Labels

[atropus]

Reading Faber & Mazlish "Siblings without Rivalry" it has an entire chapter on labelling kids. They bring up the point that there is a problem if a child gets a positive label as much as a negative one because it can be a lot of a burden on them. If they are "the organised one" then they feel an extra stigma attached to making sure they fill that

Comments

[morbid_curious]

...like when I was a kid and I was the musical one so my brother gave up music even though he really enjoyed it.

I'd forgotten about that, but now that you mention it, yeah. I only worked out that I had a fair degree of aptitude for music much later in life. Of course, that perfectionist streak and a good ear for pitch don't make the violin a good instrument to learn, honestly - one of the reasons I abandoned that was that I could hear just how terrible I sounded compared to the noises I was trying to make.

As it happens, I'm currently attempting to get my USB MIDI keyboard to the stage where I can hook it up to my laptop and dabble some more :-) Might need to ask Dad's help for soldering, though - it needs a new upgrade chip sent from Germany to work with Vista/Win7.

Knowing our parents values and motivations really helped us growing up, I think. Since we knew why things were or weren't the right things to do, it was pretty easy to be well-behaved. Well, relatively well-behaved, at least ;-) I like to think we turned out okay,

[atropus]

I think it's the same thing with art. We were both pretty talented but because we were raised risk averse we tended not to aim on "how can I get better at this" and focus more on "I don't seem to be good at this". Because we were "gifted" a lot of things came easy and it was harder to work through setbacks or to see the point when things were harder. I think if we had had (and our parents had had) the resources he might have been more willing to improve at things we weren't so naturally good at. I know it's taken me years to learn to work at stuff and I'm still not so good at it.

...the number of video games I just didn't enjoy because I couldn't handle "losing"... depression may have had a part to play in that too, and it was probably a bit of chicken and egg as well - defeatest mindset, begets depression, begets defeatest mindset.

[graeco_celt]

Man, you can't imagine how happy it makes me to see the two of you actually caring about investigating who you are and what you do, as parents, and how that affects your children.

My older sister and I are pretty good examples of exactly this. Not that my parents went out of their way to label us or anything but our 'roles' were set pretty early on and that has had some long terms and not always good effects on both of us.

[atropus]

I think that much more of the "damage" was on Dave rather than me and that a lot of issues we have worked on in our adult lives. It has done our relationship no end of good for us to be out of each other's space. :)

I was having a conversation at a party the other night and I remember saying "...well I've always been a geek, it's just now I'm a Parenting Geek." My husband and I often think over our strategies and have conversations about our goals for our boys and ourselves as parents and whether our strategies work or need fine-tuning. I wuv my husband ^_^

[kirina]

Thanks for this break from labelling meaning separating water samples into 5mL vials and becca sticking teeny tiny labels on them!
Interesting read ^_^