Category: Parenting

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.

Living One-Handed

Posted on by Suki

I once wrote a piece called “Living One–Handed”about feeling like everything is twice as difficult when you have a baby to haul around. My kids are big now and I couldn’t haul them around even if I wanted to. In fact, my 13-year-old has just passed me in height—his shoe size passed mine over a year ago.

So I knew I really didn’t have an excuse anymore, and I finally set up the inevitable: surgery for my long time carpal tunnel syndrome.

It’s great to have someone to blame for the misfortune in our lives: I can blame my kids for this one! Each time I was pregnant, I blew up like a balloon and my hands started to buzz. The first time, I was alarmed but found out that this is common and usually disappears along with the extra pounds. The second time, it didn’t go away (and neither, come to think of it, did some of the pounds!).

I kept saying that when things got less complicated I would get the problem fixed, but somehow, things never seemed less complicated. The years of living one-handed were short in retrospect, but the years when I felt like I just couldn’t keep up, like everything I wanted to do kept piling up ahead of me and I had to push harder and harder to keep going—those years made surgery seem impossible.

There is that old saying, if you want to get something done, get a busy person to do it. That is definitely true—I am way too busy, but when I take things on I get them done. And it seems like the busier I am, the more I am tempted to take things on. This year has been a very busy one for me: I wrote a book about gifted homeschooling and my favorite press, Great Potential Press, agreed to publish it. I have also been writing children’s fiction, found an agent, and helped start an educational nonprofit.  My son had his bar mitzvah. All that on top of my usual crazy life of homeschooling two kids, writing, blogging, and singing.

So any rational person would look at this year in my life and say, this is not the year put yourself out of commission for a few months. I, however, am apparently not rational! So in June I finally got around to getting surgery. The surgery itself took 15 minutes. The healing, physical therapy, and everything else will take a few months. (So far, the results seem great, though of course, I haven’t gotten to anywhere near my usual level of activity.)

I have been feeling to a certain extent what it felt like to have a small baby. People were opening doors for me, carrying things for me, and inquiring after my general health and comfort. That’s sort of fun, for a while, but also frustrating when you are one of those people to whom other people give things that need to get done. I sat and watched people do things and read a few good books. Now, I am getting back to doing things on my own, which is a relief.

I am glad that my one-handedness was the result of surgery and not another baby, frankly. Although I love babies and have enjoyed reflecting on that time of my life again, I am ready to move on to where my big kids are taking me. It was great to see my big helpers rise to the occasion, helping me cook dinner, doing many more household chores than they would have, and offering assistance when I needed it.

I have noticed that many changes in family life seem to happen overnight. One day you have a baby, and the next day you realize that baby is walking away from you. One day you look into your little kid’s face and you see the face of a big kid looking back at you. For nine years I couldn’t consider surgery because my kids, especially the younger one, needed me so much. But this really was the right timing. Although it was crazy to be answering my editor’s questions one-handed or with voice-recognition software, the important thing was to see my kids step up and do what needed to be done.

It seems so sudden that I’ve gone from feeling short one hand to knowing that when I need them, I have four extra hands at my disposal. It has been gratifying to step back, rest my healing arm on the sofa, and watch my kids doing what I always hoped they were capable of.

Why I advocate for gifted children

Posted on by Suki

Parents with kids designated “gifted” have a choice to make: When they’re out in public, will they use the word? You’d be amazed at how often I see this theme recur on gifted parenting lists: “Do you tell people your child is gifted?”

Of course, parents have no trouble admitting to their children’s other qualities. You don’t hear people trying to find ways not to refer to their kid’s red hair or skill at catching a baseball. But somehow, when your kid is smart you’re supposed to hide it. Some parents go so far as to deny it—they don’t want their children set apart.

In my case, I had no interest in the word until I needed it. We were having troubles with our second child that didn’t fit any parenting manual, and didn’t fall neatly into any psychological profile. I finally found the answers amongst literature about gifted children. Like other parents of gifted kids, I found my parenting manual in A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children.

The thing that I’ve noticed since is that in general, people really don’t understand what this is all about. The most common reaction is confusion—my old reaction: why do you care?—but I also get people thinking that I’m bragging about my kids, thinking that I’m some sort of pushy helicopter parent who wants to promote her kids, and probably lots of other unflattering things I haven’t heard.

So why do we care?

There’s a national organization dedicated to gifted children. There are many state organizations. They all have conferences. Teachers get special training. Parents seek each other out on the Internet and in person. All of us care about gifted kids and their welfare. But why? Aren’t gifted kids automatically successful? Aren’t they every teacher’s dream? Aren’t they bound for success and happiness?

Well, no. We care about the welfare of gifted kids because things aren’t always so rosy for them. Yes, I’m sure you know a kid who’s a straight-A student, has the most wonderful boyfriend, is polite and kind and well-mannered, plays violin like a dream, volunteers at her local soup kitchen, speaks three languages, and, well, you get the picture. There are gifted kids like this, and they don’t need much help. For whatever reason, they are thriving within society as it’s presented to them. (It’s also possible that these kids are getting a lot of help you don’t see.)

The gifted kids who need advocacy are the ones who aren’t thriving. They are more often bullied than kids of average intelligence. They are more likely to have unusual sensitivities and have trouble with social interactions. They are more likely to check out at school if their teachers aren’t trained to deal with them. And surprisingly, they are more likely to drop out of high school than kids closer to the academic median.

It’s true that these kids sometimes come out ahead in the end—choose your favorite billionaire Silicon Valley nerd. But they suffer a lot of pain and risk being lost as productive members of society because they don’t get the help they need. And those of us who advocate for these kids think that is just as much a shame as when other kids are at risk. These kids are not better than other kids; they’re just kids and they need help.

How and why are gifted kids different?

The How is much easier to answer than the Why. First of all, there does seem to be a correlation with the sorts of mental acrobatics tested by IQ tests and various patterns of development. Gifted kids are:

  • More likely to show asynchronous development. This means that they are “many ages at once”—a math-smart fifteen-year-old boy who still cries easily or a six-year-old with adult verbal skills and a two-year-old’s temper tantrums. [Read more about asynchronous development.]
  • Likely to exhibit what are called “overexcitabilities.” They have certain quirks that are more easily triggered than the general population. It’s very common for gifted kids to show sensory processing disorders, to become belligerent when they are bored in school, or to need to run around and flap their hands when they are learning something fun. [Read more about overexcitabilities.]
  • Likely to learn in fundamentally different ways than the “average” child (whatever that is) such that classroom learning can be frustrating and fruitless for them. Gifted kids’ learning speed often means that they so quickly grasp the material presented that they become disruptive in the classroom, asking the teacher questions that derail the discussion. Also, lots of gifted kids are visual-spatial learners. They simply don’t learn from reading a textbook and never will. It’s not uncommon to hear from parents on gifted parenting e-mail lists whose kids had gone from a special education classroom to being designated at the very top of the IQ scale. Sometimes giftedness looks like something else. [Watch a video about misdiagnosis of gifted kids.]
  • Often found to have learning deficits that mask their strengths. So-called “twice-exceptional” kids suffer doubly, from the same frustrations in the classroom and social groups, and also from the fact that they often don’t get help for their LDs due to their ability to mask them. [Read more about 2e kids.]

Why gifted kids are different is under much discussion at the moment. The question is being looked at by everyone from neurologists to popular writers. Stay tuned for the conclusive answer. But parents and teachers of gifted kids can tell you that they are clearly different, whether by nurture, nature, or something much more complicated (my opinion).

Are gifted kids “better” than other kids?

This is the crux of the matter. This misconception stems from two roots: First, the longstanding anti-intellectual tradition of American culture. Think we don’t have a longstanding anti-intellectual tradition? Just read a few biographies of gifted kids of the past. Torturing the smart kid isn’t a new phenomenon. The dislike and distrust of smart people is so deeply rooted in our culture parents are afraid to describe their kids as smart for fear it will elicit a negative reaction. Second, there’s that stupid word: “Gifted.” The word implies a value judgment. It implies that other kids don’t have gifts. Many of us who write about gifted kids prefer a neutral term like “non-neurotypical,” but that’s a mouthful, and that’s not the one people recognize. (Also, spellcheck hates that word!)

The designation of gifted is a description, not a prediction. Gifted kids are no more likely to be successful than the general population, no more likely to be happily married, no more likely to win the lottery. But intelligence is, in fact, part of the description of some activities. So you will see that Nobel Prize winners are more likely to be gifted. You will see fewer math-savvy people winning the lottery (because they don’t play). You will see more voracious readers teaching in college classrooms. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs largely fit the gifted description.

But none of this is surprising. If you trade a gifted brain for height and coordination, would it surprise you that taller, more coordinated people are more likely to become basketball players? But in the end, it’s the people who work hard, have some lucky breaks, and believe in their own capabilities who achieve success. Giftedness is not a ticket to success—it can just be one of the cards in a winning hand.

Do I think my kids are special?

Sure I do, and I hope you think your kids are special, too. But I don’t think there is anything fundamentally more special or more important about any “type” of person. Old sayings like “it takes all kinds” don’t become old sayings for nothing. This world would be one heck of a terrible place if we were all alike. And this world is a worse place when any child is not able to reach his or her potential.

I was chatting with a woman recently who told me her daughter’s story: She said, “She really hated school, so I took her out. She decided that she’d just skip high school and go straight to college. She’s eighteen now and on her way to university… to get her PhD.”

Would the world really be a better place if that girl had been forced to sit through high school because it’s “what we do”? Would it really be a better place if she had been forced to hide how smart she was to get along with others? Not all gifted kids end up starting PhDs at eighteen (I doubt mine will), but all gifted kids are kids with special needs. And like all kids with special needs, our society benefits when those needs are taken care of.

From the archives: What a Mitzvah! A Day in the Life of Fundraising for a Preschool

Posted on by Suki

Continuing with cleaning out my files, I keep coming up with old gems that I don’t just want to delete. Here’s another, from my days as the director of fundraising for our preschool.

Each year for the last few years we have had a big rummage sale to benefit our preschool, which is a program supported by our local Reform Jewish Temple. We ask all the temple members and our parent community to give donations, then on a Sunday morning we park on the front lawn of the temple and sell it.

It’s a pretty good fundraiser, pulling in well over a thousand dollars a year. Preschool education is expensive, no matter how you cut it, and our school needs the funds. It’s also a good way for the parents to get to know each other—hauling loads of other people’s stuff seems to cement a bond like nothing else we’ve tried.

As the fundraising director for the last few years, I have only minor grumbles when it comes to the parents. The first year we did it, apparently the parents thought their participation was optional…and more than a few didn’t turn up. That was pretty bad. But since then, I’ve started our rummage sale season with the threat that if not enough parents signed up, we’d call it off and they’d have to haul away the junk we got. That seems to work.

I also have few complaints about our customers. We get our share of nutty people (who usually pay) and scofflaws (who try not to). But we also get lots of young families, new immigrants, and people on small incomes. It feels good to do good—in Judaism this is called a mitzvah.

The thing that makes me wonder, however, is the motivation of some of our donors. I have to say that the majority of things we get are good, sellable items. And I know that a lot of our temple members and parents (myself included) save up our stuff all year long so that we can donate it. It’s a pretty easy mitzvah to do.

But I’m really not sure where some of our donors get their ideas about what belongs at a rummage sale. We can start with the people who admit the quality of their junk, like the parent who arrived with a truckload and told our director, “This is the stuff our neighbors couldn’t sell at their rummage sale.”

And then, perhaps, people like me who think the things they donate are eminently usable until we see them in the stark California sunshine and think, hm, perhaps that should have gone in the recycling bin.

But what motivates our donors to give us (this year alone)…

…A ripped garden hose…

…A cat box with used litter still in it…

…A box full of mysterious wood pieces that probably fit together to make…something…

…Half-eaten boxes of crackers (several flavors!)…

…A pair of sweatpants ripped nearly in half…

…Lots of very used underwear…

…A queen-sized mattress with urine stains…

You have to wonder what they were thinking. I prefer to think that most of our donors are motivated to do good. Temple members are generally very supportive of the preschool, even though it’s a drain on the budget because tuition just can’t be high enough to pay our costs. And I’m sure that our donors aren’t out of the ordinary. One parent told me that she’d seen even worse stuff when she worked for a relief group taking donations for flood victims. “We had to sort it,” she said, “or the people would get mad and make us take it back.” Imagine the nerve of those flood victims!

I guess I prefer to think that a lot of us just aren’t comfortable with our disposable economy, and can’t bear to put things in the trash when “someone might have a need for it.” When I donated the sippy cup bottoms that didn’t have tops, I swear that I thought that perhaps another family was in the opposite situation: perhaps those sippy cup bottoms would find their life partners through a rummage sale! Of course, they were still there at the end of the day.

But I guess as hard as I try to access my preschooler’s elastic imagination, I can’t find a rationale for some of the donations. Couldn’t they have emptied the catbox—and the diaper genie that came equipped with some used diapers? And did they really think that we’d be able to sell that mattress? A mitzvah is to do good for someone, but all that mattress got us was grief. All day we watched it towering up there, leaning against the porch, while people picked through the clothing, eyed the furniture, and tested the heft of the silverware. Our all-volunteer staff (which counts our director, who doesn’t get paid anywhere near enough to get up at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday) didn’t need the added stress of what to do with a mattress.

What saved our life was the Free Cycle, our local branch of a national network of folks who believe that we need to rebel against our disposable economy. These people believe as a matter of faith that there’s someone out there who wants pretty much anything.

Even, it turns out, a stained mattress. Kelley, a plain-spoken computer engineer who has a dad with a big truck, came and took it all from us. She didn’t ask for anything in return. When we broached the idea of making the last straggling customers take entire bags of clothes, she said, “I’m afraid if we did that, they’d just throw them away.” Instead, she let them pick out what they wanted (it was all free by then) and waited patiently to take away the remains.

Everyone involved in this sale tried to do, in their own way, a small mitzvah. I felt great when a man with a hard-earned wizened face told me he was taking lots of our free stuff to the program he runs to help other men get off the streets. The young couple who spoke little English seemed embarrassed but happy that they could take away the baby changing table for free, and that we even took it apart for them. The temple’s janitor helped carry tables back inside, though he really didn’t have to.

But the greatest mitzvah of the day was from the Free Cycler, who took away all our leftover follies: the mangled picture frames, the worn out shoes, castoff dishes, the book inscribed “to my darling,” my formerly precious sippy cup bottoms, and even, yes, the mattress. They took the stained mattress and by golly, they are going to find it a home.

We tweak the workings of this fund raiser every year, though often the suggestions are impractical. Could we have a parent on duty to sift through the stuff people want to donate? What would they say if one of their fellow parents wanted to donate a used catbox? Would we get any donations at all if we restricted donation times? Fund raising for small nonprofits is fraught with these sorts of logistical questions. We all love our school, but just how much do we love it?

Near the end of our mercifully cool day, our director suggested that perhaps next year, we could do a silent auction. I wonder what sort of donations we’ll get for that!

From the archives: Visiting Africa with Burp

Posted on by Suki

Continuing with the discoveries I made in my old files. This is another piece, from when our daughter was quite small, that reminded me of the charm of having an imaginative little one in the house. Yes, they still have imaginations, but they know the difference between truth and make-believe. If you have a little one who still believes passionately that her burpcloth is alive, savor it. Soon enough, it will be gone.

Perhaps I was pregnant with our second child, or she’d already arrived. I don’t remember that part. But I do remember reading an “expert” opinion about children’s imaginary friends. The expert in question supported the health of having imaginary friends, but then tossed off the opinion that children with older siblings “are seldom allowed this luxury.”

I remember reading this aloud to my husband and saying, “My child will be allowed this luxury!”

We have always enjoyed our children’s imaginations, and their imaginary friends have become part of the family. Our older son’s friend, which we spelled “Seiterint,” started out as a benign, tiny person that he carried around between his thumb and forefinger, and morphed into a Pan-like creature as likely to be naughty as good.

Our daughter’s friend started out as a burpcloth that she bonded with as a baby and became a family of “Burps,” who lived in Africa and did everything that our daughter so desperately desired to do but couldn’t yet manage.

Seiterint had an island and the island had an ecology that we learned in great detail. Burp had Burp’s own genderless set of pronouns: “Burp took Burpself to Africa in Burp’s plane.” And both of our children have eventually come to own their own airlines!

I know that all children are imaginative, but remembering that one expert’s opinion makes me question what we have done to nurture our children’s. Our daughter’s imagination is no less a part of our lives than our son’s, and we even attempt to write down some of the adorable things she says, even as our lives are so much busier with two children.

The first thing that I think we did right is that we never, ever contradicted an imaginary statement. We allowed our children to be “wrong” whenever it didn’t hurt them not to know the truth. Why should we tell a three-year-old that Africa isn’t next door? Why should we insist that our son play with “real” friends when his imaginary ones are helping him learn how to get along with others?

The next thing we did was to welcome our children’s imaginary friends like we’d welcome their real friends. When other children – or adults – seemed confused about a mention of the imaginary friend, we’d simply explain, “Oh, Seiterint is his imaginary friend.” He didn’t see that as a criticism (it wasn’t), and usually the children accepted the friend without question.

Once our daughter embarked on her own imaginary journey with her friend Burp, we made sure to keep the message clear and simple with our older son: We allowed him the luxury of having an imaginary friend, and he will do the same for his sister.

Once our son learned that this was a non-negotiable item in our family dynamic, he learned to enjoy her flights of fancy as well. As soon as he learned to spell in order to keep secrets from his sister, he started to spell his delight at cute things she had said. He was very solicitous of Burp and generally allowed Burp to take part in their imaginative play.

By this description it might seem that our children get along fabulously well and that we’re just plain lucky. Actually, they clash often and harshly. Their personalities are almost as opposite as personalities can be. But children do understand absolutes. Here in the land of plenty we have lots of picky children, but in places where people starve to death, children will pretty much eat anything that’s put in front of them. And in our house, many things are negotiable, and we see the whining and difficult behavior that children exhibit whenever there is a crack in the veneer.

But in the matter of imagination, we draw an absolute line. If food served in a pink bowl tastes more like strawberries than food served in a green bowl, that is truth. And if the imaginary friend wants to ride on the back of our daughter’s carseat and eat a chocolate donut at the grocery store, well, we’re just glad Burp is made of washable cotton.

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