Category: Parenting

Advocacy for Gifted Kids: Vote With Your Feet

Posted on by Suki

In celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week, Great Potential Press is pleased to present a series of guest blog posts covering some of the biggest topics in childhood development and gifted education today. GPP author and blogger Suki Wessling discusses her take on homeschooling versus traditional schooling, for National Parenting Gifted Children Week.

This is Part 6 of her guest series. Return to Part 1 for links to all the posts.

Have your own experience or perspective to share? Join the conversation onFacebook or tweet us @GiftedBooks or #NPGCW12, and you may see your comments featured in a future post!

My choice to homeschool my kids might look from the outside like a big vote of no confidence in our public education system. In fact, a fair number of homeschoolers do vilify schools, presenting homeschooling as the only valid choice.

My choice to homeschool my kids might look from the outside like a big vote of no confidence in our public education system. In fact, a fair number of homeschoolers do vilify schools, presenting homeschooling as the only valid choice.

My experiences and point of view, however, are somewhat different. I admit that public school and I got off to a bad start. I did due diligence on our local elementary school and opted for a small private school for our first child’s kindergarten year. I had many reasons, but the big two were these:

  1. Our local public schools had no interest in serving the needs of families. To make busing cheaper, our local elementary’s kindergarten started at 7:40 in the morning, and to save money on staff, it was only two and a half hours long. I did the math, and decided that private tuition was worth the extra hour sleep my kids and I would get.
  2. The principal scared me off. When I described my son’s learning and what we were looking for in a school, he said, “It sounds like you are a family I’d love to have at our school. Unfortunately, we can provide nothing that you’re asking for.” No GATE program, no foreign language (in fact, he said “teaching Spanish is illegal!”), no art, music, or PE besides what teachers and parents provided.

We eventually happened upon a charter school that was a better fit for my son and our family, but it ended up being a terrible fit for our daughter. Our quiet, compliant son was suffering through the long stretches of boredom he met in an undifferentiated classroom. But I realized that our twice–exceptional daughter would never function in a school geared toward serving the needs of the kids in the middle of the spectrum.

So we ended up trying private school for our daughter as well, and finally gave in to homeschooling.

As soon as we started homeschooling, I knew that we needed some sort of “school” to go to. Despite her difficulties in the classroom, my daughter is very social and was bored with me alone at home. So we found a public homeschool program that was wonderfully accepting of her and her unusual behavior, and then again accepting of my son when he started homeschooling.

So how do I see our schooling history as advocacy for gifted kids?

I think that too many parents keep quiet about their gifted kids’ needs. Their kids suffer in school, but not quite enough for their parents to feel like it’s worth making a fuss. And thus teachers, administrators, and decision-makers on up the educational food-chain don’t get the message that gifted kids’ needs aren’t being served by our schools.

Yes, I could have stayed with our neighborhood schools and advocated for more: teacher training, differentiated classrooms, broader educational goals, and reintegration of essential curriculum that has been lost. But I knew enough about the state of our local schools to know that I wasn’t going to be effective in that fight.

However, there is one thing that bean–counters do understand: money, and who gets it. My kids move from school to school carrying their ADA funding with them. I transfer them out of our district into a smaller, friendlier district, one that supports alternative education, if not specifically gifted education. By registering my children with a public homeschool program, I keep them in the system and the system knows where they are.

I wish I could do more on this front, but I decided long ago that I have to put my kids’ needs ahead of any activism that may tempt me. I make sure in a variety of ways that we vote with our dollars. Our local district has never bothered to find out why we—and many other families—transfer to another district. If they did gather that information, I believe they’d be surprised at how many gifted kids are “voting with their feet.”

To a certain extent, I do believe that our public school system needs to learn its lessons the hard way. The more they emphasize test scores, the more families with high–scoring kids leave the system. The more they cut the curriculum to the bone, the less money they will have for the active, experiential learning that would tempt these families back.

I have no wish for us as a society to lose public schooling. Our public schools bring us together and offer us a common vision of ourselves as a country. But as long as it is possible to choose an alternative to inappropriate schooling for my children, I will. I am glad that for now, we have a public school that we love.

Continue to Part 7.

On Being the Parent of a 2e Child

Posted on by Suki

In celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week, Great Potential Press is pleased to present a series of guest blog posts covering some of the biggest topics in childhood development and gifted education today. GPP author and blogger Suki Wessling takes a closer look at how parents can support their twice-exceptional children.

This is Part 3 of her guest series. Return to Part 1 for links to all the posts.

Have your own experience or perspective to share? Join the conversation on Facebook or tweet us @GiftedBooks or #NPGCW12, and you may see your comments featured in a future post!

I remember the day when our family therapist suggested that I refer to my daughter as a child with special needs. The suggestion literally gave me pause. I remember the swirl of ideas in my head: it seemed at the same time to be the most preposterous suggestion and the most practical one I’d heard.

I grew up, like many of us, thinking of “the helmet boy” as the poster child for kids with special needs. When I was in school, disabled kids were just starting to be mainstreamed. Nice kids knew that we shouldn’t make fun of these kids, but we weren’t given any guidance on how to integrate them into our world.  Adults suddenly expected us to pretend that we didn’t notice these kids’ differences, which was obviously ridiculous. I had the benefit of knowing a family friend who was developmentally disabled, but throughout my childhood, kids in special ed at school were “the other.”

So there was my adult self, sitting on a comfy couch, being told that I should identify my daughter—helmetless, verbally adept, mathematically quick, with an incisive wit and a keen eye for irony—as belonging to the same category as truly disabled kids. It was a hard thing to do, and it took me a few years more to understand why.

Twice-exceptional kids are a conundrum that our culture has no mechanism for dealing with. Since I was a child in the 70s, we have evolved. We now teach our children about differences; we teach them about multiple intelligences; we teach them to accept each person as he is. When my kids see a child in a wheelchair, or have a conversation with a child who is developmentally disabled, they have many more tools than I had as a child.

But what to do with the hardly verbal boy who is four years advanced in math? The verbally brilliant child who can’t read? The chess wiz who can’t go to tournaments because so many bodies in a room make her shake and cry?

Our culture is nowhere near understanding what to do with these kids, but we parents have had to take a crash course in dealing with our twice-exceptional children. And to make it worse, each 2e child is so different that we can’t crib notes off our neighbors. We need to ace a test that no one else has ever taken.

I remember the day a parent joined an online support group I belong to and introduced herself like this: “I have two sons. One of them was clearly gifted, and we thought that it would help to have him evaluated. So we decided that we should have our other son, who was in special education at his school and had been diagnosed developmentally disabled, get evaluated too. Imagine our surprise: Our gifted son was gifted; our developmentally disabled son blew the top off the IQ test.”

2e kids fool everyone around them. Sometimes they seem like well-rounded gifted kids, and people wonder why their parents don’t treat them as completely normal. Sometimes they seem so disabled by their other exceptionality that people can’t see their giftedness. And sometimes their disability masks the giftedness just enough that they seem completely average, not in need of any remediation.

I decided early on that forewarning was prudent where my daughter was concerned. I developed a vocabulary to use with caregivers of all sorts: new teachers, the coach at soccer camp, other parents who might notice her unusual behavior. “My daughter is ‘unusual.’ We don’t have an exact diagnosis, but you can use what you know about autistic kids to help her along when she’s having trouble with group activities.”

As she has grown and learned more self-regulation, I have fewer occasions to use this speech. Sometimes I give the speech and it turns out to be completely unnecessary. But sometimes I forget the speech and I remember why I started giving it in the first place!

But also as she has grown, I have realized how delicate the balance is when you’re raising a child with special needs. So many parents know that their children with special needs will never live outside of a group home, never hold down a job, never be able to marry. But parents of 2e kids just simply don’t know. On any given day, you might find me wholly confident that it’s going to be all right, or in despair over whether she’ll ever be able to lead a fulfilling life.

Sometimes when people ask me what I’m up to, I joke that I’m getting my PhD in Psychology—with my dissertation focusing on one child. When you have a twice-exceptional child, humor helps. Talking to other parents helps. But what would really help is knowing that when I utter the words “twice-exceptional,” others would have a bit of understanding, moving our culture a little further into accepting that people truly do come in all flavors, with no box the right shape to fit us all.

Continue to Part 4.

A parent’s view from the psychiatrist’s couch

Posted on by Suki

In celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week, Great Potential Press is pleased to present a series of guest blog posts covering some of the biggest topics in childhood development and gifted education today. GPP author and blogger Suki Wessling takes a closer look at how parents can support their twice-exceptional children.

This is Part 5 of her guest series. Return to Part 1 for links to all the posts.

Have your own experience or perspective to share? Join the conversation on Facebook or tweet us @GiftedBooks or #

I promise that I am neither exaggerating nor joking when I tell you that I could have gotten any sort of diagnosis for my five-year-old daughter.

Confused as to why our bright, funny, active child couldn’t make it through half a day in a classroom,  we sought help from a child psychiatrist. She held up the diagnoses like a bouquet.

“Here we have ADHD, which comes with this lovely drug. Or you might want to choose Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which comes with a drug of a stronger flavor. Of course, there’s always Bipolar Disorder. The drug for that diagnosis is very popular with parents this year.”

Now I am, of course, being facetious. She didn’t speak that way, but the implications were obvious. She could see that we were desperate, and she was there to solve our problems with pharmaceuticals.

However, if she’d paused to ask us, she would have found out that we had a very different mission in mind. We didn’t want to know how to calm our daughter down—we wanted to know what was causing the problem in the first place.

I found the answers on the SENG website and in the book Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children, and those answers gave us the courage the fire the psychiatrist and seek completely different ways to help our daughter succeed in life.

You could say that I’ve offered a happy ending, but here is the way I look at it: I am a highly educated mother, a writer who responds to questions by getting out her smartphone and looking up the answer. My own mother is a medical researcher who supplies me with information from Medline. My experience at the psychiatrist’s office is a common one, but my reaction to it is not. Most parents bow to the authority because they don’t see any other choice.

In my daughter’s life, we have sought help from the realms of psychology, psychiatry, family medicine, family therapy, educational theory, alternative medicine, and traditional Chinese medicine. In that time, a few constants have held true across disciplines:

  • No one ever asked about her intellectual profile
    Despite the fact that the research is solid, easily available, and accepted by leaders in many disciplines, no one ever considered how giftedness might interplay with her behavioral issues. Not once did a practitioner recommend testing of any kind that might relate her problems in the classroom to her learning styles and needs.
  • No one ever asked about her diet
    Parents of autistic kids upend their entire families’ diets because of the amazing results they see. Parents of kids with Down Syndrome see fantastic improvements with nutritional supplementation. Yet, despite the evidence, gifted kids are treated as if they have no special needs at all. Pediatricians should hear alarm bells when the parents of a delightful, highly verbal four-year-old say that he always throws fabulous tantrums in the mid-morning. Everyone should have “reactive hypoglycemia” on the tips of their tongues. But not one practitioner ever mentioned it to me.
  • No one ever suggested that the problems were with her environment
    It took hiring an educational consultant (not paid for by insurance) to get the straight dope on a kid like mine: “I can’t imagine a school that could serve her needs,” the consultant told me. So why couldn’t all the teachers, school principals, and everyone else suggest that perhaps school was the problem? School administrators are so sold on the idea that one-size-fits-all education is good for all kids that it doesn’t occur to them that their method can’t possibly work for all kids.

I think that the misdiagnosis of gifted kids is tied into our general cultural uneasiness with distinguishing “smart” kids from other kids. It’s like our culture is still in the high school locker room, unable to get past jocks vs. nerds.

But if we are truly trying to serve all kids’ needs, then that’s something we have to get past. Pediatricians should feel comfortable telling parents of obviously gifted kids about resources they might need when they run into trouble. School administrators should admit when their school doesn’t serve a child’s needs, and be ready to offer information and advice to parents who need it.

Finally, psychiatrists need to stop viewing high intelligence—and the accompanying overexcitabilities that send parents into their offices—as a disease to be masked with drugs. My heart goes out to all those families raising children with severe problems for which drugs are truly an answer. But it is simply wrong to offer drugs to high-IQ kids instead of advice about understanding typical psychological profiles, dietary needs, and appropriate educational environments. Drugs should be the last resort, not the first option.

Continue to Part 6.

How Other Parents Add to the Challenge of Raising Gifted Kids

Posted on by Suki

In celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week, Great Potential Press is pleased to present a series of guest blog posts covering some of the biggest topics in childhood development and gifted education today. GPP author and blogger Suki Wessling takes a closer look at how parents can support their gifted children.

This is Part 2 of her guest series. Return to Part 1 for links to all the posts.

Have your own experience or perspective to share? Join the conversation on Facebook or tweet us @GiftedBooks or #NPGCW12, and you may see your comments featured in a future post!

When my kids were in school, one of the things I remember parents saying to me pretty often was a variant of, “You are so lucky that…” Then they would always follow with something that our modern school environment places great importance on: reading, math, being able to follow directions, scoring high on standardized tests.

I remember clearly the time a dad said to me, “You are so lucky that your son can read so well.” It had been a frustrating day. It took a lot to get my two kids out of the house and to school, where so many things were difficult for them.  This man’s son was no scholar, but he was a well-liked, happy, athletic boy who was a credit to his caring parents. Thinking about the daily difficulties we had with our ‘smart’ kids, I wanted to say, “You are so lucky your son can hit a baseball!”

But I just let it go. Sometimes it’s not worth the effort to educate other people.

Most parents simply don’t get it, and I don’t consider it my day–to–day job to make them understand. But one of the reasons why I write about giftedness and parenting is to give other parents the words that so often escape us when we’re put on the spot.

Not only, “you are so lucky your son can hit a baseball,” but also:

“you are so lucky that the first parenting manual you tried worked for you,” and

“you are so lucky that your child hasn’t suddenly developed a horrible fear of public bathrooms,” and

“you are so lucky that you can spell words to your spouse and expect that your two–year–old won’t know what you are saying,” and

“you are so lucky your child hasn’t been bored to literal tears in the classroom” and

“you are so lucky that teachers are always happy to see your child in their classroom.”

The most important thing that people don’t get about raising gifted kids is that giftedness comes in a package: you don’t just get quick reading skills or advanced mathematical reasoning. You get a constantly questioning brain that needs to be fed, a tightly wound nervous system that tasks the most advanced parenting skills, and special needs that are not paid for by well-funded public programs.

A lot of this happens behind the scenes. Other parents see the blue ribbons and the child who gets sent off to another classroom for math class. They don’t see the complex dance each morning when you’re trying to get your child ready for an environment that challenges him emotionally, socially, and personally. They don’t see the child you greet after school who is suffering from tension–induced stomach aches and sore throats.

When parents of gifted kids advocate for better teaching techniques, other parents don’t usually understand that this will benefit their children as well. When parents of gifted kids ask for services their kids need, other parents often view them as pushy, “helicopter” parents who want something special for their children. When parents of gifted kids are at the end of their tethers and needs someone simply to understand, they most often run to their community on the Internet, since it is so hard for most of them to find any sort of community at home.

As parents of unusual children, we almost always find ourselves somewhere on the outside. We have commonalities with other parents, especially parents who have children with developmental problems, psychological disabilities, and even physical disabilities.

But parenting gifted children is a challenge that each day we have to face anew. It is largely a good challenge, one that we feel honored to have, but that doesn’t make it any easier. We almost always feel like we can’t possibly give our children enough: enough educational opportunities, enough time for creative exploration, enough understanding of the beauty of the difficult person we have found in our lives.

My children constantly amaze, perplex, excite, and confound me. I would never say that parenting them is easy, but it is a challenge that I know I will be faced with every day.

Continue to Part 3.

The Role of Parents In Identifying Gifted Children

Posted on by Suki

In celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week, Great Potential Press is pleased to present a series of guest blog posts covering some of the biggest topics in childhood development and gifted education today. GPP author and blogger Suki Wessling takes a closer look at how parents can support their gifted children.

This is Part 1 of her guest series. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.

Have your own experience or perspective to share? Join the conversation on Facebook or tweet us @GiftedBooks or #NPGCW12, and you may see your comments featured in a future post!

Before I had children, I reacted to the word “gifted” like the majority of people I knew: I just had no use for it. I distinctly remember a friend telling me that she was having trouble choosing a school because her son might be gifted, and I wondered, “Why would she care?”

When my husband and I bought our house, I only gave cursory thought to the real estate agent’s admission that our local school district “wasn’t the best.” My husband and I figured that we sweated through public school, and our kids would, too.

How things change when your children move from the realm of imagination to the physical world! Our kids’ intelligence didn’t surprise us, but their needs did. I had always believed that every child’s needs could be served well by a single good school. But when I started to experience the world as a parent, things changed. I still believe strongly that a well functioning society offers everyone the chance to pursue a fulfilling life, but I no longer believe that kids’ needs are as interchangeable as their sneakers.

Research shows that parents are the best identifiers of their children’s giftedness, and this aligns well with my experience. Most parents I have met are well-attuned to their kids’ needs, and most of them are unlikely to call a child who falls within the typical learning curve “gifted.” In fact, I think the problem is not that too many parents identify their children as gifted, but rather that too few acknowledge their kids’ giftedness when doing so could help their kids thrive as students and as people.

Why are parents reluctant to identify their kids?

First, many parents are unwilling to identify their children as different from the herd. They are influenced by teachers and administrators who believe that in order to have cohesive school culture, all kids must be treated the same. They are influenced by our culture, which places a great emphasis on being part of the team. But of course, look at any well-functioning team and you will see a group of people who acknowledge each other’s different skills and needs. A baseball team doesn’t offer the same training opportunities to pitchers and catchers. A bank doesn’t look for the same qualities in tellers and financial analysts, nor does it offer them the same training.

Second, there’s the whole weighted issue of what giftedness is. Lots of parents (my past self included) think that even using the word is divisive. They think that their gifted kids should be able to deal with school as it’s presented to them, and even when their kids are unhappy in school, they will blame their student’s behavior before even considering that perhaps the classroom is unsuited to their student. People who would never consider putting their “husky” child into “slim” jeans think that any school should do just fine.

Third, there’s the general confusion about why our schools should serve the needs of gifted students. Some experts promote the idea that we have to serve the needs of the gifted because they are an elite who will be important to the future of our country. Parents with gifted learners who aren’t high achievers will generally be turned off by this attitude, because their children don’t fit the mold that this view of giftedness promotes.

Other experts believe that gifted children have a form of special needs, and their giftedness makes them not only unusual in the classroom but also unsuited to typical classrooms. In this case, parents might fear that separating their kids from the general school population won’t be healthy for their students or for the school. And parents may be hesitant to label their kids as having “special needs” when they expect them to be high achievers.

Amidst this confusion of ideas and attitudes, it’s understandable that parents might not consider the possibility that their children are gifted or might downplay their children’s differences from the general school population.

It’s common on gifted support e-mail lists for new parents to enter with their digital tails between their legs. “I don’t really know if I belong here,” they’ll start. “My child never really did well in school,” they’ll apologize. “My child doesn’t even like math,” they’ll despair, “can she really be gifted?”

So many of us fall victim to the feeling that there’s something wrong with parents identifying their children as gifted. But instead of being embarrassed with self-identification, we should feel comfortable knowing that we know our children – and their needs – better than anyone else.

Continue to Part 2.

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