Go easy on him. Most "gifted" kids are children of narcissists, ending up with schizoid/schizophrenic or CPTSD-style presentations. The "prodigy child" narrative is there entirely to flatter the parent. Or at least this was true for my cohort. It's really hard to get out from being on the wrong side of this. Narcissistic parenting is insipid and in many ways contagious. If you don't end up with that batch of problems, you end up being a narcissist yourself.
It's huge in tech too-- plenty of people interview at companies whose names are effectively magic spells which will make them "good enough" for their parents stories to their friends.
And he's sorta right about the travel thing-- you can buy a lot of people's esteem by buying a plane ticket and being coddled by hotels and tour guides for a couple weeks. You can even call it an "adventure" and nobody will correct you. Narcissists are crazy about signalling their status with travel, so children of narcissists tend to hate it for that reason.
My parents were the antithesis of pushy, but were definitely narcissists - “why can’t you just be normal” was the standard refrain, as believe me, they hated being hauled up in front of the headteacher or being sent dismal missives over my behaviour just as much as I did. I made them look bad, as academic achievement was not important to them - popularity was. They’d organise absolutely agonising social events for me in an attempt to fix me, which just drove me further into the woods.
I've studied this a lot. Narcissism and self-loathing are the same thing. The trick is that the self is malleable and can include others (family and close friends).
It's a pay-it-forward system where the kid gets stuck in the vice, with nobody in the system below him/her to pay it forward/downward to (you might have heard this as "shit rolls downhill").
So for the kid it's actual self-loathing, since there's no other candidate in the extended self to disqualify with high standards (like "just being normal"). This kid (it's usually just one of the kids) is called the scapegoat.
Read Pete Walker's book on cPTSD. I bet it will rock your entire world.
Interesting - and yes, watching the disparity with my equally intelligent 7 year junior sib was a particularly galling experience - she was forgiven for her actions, I think mostly as our parents had given up caring by that point - and she has a similar but different set of traumas.
I’ll read it, thanks - perspective is always very welcome. Just read the synopsis and that alone speaks to me.
It's huge in tech too-- plenty of people interview at companies whose names are effectively magic spells which will make them "good enough" for their parents stories to their friends.
And he's sorta right about the travel thing-- you can buy a lot of people's esteem by buying a plane ticket and being coddled by hotels and tour guides for a couple weeks. You can even call it an "adventure" and nobody will correct you. Narcissists are crazy about signalling their status with travel, so children of narcissists tend to hate it for that reason.