Vanity/Self-Esteem / National Day / Gifted and Other Children

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

I'm sure I've missed over 100 people's birthdays, anniversaries, 
illnesses, recoveries, and other events where they needed to be 
patted on the back --- I mean, people on HPfGU lists whom I *like* 
and I *wanted* to pat their backs, but I was AFK so long!

Naama wrote:

> Fighting vanity, once such an important paedagogical principle 
> (remember Marilla in Anne of Green Gables?), seems to have gone 
> completely out of fashion, hasn't it? Now it's all about making
> your child feel good about herself, giving her a lot of positive 
> reinforcement, etc. 

There may be sound reason for this, not merely that people in general 
became increasingly sinful through the twentieth century. For one 
thing, once upon a time, 95% of people were farmers and neighbors 
worked somewhat co-operatively and the vast majority of people were 
compelled to stay in the same social class as their parents, but 
nowdays most people have to find jobs/careers different from their 
parents' jobs/careers, and both downward and upward social mobility 
occur fairly often. So it would make sense that people in the old 
days would have a need to be contented with the inherited status 
and career (usually farming) that they were stuck with, contented to 
defer to people of higher social class or older age, and it would 
make sense that people nowdays would have a need to have the courage 
and aggression to fight in the competition for good grades / college 
admission / jobs / promotions / customers / investors.... I'm 
suggesting that teaching people humility (the opposite of vanity) is 
good for the old-fashioned goal of keeping to your station and bad 
for the new-fangled goal of making a huge fortune.

Another possibility is that modern life does a lot more damage to 
children's self-esteem than old-time life did, so first aid for their 
self-esteem is a new need. Two things that *might* have been some 
good for old-time kids' self-esteem is that they could see the 
obvious value to the family's survival of the work (chores) they did 
on the farm, and that they spent a lot of time in the presence of 
adults, watching the adults work (while doing their own work) and 
thus learning how to do adult work. One thing in the modern world 
that is *surely* bad for *everyone's* self-esteem is television, 
constantly showing us physically beautiful, fashionable, prosperous 
people that it implies we are *supposed* to resemble, and being based 
on showing advertisements, whose method of urging us to buy their 
products is subtlely making us feel that we are defective and can 
have our defects fixed by the product.

Ali Hewisonw wrote:

> I confess to being rather jealous of the US and other countries
> that have a special day to celebrate being themselves.

I had the impression that many old countries have their patron 
saint's day as their national day. For England, that would be St. 
George. Mexico has an Independence Day but makes a bigger celebration 
of the anniversary of a famous battle (5 de mayo, battle of Puebla).

Tabouli wrote:

> My mother, alas, didn't much like the amount of attention he gave
> me, and plumped for 3, of course, and my brother joined in 
> wholeheartedly. As, it seems, did both of poor Catlady's parents
> in her case.

No, I must give my parents credit for having been type II in their 
way. I don't recall them much studying research about how to educate 
gifted children, but their idea was like your further words:
<< bullied into extending into ever more domains where excelling is 
expected a la archetype 2 parents >>

Cindy Sphynx wrote:

> After all, we don't label non-gifted children as underachievers if
> they do not reach goals they set for themselves or if they don't 
> reach some objective measure of achievement. 

Sure we do. Whoever heard of a parent being satisfied with their IQ = 
100 child bringing home 'averaqe' grades?

> I never scored as gifted or profoundly gifted on an IQ test. 

I don't know if you ever *took* an IQ test, but I *sure* that if you 
did, you would score as gifted or profoundly gifted. I base this 
opinion partly on reading what you write on these lists, and partly 
on my knowledge that success in law school and bar exams involves 
some of whatever it is that IQ tests measure, so that statistically 
it is very rare for a person of merely 100 IQ to become a lawyer 
(they must have worked *very* hard (hi, Tabouli!) or had someone pull 
strings for them).