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Discover

Discovering Yourself

You may want to grab some note paper before you read on.

To discover and develop your child’s Intelligence River, you’ll need to discover your own. What does your personal package look like? What skills will you bring to his development? What are your strong intelligences? Where will you instinctively, naturally, know what will help her grow? Where will you make right moves without even having to think about them — or even notice that you’re “making moves” at all?

Where are you less confident about your own skills? How will you provide in those areas? Who can help you in your relatively weak areas? Which of your friends have skills you’d love to see flowering in your own child? How are you going to ask them to be part of her growth team?

I hope you’re not going to make a no-deciding decision not to provide in those areas? Remember, you can’t not communicate. You’re going to be showing your child what intelligences you value by your inactions, as well as by your actions. An example: Some parents doubt their own Number Intelligence. Even though they tell their child how important arithmetic is, their actions say that numbers are to be feared and detested. Guess which source of information is assimilated?

What Not to Discover

Before you plunge into the Discover process, I leave you with a caution: The goal of the Discover phase is to help you see your child better. Be careful it doesn’t do just the opposite. The checklists here are only tools — and not very precise ones. Humans are complicated. No matter how careful your observations, you may well come to wrong conclusions. So take your conclusions with a grain of salt, using them to suggest directions, but not to dictate, OK?

Let me give you an example. One of my older son’s favorite toddler toys was a box of old plumbing pipes (probably lead!) that he spent hours fitting through knotholes in a rustic coffee table, screwing them together as well as the mismatched fittings allowed. In hindsight, I see a direct link from that to his life as computer programmer and music composer. My younger son had trouble with handwriting in his first school years, then went on to become an avid and skilled builder of paper models, and now, as a young adult, is a wonderfully skilled potter. What if we had decided Paul was sure to become a plumber, and that Andy wouldn’t work with his hands?

Say that you decide, on careful observation, that your child has a woefully lacking Director — disorganization and lack of planning seem to be his strongest suites! That certainly suggests that you may want to pay special attention to developing skills there. But it doesn’t mean you have to go off the deep end! If you decide that you have to teach her how to be more organized to the exclusion of everything else, you’re likely to do more harm than good. Or if you go in the other direction, and decide there’s no hope, he’ll just have to live at home and marry someone who’s willing to manage his life for him, you deny him a chance to develop an essential skill. Balance!

On A Jag

There’s another important reason to be a bit cautious. No one ever develops absolutely smoothly, moving every intelligence forward at the same rate. We all pace our development a bit differently. Many of us go on jags, where we’re totally into one area, and let others slip. Some of us stay specialists. But many of us seem to focus one or two intelligences at a time and switch our focus now and then. Some of this is developmental — like all the seventh graders who are so involved in hormones and the social whirl that reading takes a back seat for a while. Some of it is just our individual ways of tackling the world — one kid works out the social challenge of seventh grade, then goes back to reading, while another keeps her “nose in a book” and ignores the social until high school, then adds that component.

A child’s exclude-everything-else passions may last a long time. One of the brightest kids I’ve ever known watched TV to the exclusion of everything else for months. Her parents bit their tongues and waited. One day she stood up, announced that she’d figured TV out, and basically hasn’t glanced at it since! (She’s in her forties now!)

You get the point, right? Don’t assume you understand perfectly. Go a little easy. Keep everyone’s options open.