Raising children is hard work, which is one reason why "be a better parent" is a common New Year's resolution. Raising children is especially hard work when the readily available advice doesn't fit the situation, which is true for most parents of gifted children. How do a toddler's parents ask for advice from other playgroup parents when their child is starting to read before some of his peers have started to talk? It is often obvious that a gifted child doesn't fit the neat milestones given in the standard guidebooks long before parents figure out why they don't fit.
However, parents find help in many places, not just from other parents and from parenting manuals. Millions of people have read Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. How many children have been allowed to play with their food because Ma allowed Laura to play with hers, just as long as she ate it? How many children have been raised with the motto of television's Daniel Boone, "Be sure you're right, then go ahead"?
Here are some quotations to think about. They come from a wide range of sources and contexts, yet they each relate to frequent topics of discussion among the parents of gifted children. May they provide you with ideas and inspiration in the year to come.*****
"Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers." Socrates
"All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable." Fran Lebowitz
"Love is not only something you feel. It is something you do." David Wilkerson
"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do, you apologize for the truth." Benjamin Disraeli
"Parents can only advise their children or point them in the right direction. Ultimately people shape their own characters." Anne Frank
"Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence." Honore de Balzac
"The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer." Henry David Thoreau
"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit." e. e. cummings
"Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind." Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"People who boast about their IQs are losers." Stephen Hawking
"Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death." Albert Einstein
"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." John Steinbeck
"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind." Samuel Johnson
"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." John F. Kennedy
"If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking." George S. Patton
"A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason." Thomas Carlyle
"Do not wait for ideal circumstances; they will never come; nor for the best opportunities." Janet Erskine Stuart
"If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact not to be solved, but to be coped with over time." Shimon Peres
"If you don't have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?" Stephen King
"Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it." George Halas
"I love the winning, I can take the losing, but most of all I love to play." Boris Becker
"For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison." Theodore Roosevelt
(Adapted from the series "Quotations on Wry", published in IMprint, the Newsletter of Northern New Jersey Mensa, in January, 2003, 2004, and 2006. This article may be reprinted without alteration by any AML local group, as long as credit is given to IMprint and the author. Please notify Kathe Oliver )