B-log

by Bertie Kingore (from a conference handout)

1. Appreciate gifted learners as children. Just as all children do, they need love, friendship, reasonable standards of behavior, responsibility, time management skills, free time, and creative pursuits. They need your involvement in their development of independence. Appreciate them for who they are rather than who they may become.
2. Interact with families of gifted children. Gifted children seek interest-mates and intellectual peers as well as age peers. You may also find solace interacting with another parent who lives with and loves a gifted child.
3. Recognize how the personal and instructional needs of a gifted child differ from others. Gifted students require intellectual peers who understand more abstract ideas and get their jokes. They learn best when instruction is at a pace and level that respond to their accelerated readiness to learn.
4. Understand the developmental crises for gifted students. Linda Silverman cautions that gifted students experience uneven development, underachievement often related to a lack of curriculum challenge, conflict between achievement and popularity, and difficulty selecting a career due to multipotentiality.
5. Assure your child that being different is okay. Gifted children can feel disconnected from age peers who interpret so differently. HElp them appreciate individual differences in others and themselves. Provide a place where it is safe for children to be themselves.
6. Be an encourager. A parent uniquely understands the whole child as you view your child in multiple scenarios over an extended period of time. As an encourager, validate your child’s worth and goals as you encourage passions for learning. 
7. Emphasize what is learned is more important than any grade. Interact enthusiastically as your child shares school work with you. Rather than focus upon the grade, use prompts that facilitate communication about what was learned, what subject and topic interests and passions were uncovered, and real-life applications.
8. Be an active listener and elicit children’s perceptions. Strive to understand their messages and feelings rather than to too quickly repsond to their words. Insure that children know you respect them and are genuinely interested in their information. Power struggles can be deferred with a request for their view instead of a barrage of your answers. 
9. Follow their interests and leads in learning situations rather than pressure them with your agenda. Our goals may not be their goals. Consult them on issues affecting them whenever you believe they understand the consequences.
10. Talk up to them. Advanced vocabularies lead to higher comprehension and achievement.
11. Enjoy music, plays, museums, art, sports, and historical places together and discuss the experience. These shared cultural experiences give family members warm memories to talk about over the years.
12. Model life-long learning habits. Talk about current events and volunteer with your child to help others. Our actions may model more than our words.
13. Facilitate real-life reading, writing, science, and math experiences. Get library cards and go to the library together. Enjoy browsing. Help children find good books and materials in the areas in which they express interest. Start at an early age to shop together with a list and a budget, write thank you notes and invitations, and plan the area and plants for a garden.
14. Give books and learning games as presents, and then spend time together reading and playing those games. Research supports that reading and playing card and board games increase vocabulary, math skills, comprehension, and critical thinking skills.
15. Recognize that gifted children need to question and respond critically. They sometimes are impatient with conventions, such as spelling, grammar, rules, and even patience for others. Talk frankly about the importance of conventions without stifling their creativity and spirit.
16. Maintain a sense of humor. As a parent every day you choose whether to laugh or cry.
17. Support school efforts to differentiate and provide services for advanced and gifted children. Consider attending school in-service programs on differentiation and the needs of gifted children.
18. As appropriate, supply home perspectives and feedback on your child’s well-being, responses to learning, and interests. No matter what our occupations, your children are your greatest work.
19. Be an advocate more than an advisory. Stand with your children, and when necessary, before them. There will be a time when you transition to an advisory role, but don’t leap to do it prematurely.
20. (note: from Bryan) Go to God for wisdom, humility, discernment, trust, and faith in nurturing your gifted child. Remember that parent is a verb, not just a noun.

• A humble athlete recognizes his limitations. We all come with divinely imposed limitations—limitations meant to humble us.
• The humble athlete welcomes critique and correction from coaches and teammates. If we’re humble, we realize that we have weaknesses, so we welcome correction. If we’re humble, we know we need to improve, so we want others to show us where and how.
• The humble athlete acknowledges the contribution of others. No athlete accomplishes anything alone.
• The humble athlete is gracious in defeat and modest in victory. When the humble athlete loses, he recognizes that his opponents played better, and he sincerely congratulates them on their win. And when the humble athlete wins, there are no excessive celebrations, no inappropriate victory dances. He realizes that victory is a gift from God and is an opportunity to draw attention to God, not himself.
• The humble athlete honors his coach. He doesn’t rip the coach in private, he doesn’t slouch when on the bench, he expresses gratitude and accepts the role the coach chooses for him.
• The humble athlete respects the officials. He doesn’t protest a call—even if it was inaccurate.
• The humble athlete gives glory for all his athletic accomplishment to God. He knows that all of his athletic skill is ultimately a gift from God.

 From Don’t Waste Your Sports via Crossway Blog.

Reflections on years as a sports dad and coach

• There’s a lot more pink in softball than baseball. This gets less so as the kids age.
• Children under the age of seven like to play in dirt, regardless of sex
• Boys will tackle each other to be the first to get to a ball. Girls are much more polite in their approach. This is also true in basketball.
• Coaches for boys think that what they’re doing today for 5-year olds could make or break whether or not they get to the big leagues. Coaches for girls think that what they’re doing for the 5 year-old girls will make or break whether or not the girls will have fun that day.
• Both groups really need a lot of work on fielding grounders, dribbling the ball, and listening to the coach.
• Dads of either group tend to be more insecure about their child’s performance than do moms.
• Parents of either group can be the most un-fun part of the sport.
• Kids accomplish much more with encouragement than by humiliation or dread.

It’s unavoidable: my daughters are steadily, progressively becoming women. Kelli and I are doing our best to use this time to raise them to be ladies. Part of that work is help our daughters make good choices when it comes to boys.

Boys. 

I’ve got one of ‘em myself, so I know they’re not all bad. But most of ‘em aren’t much good, in their current state of being. I take seriously the role of protecting my daughters from boys who are the way I was. I will not be passive in this responsibility. I go to Junk Yard Dog mode already just thinking about a boy setting his sights on my daughter for anything less than noble intentions. And I still growl menacingly at the ones who may be noble, just so they don’t get any funny ideas.

I used to think I had plenty of time before this would become prominent in our lives. In reality, that time has been upon us for a while now and every investment we made to equip our daughters has been a necessary, important investment.

When I think of my daughters, I’m reminded of this analogy, which is readily available on the web:

Girls are like apples on trees. The best ones are at the top of the tree. The boys don’t want to reach for the good ones because they are afraid of falling and getting hurt. Instead, they just get the apples from the ground that aren’t as good, but easy. So the apples at the top think something is wrong with them, when in reality, they’re amazing. They just have to wait for the right boy to come along, the one who’s brave enough to climb all the way to the top of the tree.

It’s not a perfect analogy, because not all “top apples” think there’s something wrong with them. In fact, I think that many high-caliber young ladies become so because they have been raised to understand they are worth more than the extent that immature adolescent boys value them. We certainly understand our job as parents to daughters is to help see themselves in the humble, but honorable and beautiful way that God sees them. Our responsibility is to help them be selective about the boys who they allow to solicit their affections.

However, I certainly agree the analogy that that bottom feeders are to be avoided. 

My girls are wonderfully made. They are beautiful and highly regarded by their creator and redeemer Jesus. I love them beyond measure and I am daily amazed by the unique way that God uses them to bless others. When the day arrives for young men to come calling (the 1920s called and wants its dating terminology back), only those who respect my girls and treat them well will be allowed to do so. There may be some boys who will be tolerated long enough to determine whether or not they are bottom feeders or tree-climbers. Hopefully, though, our daughters and we will have worked together and talked together enough that they will be able to identify and avoid most bottom-feeders on their own…but if not, I’ll enthusiastically help them (and even bring out my snake-whacking stick if necessary).

It’s no mystery talk is cheap and parenting is hard. I know that many parents have little control of who their children date. Even so, the failure of others parents doesn’t excus my own responsibilities. The current tone, tenor, and trust of our relationships establishes the foundation for the future. We tell our girls now what our expectations and standards are for the future. We continually remind them of who they are and whose they are, so they don’t doubt either of those things in the future and instead seek to find their identity in a selfish, hormone-addled boy. We don’t do it all perfectly, but we try hard, hard, hard to parent in a way where our daughters trust our decisions as being for their best interest, for their benefit, and for their blessing.

My job as dad is to be the type of man that models what my daughters should be looking for in a future husband. I try to model that relationship with their mother. My job is to be single-minded in my love and commitment to her, and to love her in a sacrificial manner. I want my daughters to see me to honor her, to seek her input in family decisions, and to protect and defend her. I want my daughters to see me cleaved to her and to transparently share my life with her. I try to be an example to my daughters of what to look for in a man. And even as I try to be this every day to my bride, my prayer is that my daughters are given to men one day who exceed this standard and excel as husbands and fathers better than have I.

This article about a mom’s horror of unexpected week-long access into her 11-year old daughters FB account compels me to offer a list of basic suggestions to employ when allowing your child to merge onto this crazy social network called Facebook:

1. Don’t let your child under 13 have a FB account. That is FB policy, and by skirting the policy, you (parent) teach your children a bad lesson…that rules are made to be broken. 
2. Don’t let your child have protected access to FB. Set up the account for them. Tell them you know the password, and that you will check it regularly. EVERY update to our child’s account is forwarded to us. It is at time tiresome and tedious, but necessary; not so much for her…but because of what her friends post/share.
3. Don’t let your child think FB is a right. It is a privilege. And accordingly, it is leverage. Children with FB put a high value on it because of the social connectivity, so loss of access to it is a deterring consequence for poor behavior.
4. Control the amount of time spent on FB. Do not allow it to overtake the “real-time” interaction within your family. We set the limit at 30 minutes (with flexibility built in to whatever is going on that evening with the family).
5. Conscientiously, deliberately do the work of parenting on FB. When something inappropriate hits your child’s wall, address it. If there is a problem “friend,” remove or block that person without hesitation or regret. 
6. Set a good example. If your child sees your wall posted with “how hot am I” quiz results or postings of drunkenness, sexuality, flirting and indulgence…that is behavior that they will mimic and later exceed, not just in their virtual world, but also in in their real life.
7. Teach your child how to use FB correctly. Teach them the difference between a message and the wall. Teach them how to use selective lists. Help them understand what FB is: public access into their private life.  
8. Become friends with some of your child’s friends. Especially, if at all possible, with their “inner circle.” You owe no apology for inserting yourself into your child’s life.
9. Control the negotiations as your child matures and the nature of your FB supervision changes. Be pro-active and announce when you are giving more freedom to your child and allowing them to assume more responsibility. 
10. Show respect to your child on FB. Try not to embarrass your child in front of peers. Do the work of parenting in your real-life relationship, not by scolding, shaming, or ridiculing on their wall.
11. Set the tightest privacy setting possible for your child. There are some icky people lurking out there, hoping to find innocent pictures to be used for not-at-all-innocent purposes.

When I was a boy, I remember helping my dad build a front porch for our house. I was hammering away on the nails he had given me. My dad soon noticed that I was putting down only one nail for every 7 or 8 of his. So he took a little time and showed me how to correctly use the hammer. The difference was immediate. I didn’t match him nail-for-nail, but I became more effective once I knew how to use the tool he had given me. 

Facebook is a tool and a resource. When it is misused, we’ve seen that the consequences can be unfortunate, or even tragic. Do the work of a parent and teach your children to be completely familiarized with what FB is, and also how to most effectively use it for appropriate purposes.

Appendix:

Good, specific blog for parents re: Facebook: Smart Facebook Parenting

The following may be construed as sexist or bragging. It’s not intended to be either. It’s just my opinion on the very important matter of the need for dads in a child’s life.

Read More