Living With Live Wires

I originally began to understand the attribute of mastery differently when I read “Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment” by George Leonard several years ago. It was written in 1992, but seems to have even more relevance to our experiences today, and some sections are just prophetic in terms of our economic problems today. This book was different than the typical quickie self-help book. It was actually the opposite.

I remembered a passage that stuck with me:

Living life as a contingency

Contingencies, no question about it, are important. The achievement of goals is important.

But the real juice of life, whether it be sweet or bitter, is to be found not nearly so much in the products of our efforts as in the process of living itself, in how it feels to be alive.

George Leonard
Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (1992)

I have thought about these ideas quite often. The life of contingencies really haunted me for awhile. I could relate to that experience growing up. I didn’t want that to be the experience of my children if I could help it.

He goes on to describe the fact that our progress on the path of mastery , in learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it. He says, you have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.

[excerpt from my Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented State Conference presentation: Don't Fence Me In - Mastery, Creativity, and Adventure in the Home Education of Bright Children]

In general, a family legacy, includes….

The culmination of your history of experiences as a family. It includes your life experiences, ways of relating to each other, reactions to positive and negative events, family traditions and rituals, the family collective attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings. It even includes your genetic code.

We all have a family culture and we pass down a family legacy to our children whether we are conscious of it or not. It forms the foundation to how we see ourselves and how we live our lives.  And it creates the filter for how we behave in relationships and how we feel about our lives.

As we mature and grow, we add to and change what we experienced growing up and create our own family culture, which then becomes the legacy to our kids.

It is possible for anyone who is motivated, to more consciously create one’s own family’s legacy.

What I will share with you in the course of these posts is a small portion of how I am creating a family legacy as it relates to a lifestyle of lifelong learning.

As I began to consider what I wanted for our family legacy, I hoped for my children, most of all, to pursue a life of meaning and passion as they choose what they want to do. But in the context of pursuing their passion, I hoped to instill and inspire ways to develop their talents in an environment of creativity and adventure.

In the midst of the constant information overload involved in their education, I chose three guiding principles to keep in the forefront of my mind as we go through our days together – as a guide to help me focus and keep priorities in mind:

I chose Mastery, Creativity and Adventure.

I explore each one in more depth in future posts.

[excerpt from my Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented State Conference presentation: Don't Fence Me In - Mastery, Creativity, and Adventure in the Home Education of Bright Children]

Many of us have grown up in times and places that did not acknowledged creativity, gifts & talents in children. In the wider picture of history and culture, giftedness still seems to be a new burgeoning field in education. The awareness is increasing at amazingly fast rates, but progress has been more recent. It is rare when the healthcare, parenting and family life literature mention characteristics of highly creative & bright children or the importance of identifying these children.

Due to the tremendous parenting challenges that are often encountered with highly sensitive and intense children, parents tend to do their own research to find answers.  More often than not, parents hide the facts about their children’s abilities from friends, family and healthcare professionals for fear of being branded as one of those “bragging parents.”  This likely ostracizes them and their children from social experience with friends and family.

The lucky parents find local support groups for parents with bright & talented kids. In these groups, they are free to talk about their children, their unique abilities and get suggestions to support the special emotional & social needs. They find great relief and solace in finding a group of people that understand what they are going through and that their situation is challenging.  This is crucial for families who live in a world that often doesn’t acknowledge, accept, or appreciate the needs of gifted & children. The support system is crucial for those that need to advocate for their child to get their academic, social and emotional needs met in a world that sometimes doesn’t have a place for them.

Tony and I have been fortunate to be a part of an amazing support group for parents with gifted kids in Minnesota. The group we encountered when our children turned 5 years old is MCGT, Minnesota Counsel for the Gifted and Talented, a parent organization. We chose to home school our children at the time, and received invaluable help from the homeschool chapter of this organization.

We continue to be involved and contribute our time. Tony has served as president of the home school chapter and I taught a class at the home school co-op sponsored by chapter. We have the deepest gratitude for this organization and the parents that volunteer their time to help others. This support group has been instrumental in our lives to help us with the special needs that arise on a regular basis.

The support, resources and encouragement we have received from MCGT became our inspiration for this website. There are many locations across the country that do not have local organizations, services or resources for families with intense & sensitive children. We seek to fill, in a small part, that gap by developing an online version of what we have been fortunate enough to experience on a local level.

In addition, I am devoted, as a family therapist, to serve the needs of bright & creative children and their families. I know that intense & sensitive children are not the only focus in many families. But, the existence of intensities & sensitivities in the children usually means there are parents with similar issues. Oftentimes, the challenges that our children experience begin echoing our own childhood experiences. This often provides deep motivation for us, as parents, to understand our children in new ways and to find resources that will helpus create a family culture that will nurture each person as unique.

We are starting by opening a dialogue.

I presented at the MCGT state conference for parents of gifted children. I am also doing a presentation at the conference for gifted educators in February. I will be available at the MCGT resource fair March 7, 2009. We are beginning the website with blog content about our personal family life.  Tony and I will be starting a podcast. I will regularly post original content from my presentations about parenting and educating bright, creative children. We will increasingly post more content about relevant topics in the gifted world. We will begin by reviewing the basics concerning the identification of giftedness, testing, resources, and characteristics of giftedness. We will regularly feature interviews with families with gifted members and experts and authors. And, I will provide opportunities for parents and professionals to access online services in the form of webinars and family life coaching.

The strength of our community will evolve through the connections we make with each other. It will grow through our willingness to share our experiences, ask questions, provide feedback and become an active community of committed parents and professionals.

The journey of exploration starts now. . . but it does not have a set course nor does it have an end point.

I began to realize that my children had some very different characteristics besides being bright. There were intense sensitivities with my son and I had children who preferred different learning styles in different subjects. I began to understand what it meant to have children (and myself) with “overexciteabilities” as talked about by Dabrowski. I learned about intensity, complexity, self-determination, and asynchronous development. There were numerous things I tried to keep in mind when it came to managing all of us in the same room.

I kept trying new things and worked on their emotional responses, trying to figure out what was going on. During our learning times I tried different activities, creative projects, games. I had reasonable success.

I know we will never be able to cease our searching for answers and new ideas. Our children and our lives change too rapidly. But after the first year, I had a base of understanding that my further research could fit in to. And, the time commitment and my own ease about what we were doing became remarkably better.

After all, isn’t a relaxed parent about 70% of the contribution to successful education? 80%? 90%

At this point, as I was reflecting back on my crazy year, I began thinking about our future. When you spend so much time researching curriculum and ways to accommodate bright kids in the learning process and in your home, you can sometimes forget there is a bigger world our there. And, many years ahead.

I began to think about what our family life and our home education were about – in the long-term view, the broader perspective.

I wondered what our children would remember from their time at home regarding learning and the learning process.

Do you ever wonder about that?

It is too easy to see the struggles and challenges – to remember those times. I wanted to focus on the positive experiences and to play a very conscious role in creating them.

I decided to consciously create a family legacy of lifelong learning.

[excerpt from my Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented State Conference presentation: Don't Fence Me In - Mastery, Creativity, and Adventure in the Home Education of Bright Children]