Jesus Christ this mother on Child Genius, AIBU to think it's so ironic?

[MamaPain]

Putting aside the fact she has in all seriousness pointed out how she is far more intelligent than her daughter who can only operate in an intelligent manner due to her parenting.

Is it just me who thinks it extremely a tad ironic that she is a psychologist, yet seems to lack the insight or understanding as to how her comments may affect her child or appear to others. Also surely being so informed and intelligent, she knows that yes you can parent without a detail understanding of neurolinguistic programming?

Sorry, it was my bad grammer to blame for that misunderstading. I see why you read it as you did.

"My kids get told they are 'the cleverest boy in the world!' It's bollocks, they're not".

I think praise needs to be realistic to actually be of value to children.

I don't say 'you're the best child at maths EVER!' to my ds. He knows he's not, and there is no value to telling him something he knows to be untrue. If I want him to know how much I love him and value him as a human being I tell him so - directly. Not give him false and exaggerated praise which, quite rightly, he won't believe. As for his maths, I say 'I think it's great the way you come at a problem from different angles until you get it right' or 'I love how determined you are to do well in your times-tables test'.

Over the top praise makes a lot of children switch off.

Fair point. I am possibly probably guilty of doing what shoshanna is doing to a lesser extent. I didnt get any praise and constantly wondered what the hell inneeded to do to impress my mum. So yes i'll accept that what i do isnt the best way to dish out praise. At 9 ds1 gets specific praise rather than "youre the smartest" but 5yo gets the "youre the best" stuff.

I agree with Minifingers my friend tells her DS he is the best and cleverest at everything and he is quite an unpleasant child, he has unrealistic views of his abilities (as does she). I am not suggesting your DCs are the same of course, I am just saying why it isn't always the best thing to say.

I usually say I am proud of my 6 YO DS, 8 YO DS is top of the class in everything so I probably play it down to him, I will obviously say we are proud of his achievements but we try to ensure he is not conceited so do not discuss him in comparison to others.

I also started to change my mind about Jocelyn's parents when Mum mentioned Jocelyn had decided against school after day one. Also they both seemed constantly at their daughter's beck and call. Perhaps it would be good to make Jocelyn wait sometimes and not automatically get all her own way. This would be more helpful for her in later life. Fascinating but scary viewing.

I agree with your first post op. Exactly what DH and I were saying as we watched it. In fact she was so self unaware that she sounded like a character from "Best in Show". Tudor was pitiful, that poor little boy. I liked Rubyat, trying to get his family to understand complex uni level maths, while they all sat on the bed and smiled at him. His parents seemed caring and he clearly wanted to do it, rather than being hot-housed into it. He was incredible at recalling the tube map, I am still rather awestruck at that!

Also Aliyah's terminally humourless stepfather managed to even make play wrestling look like a training event.

"If the initiative comes from the child then absolutely fair enough,"

But it doesn't, does it?

But it did for Jocelyn, Haklyut - according to the narration, she entered herself for the competition, Which kind of makes sense to me, as I cannot imagine her parents entering her for it, as it seems to go against the grain of their child-rearing philosophy (though I am aware that we don't always know the whole story from these programmes!).

Dds friend entered herself too. I remember getting a flyer about it via school & she said she was going to enter. I didn't take he seriously at the time.

"But it did for Jocelyn, Haklyut - according to the narration, she entered herself for the competition"

She was 7, maybe even 6. How was she going to enter herself for the competition? I don't belive a word of it.

Yup. If my children wanted to go and learn on the beach for the day or jump on the trampoline whilst learning facts about sharks, I'd (a) be sacked from my job and (b) be in a lot of pelvic floor distress...

I have seen and met pushy parents before, but this beyond the actual believable. I ended up swearing at the telly so much that DH opened a bottle of wine and gave me a big glass, and CHANGED THE CHANNEL. This is child abuse, honestly. Emotional child abuse. Some of those parents should be social services for emotional abuse. And it's on telly. On the effing telly.

Oh GOD. Just put it on and the bowtie count was like 4 in the first 5 minutes.

Earlier I was saying that this stuff makes it harder for kids with high IQ to get help with what is actually a special educational need - and some replied and I was going to recommend Mensa at least as somewhere where a high IQ kid can socialise with other bright kids and have the experience of not being the smartest kid in the room for once and to be able to talk without censoring themselves for once.

But actually it's them that's running this competition! Oh I don't know. On the one hand I think it's fine to celebrate high IQ in the same way as we celebrate talented musicians and sportspeople, and some of them stat bloody young. But a lot of the parents seem a bit mental (the kids are really fine!)

I'm loving Miraz and Rubaiyat, they're great. Like everyone else I'm finding Shoshana hard to take - anyone know what her genius like IQ actually is? Mine is/was 177 (been a few years and many litres of alcohol since that was measured). I've love to know I'm smarter than her. I mean, I think we're all smarter than her, but I'd love to have actually also beaten her in her own preferred measure of intelligence...

I watched the whole thing in horror.

Shoshana disturbed me beyond belief. I thought she and her husband were some kind of awful parody for the first five minutes, then realised the programme was serious. Unbalanced woman. No self-awareness, no humility, no grace. It was so clearly all about what a great mother she is and nothing to do with her daughter. Painful to watch. The scene where Aliyah had to apologise to her father for being 'ungrateful' was so disturbing.

The parents of the little brother and sister (Tudor and Hazel?) were grim, too. That father was openly contemptuous of that poor little boy after the competition, and the mother standing beside him shaking her head - shame on them both!

I thought the HE parents seemed well meaning, but allowing their little girl to 'choose' to enter a competition against school-educated, hot-housed, coached-to-within-an-inch-of-their-little-lives kids, when it was clear she was going to fail, was irresponsible. Her little face when she scored so low was very sad. They were the only parents who seemed to be there for their child, though, and not on some maniacal mission to boost their own fragile egos.

I just think this sort of competition is so stupid! The likes of the little maths genius boy are obviously naturally incredibly gifted and thats that. He has an incredible if freaky gift and is something quite unusual and special. The majority of them, though, were just hot-housed bright kids who would benefit from a more balanced life and a bit of idle watching of CBBC and some milk & cookies, in my humble opinion!

Agree with rocketjam, too.

The psychologists were abusive. The parents of Tudor and Hazel were abusive. Nasty, nasty people.

Also... the ones like Shoshana, what is it they expect to happen to their kid as a result of all this? Fame and fortune? Being the world's best footballer will result in riches (maybe not for a girl, OK) but being the world's fastest adder of numbers makes you... a slightly unreliable calculator. Nobody will actually pay you for it. I went to uni, degree, PhD, postdoc, worked as a scientist... did I ever think, god, if I was 10% smarter it would so helpful? Nope. 10% more patience? 10% more organised? 10% less lazy? All would have been much more helpful. And that's in a job that I was privileged to get, where hard thinky problems were a huge part of the daily work. There aren't that many of these jobs around. Huh, maybe some of these brains can turn in their later life to solving the problems of economics - why is it that we seem to have a glut of smart people at the same time as we face problems (cancer, dementia, climate change, global inequality, fragile financial systems) that could do with some serious thinking about?

Anyway I need to get my kids up from their naps so I suppose that's my excuse!

Most IQ tests only go up to 160. I believe she said hers was in the 150s but I'm now not sure I'm remembering rightly?

We'll, Curtis's mother certainly has her eye on the main chance......I bet quite a few of the others are looking for ways to cash in too.

I thought the one I did was Stanford-Binet - it was the one Mensa used for children in 1989, went up to 178.
I suppose that means if I got recalibrated Shoshana and I would be similar... god help me. I'm not half as odd as that, promise!

Oh, I wasn't doubting you, I just meant, from the way she comes across, I am betting if her IQ is in the 150s, she's using a test that only goes to 160 because she seems very sure she's right at the top!

I think IQ testing is a load of cock, but I would, because last time I had mine measured (it's part of the tests you can do for DSA at university), the tester wouldn't tell me what it was cos she thought it was embarrassingly low. I remain resolutely unembarrassed. And with the added bonus of having no ambition to cash in on any bright children I might breed.

hak - oh, god ... and Curtis's grandma! Saying he was an asset to her family 'and the country'! I know being proud is better than being disappointed but that was awful.

toomuch - I tested at 170, when I was at school, but the kids seem to have nicked most of that.

I became less convinced that Shoshana was a genius as the episode went on. I mean, "bone energy"? Seriously? The quack therapist saw her coming.

I've done both the Stanford-Binet and the WAIS-III and scored roughly the same on both, which probably means the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

I'm definitely not the type to feed my children kale smoothies and give them weird exercise regimes, I promise! Though I suppose I'm fairly odd in other ways.

LRD IQ tests only test a very narrow range of skills, very heavily biased towards number processing, memory and vocabulary. The reason I scored highly on the WAIS-III (now superseded by the WAIS-IV) and the Stanford-Binet is that words and memory are my 'thing' - I scored in the top 0.2% on those and this was balanced out by scoring lower (top 5%) in other aspects of the test. If your aptitudes are different, your abilities just aren't going to show in standard tests of this kind. Hence my comments about their lack of usefulness.

I really think most of this programme comes out as child abuse. It's putting massive pressure on the children to make them perform in front of the cameras, and for children who have generally succeeded throughout their lives it must make it worse if they "fail" so publicly. So many of the children are socially awkward, and in many cases the programme sets them and their parents up to be laughed at and even disliked and despised. If I had the brightest child in the world I wouldn't let them within a mile of this.