn’t recognized as special in the classroom, he or she may feel irrationally and extraordinarily rejected. Dethroned children exhibit negativity, anger, aggressiveness, or sadness. They may readily be labeled depressed anxious, or ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder). Their personalities change dramatically and they may literally “shut down” to learning.

Dethroned children may try to run their families, their teachers, and other students, and they may argue incessantly to “outsmart” adults. Their parents often refer to them as “lawyers.” Victory in an argument temporarily restores their throne. As these children trap adults into the battles, parents and teachers find themselves losing their tempers. Teachers and parents, offended by such powerful children, try to “put them in their places.” Adults respond to these oppositional, offensive children with a big NO permanently engraved on their foreheads. “Unfair,” the children argue, undaunted. They believe that no one understands them and, indeed, few people do.

Dethronement may happen any time in life briefly, or it may become long lasting. It truly seems like an altered state and a dramatic change in the child. Read the stories about Patrick and Laura for examples of dethronement at home and at school.

Research on Overempowerment

In my survey of 5,400 middle grade children for my recent book, Growing Up Too Fast: The Rimm Report on the Secret World of America’s Middle Schoolers, I found that middle grade children today are growing up in environments more similar to what their parents experienced in high school and beyond. The media have prematurely sexualized them. By third grade, 15% worried a lot about popularity with the opposite sex, and a similar percentage worried that their parents didn’t understand them. In earlier generations, such worries were reserved for adolescence. For third graders at that time, their priorities were pleasing parents and teachers and playing with children of their own gender. Popularity wasn’t even a word in their vocabulary. In our clinic, when young, gifted children are tested and asked to pronounce the word condemn, the most frequent mispronunciation is condom, and even small children have wished for “sexy” clothes.

In focus groups with gifted fifth through eighth graders, the children indicated they believed they had already made an average of two thirds of the decisions in their lives. When I asked if they thought their parents permitted them enough of their own decision making, most were not contented. Among the fifth graders, more than half (55%) were unsatisfied, and by eighth grade, 90% of the students believed they should have more power. Here are examples of what they had to say:

My parents won’t listen to me. My dad thinks I should be treated differently just because I’m a kid. It wasn't the same treatment as my parents.” (Fifth-grade boy)

“I think parents can help us make some decisions, but if we want to make them ourselves, they should just accept that and let us do it.” (Seventh-grade girl)

“My parents trust my judgment. They might give me some ideas, but I make 90% of the decisions. (Seventh-grade boy)

What Parents Can Do to Prevent Early Adolescence

In addition to raising children in responsive environments where parents set clear limits as in the V of Love, there’s much that parents can do to help preserve a healthy childhood. My research found that children with good family relationships, less screen watching, and more involvement in interests and extracurricular activities were less likely to be caught up in high-risk behaviors like drinking alcohol, doing drugs, and promiscuous sexual involvement. Youngsters who described their family relationships as above average were also less likely to be quite as worried about being pretty and popular. That isn’t to say they didn’t care about these peer issues, but family support and engagement in positive activities were extremely helpful. Families who find time to work, play, laugh, and talk together help preserve healthy childhoods. Of course, you knew that already, but with such busy lives, many of us may need reminders.

Reversing Dethronement and Underachievement

In my book, Why Bright Kids Get Poor Grades and What You Can Do about It, I proposed a trifocal model in which parents and teachers together could select from many approaches to reverse their children’s or students’ underachievement when it has been caused by psychological dethronement. I’ve included other readings with solutions at the end of this article. In Figure 2, I’ve also prepared a Reversing Underachievement Alliance acrostic to summarize important steps to restoring a dethroned child to achievement.

It is important to realize that sometimes the reversal of underachievement is almost immediate, particularly among younger children. Other times, the reversal takes extraordinary patience and seems like a “two steps forward, one step backward” process. For many underachievers, reversing that powerless feeling of dethronement results in intense and passionate achievement. It’s almost like “awakening a sleeping giant.” For Patrick at age four, Mother described the change as having her old Patrick back again; while for Laura, her success is not yet entirely clear. Adults who retrospectively recall the reversal of their child’s underachievement often report as pivotal a high-discipline requirement like the military (at peace), a mentor, a teacher, or a partner who believed in them.