I recommend reading Light Up Your Child’s Mind – I do – but at the same time, I have to admit that the book raised a lot of questions for me. It seemed to be a fairly obvious collection of sound advice: many children are gifted in some way or another, often in ways that the structure of education and schooling do not directly reward or recognize. The book provides tips on how to identify and encourage that giftedness, while still helping the child succeed within the education system, since, obviously, that system is such a gatekeeper to success as an adult.
What disturbed me about this book is that it needed to be written: are we as parents and as a society really so misguided that we don’t pay attention to the details of our children’s interests? Do we as parents really only value “A”s on the report cards and look for the weaknesses and deficiencies in our kids? Do people really assume that school is all the education a child needs and that the responsibility to educate and teach ends with the school day? Does anyone really think in a world full of diverse careers, subjects, and hobbies that there is only one kind of giftedness?
The nature of media reporting and even writing is to focus on what is odd, what is the outlying case, what is the sensational story – and this trend skews our perceptions of how statistically normal (or not) many of these situations are. i tend to believe that most people use common sense more than we think they do, and that most people raise their kids with love and empathy. However, this book, written by two educational psychologists of great standing, almost suggests by its very subject matter that no one is parenting with a critical mind or with common sense, or at least very few of us.
I do not mean to suggest here that the book has nothing to offer: in fact, it has a lot of good resource suggestions on where to go to help your child develop constructive and interesting projects that will further whatever area of giftedness he or she might have. But the bottom line premise of the book: that raising a gifted child and developing those gifts requires an attentive ear, an open mind, flexibility, and time and interest on the part of the parent – is still disturbingly obvious to me – suggesting that common sense in parenting is not as common as I might think.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d823a942-3c1a-4112-9cb1-281e4d070da2 "Gifts for Mom Product Review: Light Up Your Childs Mind")
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
it’s probably obvious to you because your parents raised you that way. if you were not raised with attentive parents, then it’s all new.