My kid is great - very smart, sweet, fun, etc. So don’t get me wrong when I describe this. But she is almost aggressively indifferent about almost everything. School? Meh. Girl Scouts? Meh. Reading? Meh. Even her parkour gymnastics class, which she is willing to continue with and seems to enjoy while she’s doing it, fails to elicit any discernible verve from her. She’s in the gifted program at school, but rather than being engaged with any subject or excited about learning, she’s very happy that her supersmarts mean she has to put in approximately a 5% effort to get by.
She does get jazzed about sleepovers, Minecraft, and junk food. Most other things are greeted with indifferent laziness.
My husband is concerned that she’s never going to learn the most important life skills of giving a shit and putting in effort. He’s also very puzzled by her because he was the opposite at her age: driven, engaged, persistent, and proud to turn out the best work he was capable of. Of course, it is well known that my husband is weird.
After talking with a couple other parents, I’m starting to wonder if this is (in part) a normal phase for her age. I know there are a lot of Dopers with successful, happy older offspring, and I wanted your input. Also, what can we do to help her get excited about stuff?
It sounds like she is getting socially connected to same-age friends and getting her cues for “what is cool” from them. That starts to happen around age 10 - they actively avoid what you think is cool and seek out what their friends tell them is cool.
As for what to do - hmm:
Ask her what she is interested in - e.g., sleepovers, Minecraft and junk food.
Confirm with her that she understands the need to maintain her grades and stay engaged in school. Period.
Make it clear that she will get access to sleepovers, Minecraft and junk food ONLY when she holds up her end of the bargain - so define specific goals…
It was the case for my now-31-year-old daughter when she was 10, and ditto for my now 12-year old grandson when he was 10. My grandson’s teachers all indicated that it was a fairly common phase that usually occurs in children who are at the head of the class in ability.
I was a gifted student that didn’t put much effort into most things because most things came easily to me and the things that didn’t come easily I just wrote off as not important. I went through that stage until I got the college. The only things I were really into were boys and music. Sadly I think I wasted my youth, so if you can find something to motivate your daughter I would encourage you to do so.
Does she enjoy reading? I was “meh” on cub scouts, rec league soccer, and violin practice but loved dinosaurs, space, and mythology at age 10. It was reflected in my reading rather than the activities my parents forced on me.
My 15 year old is like that as well. Drives me nuts that she’s an awesome mathematician and she could care less. And she still doesn’t give a rat’s ass about fitting in socially, especially if it interferes with a good book! I’m noticing though, when she does have an interest in something, she completely embraces it. She’s always noodling on her guitar or drawing Manga. It’s not a lot, but she’s really very good at both. Her twin sister on the other hand, is equally smart but just flits from one activity to another without really developing a passion for any one thing.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the apathy but when she does show an interest, give her all the access to developing that interest that you can. The big worry for me is the smart girl coasting through school thing. Her teachers need to help get her engaged in her studies now before she develops too many bad study habits.
Yeah, sounds like being 10. I went through my indifference phase, my everything sucks phase, my wannabe nihilism phase, my militant black phase (your daughter probably won’t go through this) and about four others that I can’t remember. Currently in my “everything’s great, except for the things that suck” phase.
Two possibilities. First, find something that she really likes and will explore in depth. It could be anything. It could be something totally trivial.
Another possibility is to give her something that she will fail at - not in school, but a challenge at home. Or you might get the teacher to assign her something extra. We sometimes challenge ourselves only by running head on into our limits.
Sounds almost just like me (and I am 15), except you can replace the book with web browsing on my smartphone and I am a male. Also, I have that thing where I am interested in one thing for a brief period, and during that, I excessively spend time on it. Then, many times, I lose interest in it or come back to it again at a later time. There are very few things that I stay with.
And I don’t give a shit about socially fitting in or anything like that. I have got a few people to talk to, and that is really all I give a damn about.
I have no interest for sports or music. As for girls, I do develop crushes, but I am way too shy to date and have my parents know about it. Also, they don’t want me dating until I am in college. As a result, there is not really much I can do when I do develop an attraction for a girl, at least not for three more years.
Also, I am quite pedantic about using correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. This is actually an SDMB influence. In fact, if I make an embarrassing mistake and miss the edit window (I wish they would give us more time), I compose a whole new reply after it just to apologize.
Agreed. The gifted kids I teach are 8-9, but there’s sometimes something similar going on with them. I emphasize the idea in my class that to be a struggling student is a good thing, not a bad thing: it means you’re actively struggling to learn something you don’t already know and you’ll get something out of your time at school, whereas a coasting student who only does easy things is wasting their time. (The flip side is that I’d better be prepared with challenges for those kids, or else it’s ME wasting their time).
You might want to check yourself. Do you praise her for accomplishment or for effort? If you mostly praise her for accomplishment (All A’s, way to go!) you might want to try to flip that around, instead making note of times she works really hard at something and accomplishes it. Also point out when you’re struggling with something, so she can see it’s a lifelong effort.
Yeah I was also gifted and floated through high school with little effort. I didn’t care to put any effort into anything because…well I didn’t have to and, frankly, I didn’t care to. Unfortunately, unlike April R, it didn’t improve with college. I continued to attempt to breeze through classes with little effort and ended up doing terribly. I realized quickly that I had to actually WORK to do well, and I had no desire to do that. Needless to say, it hasn’t done me well in my life.
So yes, while it may be a stage for your daughter, you need to try to not let it become her entire outlook on life. Because if she doesn’t change it now, it might not ever change and she’ll end up like me. Don’t let her end up like me. Trust me. It’s an awful outlook for anyone.
And it is not necessarily that I don’t want to do anything that is hard either. If something is interesting and hard (for example, chess and card magic which are two of my on and off interests), I actually spend more time on it. I like doing hard things given I find them interesting. On the flip side, I don’t necessarily find everything that is easy to be interesting and stuff I want to do more.
So no, the difficulty level of doing something is not really a factor in me deciding whether I want to pursue it or not.
I have one last comment to make (sorry for not putting it all in one post). For me, I usually work hard in the first half or so year. After that however, I start to slack off, and usually by this time of the year, I try to do as little as I can to maintain my good grades. In fact, it is happening with me right now. I just get really lazy during this time of the year. Not surprisingly, it is also the time I get yelled at more by my parents due to me slacking off on homework and spending too much time on the computer. Fortunately, we are able to turn in late work for full credit here and the school is moving away from assigning required homework which results in penalization for not completing it, so not turning in homework usually has no effect on my grades.
That was me, too. School was easy, so I didn’t put in much effort. I put effort into things that interested me. For example, each year in our talented and gifted program, the teacher had us do a research project, and in 6th grade, I picked WWI planes and aces. I read everything I could get my hands on, had my parents take me to the next town to interview the curator of an aviation museum, built a giant model of a Sopwith Camel, did a slide show, etc., etc. But it interested me. Everything else, I did what I needed to get by. Ditto for high school. College, I worked hard, but only because I had to. It was really only in grad school that I kicked it into super high gear.
The moral of the story, at least for me–just because someone doesn’t put forth the effort doesn’t mean they can’t, or won’t eventually when the need arises.