Is it possible to have a bright child and not be a pushy parent?

[Enid]

What happens if you just leave your bright child to get on with it? Do you HAVE to do extra work with them at home or lobby the school for G&T?

I have a bright child (well, I have a bit of paper to say he is bright IFSWIM) but I couldn't push him if I tried.
When I was first told how 'bright' he was (2 years ago) i went into a precious, knee jerk reaction of 'oh the responsibility!' and started worrying about whether he should have a private tutor for philosophy and learn fencing etc
But he hates being 'taught' anything, and hates reading for pleasure and hates school and anything which smakcs of enforced learning. So we just let him mess around on the internet, and indulge his brief obsessions and I am learning to play chess (badly) to he can beat me and he seems to just 'know' stuff without worksheets or anything.
He says he wants to be a surfer beachbum in a guitar band when he grows up! I'd be terribly proud if he achieved that

ie the she's bright she will do well anywhere is untrue for lots but not all children

It's so sad to think of all these bright inquisitive little children being bored shitless by boring sterile revision papers and endless worksheets. It's a good way to make sure any natural curiosity will be stone dead before the age of 10 IMO

DH's mother was heavily into hot-housing (not that she had a clue what she was doing, she's not a teacher). From the age of about seven she had him doing 3-4 hours a day - outside school - of past papers, work sheets, French/German tapes, pages and pages of vocabulary, even the SAME Maths workbooks over and over again. He had Saturday mornings off, and an hour to eat his tea after school, but that was it . He was easily bright enough to do it all standing on his head anyway. And now he's her worst nightmare - married to me (idle dropkick SAHM with worthless non-scientific degree

wonderful to be left alone until i was about 12/13. TBH I agree that when I was a teenager, being both bright, and naturally lazy, if I had been given an incentive or been shown any interest, or even a threat for NOT doing well, I'd have done so much better.

My DCs are both 'bright' and are attaining well at school.

We don't do worksheets, but we do bake cakes (measuring) sometimes putting the butter on top of the sugar, so they have to add the two amounts together.

We look for interesting things on the internet about projects they are doing.

We follow up an interesting question from them with a more tricky one back to them.

We sometimes write sheets of sums for them, but only when they pester us to

We encourage them to write and read a wide range of topics - including newpaper articles, internet stories.

Most of it is very reactive I suppose - in a way that sitting them down with a worksheet isn't.

My dd (y4) does already get 30mins of homework a night and DS(y2) does spellings and reading. So I think they do plenty anyway - especially once they've found time for any afterschool clubs they go to

yes I agree with the age thing - I think encouraging a teenager doing GCSEs is totally different to coaching 6/7 year olds.

My DD1 is pretty bright, in that she apparently comes top of the class and her teacher gives us that impression (in a pretty laid-back way - god I love her teacher).

Which has to be her, as we do absolutely bugger-all with her.

I knew MI would be along as soon as I mentioned home made cakes

Cake-dar perhaps
I hate the idea of SATs for small children so much it was a big factor in us choosing an independent school where they don't have them. Or the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies. I haven't the faintest idea how ds is doing relative to the rest of his class/school/county. I do know he is doing well on his own terms and is clearly bright. But mainly he is happy and engaged at school and after my own experiences that means a very great deal to me.

Greensleeves - come and live in Wales - we don't have SATS here!

My yr 2 child doesn't (I think) know that SATs exist, not all state schools make a big deal out of them. And noone in our playground appears to be discussing them. I get the impression that SATs are played down and they carry on blithely unaware of it all.

so, I shouldn't feel guilty that we have the most ignorant 4 and a half year old, right?

ours is the same fennel - get the impression (from friends) that a lot of schools take that approach

There was a thread like this just after that gifted-child documentary recently. I think I said there the sole essential thing with a bright child is Not Squashing It - because while they learn like breathing, putting them down for their curiosity & keenness leaves scars.

(PS!! I'm not suggesting that any parent on here would squash their child, bright or otherwise - the squashing comes far more often from horrible bullying experiences like Marina's.)

Depends on the child and the school. I don't think you need to be pushy, but you need to keep a weather eye on things but then I think that's true of probably any child, and certainly any child who's "different" in any way, not just of G&T. If a child ends up repeating the same work two years in a row because the school can't come up with anything else, for example, then I think the parents ought to intervene. But I wouldn't describe that as "pushy". Outside school talking, reading, encouraging them to follow lines of interest are all good but again IMO not "pushy" and also something to do with any child.

On a related if rather tangential note, my mother is a teacher and on one of her inset days there was a session on gifted children which included an ed psych who reminisced about one case he'd encountered where a company called in the police because they were sure that their work-experience kid from the local comprehensive had somehow managed to embezzle tens of thousands of pounds, but they couldn't work out why. When tested, the boy had an IQ virtually off the scale. In the space of a week he'd got to grips with the company processes, spotted a loophole no one had ever noticed before, and worked out how to exploit it. No one at any of his schools had ever identified him as being anywhere on the G&T spectrum -- he was seen as a bit of a plodder. There was a child who probably could have benefited from being stretched in more conventional ways.

I've only read OP

My DD is bright, has most classes with kids 1 and 2 years older than her and we don't do much at home TBH - thats her time to play (she's 7)

We do practice times tables, spellings and listen to reading , maybe for 1/2 an hour three times a week, but thats it.

Plenty of time for her to "knuckle down" when she's doing her GCSEs I think and it certainly hasn't held her back at school

Fennel, that's the way it should be and I'm sure lots of schools do manage the SATs responsibly and in a low-key way.
We unfortunately live in a borough with a handful of very good primaries and a lot of less good ones, and overall for education it is near the bottom of the national league tables.
I know from talking to friends with older children that in some cases, bright children in the good schools are being overtly pushed at six-seven to up the school's score.
A good friend's lovely, sunny, bright dd had nightmares about her SATs after a teacher told her she was being relied on to do her bit and more. I was so angry about that. She was six.

A little story about DS's friend (they are now in Year 11). DS's friend is an extremely articulate and well read boy and his parents are both Oxbridge English graduates who are desperate for him to do well. When I mentioned his name to DS's tutor, who is also a teacher at their school, as being from a very literate and literary family that read books together, she was astonished. The friend has very low self esteem and is terrifying of failing, so he has hidden his talents from his school teachers and is not working hard for his GCSEs.
Moral of the story - don't push your children (even kindly) if they are likely to be worried that they will fail.

The whole G&T thing is mad if you ask me - it's suggesting that 10% of EVERY school will be G&T. Which has got to be wrong.

Both ds1 and dd are bright (imho), ds1 we've done a fair bit of reading with, but we just let him be himself really, he's very into acting and puts on little shows, and loves film-making so we let him do that as much as anything.

Dd is less quirky than ds1, but what I'm trying to do with her is to do lots of things she WON'T do at school, because she picks things up so quickly, and I want her to be EXCITED by what she's doing in school - 'wow, look, I can do this' rather than 'I'm so bored, we did long division AGAIN'.

I presume this is your dd2 Enid - have you tried worksheets? xxx

I was bright, my parents were pushy... I rebelled... directed my brightness into all sorts of inappropriate activities.

My parents gave up on me when it got very bad. So I set out to prove them wrong, resat my high school exams and did two university degrees. Ended up a high flying career woman. Not saying that's a good or a bad thing btw, I have not made my mind up yet about this.

Sorry, don't know the right answer.

Not all Oxbridge English graduates are like that, Lilymaid

Marina, that's awful. We're nearby, as you know, but DD1's school really doesn't seem to mention KS1 SATs to them, quite possibly till they're actually in the room doing them. Which IMO is how it should be.

I remember a friend of mine sobbing hysterically at the age of 11 because she had been given a B for a test. she went to see the teacher and everything and said if he didn't change it she wasn't going home

in a typical 11 year old way i just thought "Get a grip"

that's probably why she is an archeologist and i'm not.

In conclusion, pushed children do better but at what cost? I would rather have my jolly little boys working in a cheese factory for 40 years than have them sob because they are frightened to tell me they didn't get an A.

And I don't think DD1's school does G&T at all.

I know she's only six at the moment but I really do think there is a solid educational (not to speak of social) value in Hanging Around Doing Bugger All. Which DD1 is becoming extremely good at

MI, had we not moved the dcs would have gone to the school in question. Good SATs and OFSTED do not a happy school make
Your borough is faring far better overall I think
Ours really is down the toilet as far as education goes, although we have good libraries and leisure facilities which are always good news