this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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My youngest (now 27) has a bit of a problem with that. The issue is that he's smart and most things always came easy to him. He'd do those giant writing assignments the night before that are supposed to be worked on for weeks and still get the high grade. Hardly ever seemed to study, but got solid A's. But when something comes along that he's not automatically good at, he gets super frustrated. He wanted to learn the guitar in high school (I play a little), so we bought him one and some basic instruction, but he hated it because it didn't come naturally. It's a decoration on his wall.
I will give him this though: he decided a few years back that he wanted to learn to draw, and that didn't come naturally, but he's continued to work at it and has gotten pretty decent. So it's something a person can get past.
I just wanted to add something to my earlier post. It may be that playing a guitar is highly noticeable. You can't practice often without everyone around you hearing it. Even if you became skilled, there is the expectation of performing in front of people, and most intelligent people feel they need to perform at the top level.
Drawing however allows you to practice in private and present only your best work. Which allows the ego and social standing to stay intact. Everyone has an identity that they make for themselves but often it limits them to always stay between those lines, especially in front of others.
That's certainly a possibility.
This is a common trap for intelligent people. Because of years of everything being easy you have that expectation for every situation. You never learn how to challenge yourself. Additionally your identity and social status was built on always being capable and smarter than others around you.
When suddenly you run into something that actually takes study and dedication, you just don't know how. Studying and persistence are learned skills. It's also embarrassing and causes you to shy away. Things seem impossible if you have no experience of being challenged. Depression and avoidance takes over.
Before you know it you're middle aged and never did any of the amazing things that everyone expected of you as a child prodigy. Potential was capped at the level that requires no effort.
My wife is really smart and says she just "sees" the answer to math problems. Ask her to multiple two 3-digit numbers and she does it quickly in her head. Was never like that for me, I always have to work the process even for simple things, it's never obvious. I got a CS degree with a math minor, and took some pretty high level math classes. It was always the same for me: learn the process, then work it through, whether it's number theory or multiplying two numbers.
My wife didn't get a degree, but she went back to school as an adult. When she got to the first math class that had symbolic/algebraic notation, she ground to a halt initially. She couldn't just see the answer, and she had no practice working through the process. Was a real slog for her.
Being brilliant is a gift, but you need to learn to work the mental muscles too.
This is basically why I believe that effortless As in grade school are a failure state for kids. People tell me that mu standards are too high for my kid, but I cannot express to them that now is the time for my kid to build up the ability to struggle and persevere. It's not that I have high standards. I just think that a perfect score is a sign that the task wasn't hard enough.
I saw way too many kids burn out in college because they'd never seem a grade below an A before, let alone the C they just scored. Since I was used to being pushed to my limit in grade school (not by my mother, but by teachers), I was fully prepared to work hard to barely make a B sometimes.
You can go too far in the other direction and burn out an intelligent child for the rest of their life.
There is some balance between allowing them to build confidence with some A's among their peers, and then also being challenged to get that C they didn't think was possible.
Nobody can always function at 100% anyway and both experiences build different skills. It's like how you can't lift heavy weights all day every day. You need down time and stretching as well as aerobic exercise if you want to be able to make full use of the strength.
I think learning to be happy with a B is an important skill. I don't believe that As should be effortless. If an A is effortless, then that means the kid wasn't in a challenging enough class. In real life the only reward for hard work is more work. Leaning when they want to push for the A and when they want to be content with a B is an important think for them to decide. Perfection should never be the goal. That's how kids burn out at the college level.
Hmm, mixed emotions here. On the one hand, I agree that grade school kids are capable of much more than we typically teach them. I remember a 5th grade teacher who taught us math up through fractions, and then not getting anything new in math until like 8th or 9th grade.
On the other hand, I don't think making it a struggle, with a scale that tells most of them that they didn't quite measure up, is the way to successfully teach young kids. That 5th grade teacher I mentioned made the class fun, and we weren't aware that we were leaning stuff at a faster rate than the other classes. It was all very positive.
If my kid thinks that being less than perfect is a personal failing then I have failed as a parent. That's the point of challenge my kid. To teach her that she doesn't have to be perfect. That's a B is okay. Doing your best is okay. Hell, doing what you feel like is okay as long as you hit that minimum standard which is a C.
I don't intend to make my kid struggle for a B, but As should not be effortless. If my kid isn't putting in the work then I don't think they should get an A. I think it's okay not to have an A. I was always a solid B student even in college and I was and still am okay with that. It made me a chiller kid in college and it gave me space to learn how to expand my capacity because I was so shocked by how "poorly" I did.
I was the kind of kid to get good grades without really trying, and I think I would have been better off if I had been challenged. Instead I just coasted, and when I got to calc2 I failed. I still don't have great learning habits.
I think the difference with his guitar playing and drawing was that he probably just didn't enjoy learning guitar. Tons of people buy an instrument to only learn later that they didn't like it as much as they thought. Not trying to say you don't know your kid, just pointing out that learning an art requires an interest to put into it. It can definitely be frustrating to realize that you aren't as interested in the learning process of something you had dreams of being good at.
I hear what you're saying, but I honestly think it was just motivation and maturity. I gave you two examples, but there were a number of things that he got very frustrated about when they didn't come easily. Some were school subjects, so he didn't have a choice and had to keep pushing at it, and would eventually get there. In fact, he didn't learn those things more slowly than anyone else, it was just that he was used to getting things instantly.
There's zero doubt in my mind that he would enjoy the guitar, but he wasn't mature enough to get past the initial frustration at the time.
That's good to hear, and I'm glad your kid is figuring it out! Very good point about those that are gifted sometimes needing to work harder at learning to, uh, learn.