Question for you. If you were profoundly gifted and had kids who were also profoundly gifted, what kinds of things would you do with them and resources would you provide to them to ensure they were adaquetly challenged?
My situation: I'm in my 30's, I take IQ tests every 3-4 years and always score somewhere around 155-165. I come from a multi-generational complex trauma family, my mother has an ACE store of 9, I have an 8, my father is with what I know about him around a 9 and going back generations on either side of the family it seems to be the case on both sides. High ACE scores reduce your IQ and academic performance quite a bit. My Sister scored 167 on a MENSA exam once unadusted for dyslexia and dyscalculia which they mentioned would put her in the 180's.
I can't even begin to describe the kind of perceptual maze I've had to navigate overcoming my own issues; cognitive restructuring is a powerful tool I used well before I learned about complex trauma and in the last few years that has been a real renissance for me. I feel in a lot of ways I was raised more by the internet and BBS than my own parents.
Decided a long time ago to be celibate because I just assumed my kids are going to go through the same lot in life I did and I wouldn't want to do that to anyone even by accident. Any kind of technique or program to help those kids avoid that outcome would be useful to me. If I have kids I want them to be who they are supposed to be in life.
I'm just a random guy from the internet in my 20s with no children, so I'm not really qualified to give advice! All I'm going on here is the examples I've seen, which are math focused.
From these examples, you don't have to do anything special in the early years besides talking and reading to them (and of course, building a home/family they can feel safe in -- all the stuff that normal parenting advice is about). In the next few years after that, you can add on some enrichment material depending on their interests. For example, Art of Problem Solving has this really nice "Beast Academy" series of workbooks that goes through elementary and middle school math, but with deeper questions. If they really take to a subject, you just keep feeding them more of it. It'll be fun for them, and neither expensive nor time-consuming for you.
At some point, their interests will become specific and deep enough that you can't lead them, at which point you should get them in contact with peers or mentors, e.g. through summer camps, competitions, or a magnet school. Once they're in that network, it's smooth sailing: they'll tell you what they want to learn! In other words, in general a parent with a full-time job cannot feasibly guide a talented kid's intellectual development up through age 18 (though of course your still are responsible for their moral development). Intellectually, your job is just to nurture their interests, give them the boost they need to get going, and then cheer for them as they continue on.
I had never heard of an ACE score, it is interesting. I’m a 6 and my wife is a 9. We grew up poor too. We had a kid at 15 (heh, hi ACE score in action). She was an A and B student and I was nearly all A’s. I don’t know if the IQ test I took back then was legit, but I was 150 or 140. I don’t want to get too deep in the woods, but I want to say you are not your numbers. You have it in you to be happy, to be successful, and to have good relationships. My wife and I are still together since 14 years old. Three kids, a good home, I love my career and job, I have hobbies I enjoy. It is not all sunshine and rainbows and life has been HARD. The stats say we should have ended up one way, yet we ended up another. You are not your numbers.
You are not your numbers is a rural sensibility and assumption.
During the Iraq War veterans were coming back with PTSD and seeing psychologists and psychiatrists. Some of them had multiple comobidities; depression, anxiety, Bipolar, with the PTSD and were send to get MRI Scans.
What they discovered is there was no brain damage, but certain areas of the brain weren't as developed as they ought to be; they administered ACE tests and found out everyone had high ACE scores. Other studies were done and are being done and are finding evidence of somatization; when you aren't raised right your brain physically doesn't develop properly.
Pick up a copy of the body keeps the score by Van der Kolk, and Complex PTSD from Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker. Your wife undoubtedly has gastrointestinal issues from her situation and you have your issues (likely over-resorting to fight, flight freeze or fawn responses), those books will help to cure you. I also reccomend seeing a complex trauma specialist even if you don't think you need to.
What you will end up finding out is that there is such a thing as a complex trauma family and trauma tends to be passed down from one generation to the next and become more severe until the blood line just fails. The CDC study on ACE's shows a score of 4 or higher reduces your average life expectancy by 20 years. There have been a few studies correlating high ace scores, specificially sexual abuse victims, and a specific type of rare cancer.
You will also need to go through a few iterations. I've changed tremendously from the person I was to the person I am now, and in that process, ended up completely forgetting my childhood and some of my early adult hood. Couldn't remember grade school teachers names which is not like me. My brain had repressed those memories because they were incompatible with who I am now and as I remember and re-remember them they get integrated and I gain more emotional and mental self-control and become more capible of handling future trauma.
I am going to answer some questions you didn't ask (and one you did). Apologies in advance.
For reference, I was in a gifted program and went to a gifted magnet high school. I have been fascinated by gifted ed since then, and I think much of it is still lacking (on several dimensions).
1. I think the best thing that can be done is keep the kids' ACE scores as low as possible, ideally at a 0 or 1 (that 1 being divorce). The ACE scores you mentioned sent a shiver down my spine. I'm sorry that this has happened to you and your family -- I am glad to see that you are able to mention it.
2. You can stop taking IQ tests unless you just enjoy taking them. The last time I did a deep dive into the IQ testing scene (about 20 years ago), there were not any psychometrically validated tests for adults that could measure over about 150 (that's around the 99.9% level). Also, if you continue taking them and happen to score lower than usual, don't think that you are losing it -- there is probably some external factor (e.g., a bad night's sleep, and particularly tough workout, etc.) that probably negatively impacted your score.
3. The best thing you can teach high-IQ kids, imho, is EQ-related stuff. One of the biggest challenges for many folks at my high school (often the smartest) was interacting with other people, especially people who are not near their level of intelligence. The folks who were smart and had (I am guessing) high EQ have done very well in life in a variety of ways. The folks with lower EQ... not so much.
4. As for education, I would try to introduce them to a wide variety of self-study tracks, ideally ones that can go very deep into a topic. One of the cool things about my high school was (like another poster said) that we had a lot of free and unstructured time. Furthermore, we could self-study a wide range of topics if we could find a sponsor (and there was always a sponsor if you could do the work). Looking back at my time in high school, my one wish is that our sponsors would have encouraged us to look more at graduate level texts. Looking back at my own education, most of the texts that I would consider "good" did not start popping up until upper level undergrad courses and in graduate school. Most, if not all, of the texts were not above the comprehension level of my high school peers, and I think we would have been better off had we been fast-tracked that direction. I would try to avoid any sort of classes that have a lot of repetitive busy work (this is a recipe for disaster with most gifted kids).
4a. One challenge with gifted kids is that they do a lot of things well, and the limiting factor is often times just time. I would encourage you to introduce your kids to a wide range of fields, but I also encourage you to give them some heuristics early on that may help them decide what to focus on. Three heuristics I give to younger people who are interested: 1. choose a field that has people you like to spend time with, 2. choose a field that has work in an area you want to live (e.g., don't choose finance if you are an ambitious American who doesn't want to live in NYC), and 3. choose a field that has interesting and hard problems to work on (and optionally if you care about money, that people want to have solved). These are not perfect heuristics, and there are probably better ones, but these three cut out a lot of fields very quickly.
What you are referring to are people with high IQ who are not well socialized and thus develop neuroticism and have emotional instability, which can happen for a variety of reasons but I think it is common among high IQ people and blood lines of high IQ people because of societies inability to understand them.
I was going to post a long tirade (which would've probably traumatized everyone here who read it) as EQ is a particularily onerous topic for me but I think a few short paragraphs will suffice.
In my case, I have high IQ and a near-eidetic memory which means I have what I call a "refactoring imagination"; I could imagine the perfect assembly of a car engine down to each measurement (or a few measurements that would allow me to make accurate guesses of the remainder) then iterate that complex system in my head over and over. That drawing can get put away in the brain and brought back 20 years later if relevant.
Now take a 6 year old child who always has his hand up in the classroom because he's bored, knows the answer from the book after reading it once or what the teacher showed them, and can anticipate what the teacher wants with a high degree of certainty. That child figures everyone else is just like they are is just as bored as they are (because that's the kids think); this goes on for weeks, the teacher becomes bewildered by the other kids (that profoundly gifted child is very good at selling the idea kids are smarter than they actually are to a relatively new teacher who hasn't developed out of that thinking yet) goads them a bit and through no fault of their own, the other kids begin teasing and assaulting him to take out their jealousy.
This snowballs due to an inference pattern of bad situation and that child then becomes what I call "the scapegoat student" for the remainder of their academic schooling.
It takes two parties to make a kid well socialized; the child and society. If society doesn't want to socialize a kid properly, they won't be. The kinds of people who latch on to EQ are the kinds who cannot accept they are "not special" and are also the kinds from whom I derived much abuse.
In the case of primary schools, getting your kid out of that situation requires moving to another district or state because the teachers are there to bring the bottom of society up to a functional level, not to allow the talented and gifted to soar. This produces the incentive, ultimately, to use some students as scapegoats.
The rest of what you mentioned is interesting to me, I'll take the tiem to look into it. Thank you.
My situation: I'm in my 30's, I take IQ tests every 3-4 years and always score somewhere around 155-165. I come from a multi-generational complex trauma family, my mother has an ACE store of 9, I have an 8, my father is with what I know about him around a 9 and going back generations on either side of the family it seems to be the case on both sides. High ACE scores reduce your IQ and academic performance quite a bit. My Sister scored 167 on a MENSA exam once unadusted for dyslexia and dyscalculia which they mentioned would put her in the 180's.
I can't even begin to describe the kind of perceptual maze I've had to navigate overcoming my own issues; cognitive restructuring is a powerful tool I used well before I learned about complex trauma and in the last few years that has been a real renissance for me. I feel in a lot of ways I was raised more by the internet and BBS than my own parents.
Decided a long time ago to be celibate because I just assumed my kids are going to go through the same lot in life I did and I wouldn't want to do that to anyone even by accident. Any kind of technique or program to help those kids avoid that outcome would be useful to me. If I have kids I want them to be who they are supposed to be in life.
BTW, thank you for posting this.