Category: Psychology

All children are gifts

Posted on by Suki

Children are a gift. They’re the most special kind of gift. They’re not the gift certificate type of gift, where you get to go shopping for something you want. They’re not a birthday gift, where you get it because the giver thinks you’re special. They’re not the sort of gift well-meaning mothers-in-law give when they notice that your tablecloths are all really shabby.

Children are the sort of gift we can’t ask for. Children are gifts that come to us in good times and bad. They come to us whole or damaged. They come to us perfect or deformed. They come to us with the complexity of their biological parents’ genes twisted together. They come to us with the epigenetic memory of our forefathers etched into the fibers of their being. They come to us full of promise and full of mystery. They come to us as wholly imperfect beings. They come to us with brains hungry for learning.

Children are never what we expect them to be. Perhaps they have his nose and your hair, or her way of talking but your way of hugging. But the rest is going to be a mystery. How did she develop that passion? How did he develop that fear? Where did that stubborn will come from? I am perfectly sure I never screamed like that as a child. I can’t believe I was ever this smart.

Children can fulfill our expectations for good and for bad. We expect that they’ll do well in school like we did, and they do. We expect that they’ll not make it through the family reunion without a tantrum, and they don’t. We expect that they’ll like spicy Thai food like we do, and they do. We expect that they won’t like any unusual food, and they don’t.

Children are always the children we need. When childless friends remark how our lives have changed, we agree, and we notice how incomplete our pre-parenting lives seem. When we desperately need someone to love us unquestioningly, they are there. When we need a friend, an ally, someone who really looks us in the eye, there they are. When we need someone to remind us we are all human and make mistakes, they are happy to oblige. When we need someone to challenge us, they are always willing to be the challenge we need.

You can quit a job, stop seeing a friend, even divorce your spouse. But the challenge your child offers you is the hardest to back away from. They are the toughest coach you ever had, who makes you keep going when you’re sure you have nothing left. They are the hardest exam you’ll ever take, because the consequences of failure are so vast, you know that you can’t fail.

Your child is a gift you can’t sum up in words. That twisted DNA. That history of shared laughter, breath, home, learning, sustenance. Those emotions deeper and more violent than any others. What your child gives you is more than language can handle.

Your child changes daily, and you do as well. Your relationship twines upward, each twist new in its own way. When your child goes her separate way, you are still standing on the foundation you built together. You can see your own parents down there, feel the strange mystery of grandparents you loved or didn’t know, hear the distant sounds of places your DNA has been, feel the twining of shared lives that defies genetic inheritance.

And you know, from being a parent, that your child will never truly be away from you. Your shared experiences are part of the ground you stand on. The space between phone calls, the years you don’t see each other, or the unthinkable time when a child passes on before his parents—parents are never alone.

Having had a child, you have a child within you still.

All children are gifts, the sort of gift we can’t ask for.

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.

The Difficult Question of Gender Identity

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 – in this post, when it comes to gender identity.

This is Part 4 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 daughter was still a preschooler, pretty in pink with long, curly blond hair and a charming smile, I started to watch the way older girls acted and dressed as they approached puberty. I wondered how I was going to help my daughter through the difficulty of being a girl in our society. And that was even before I knew what kind of girl she’d be.

At about the age of six, my daughter decided to do away with girlishness. She insisted I cut off her gorgeous locks. She moved to the boys’ section of the clothing store. She developed an abiding interest in weapons and potty language. Her favorite book was Captain Underpants. Except for her undying love of baby dolls, she declared all things girlish “stupid.

Despite my being a woman who appreciates the finer parts of girlishness, I supported her decision not to follow gender norms she didn’t like. I agreed to cut her hair, though I warned her that she would be taken for a boy. She decided this was a consequence she could accept. I tried to squelch the potty talk in public, but there was no stopping it at home. My husband and I successfully moved her from Captain Underpants to King Arthur, which at least had literary value.

But the fact is, my daughter suffers the consequences of being an unusual girl on a daily basis. Despite telling some people repeatedly that she’s a girl, she is often referred to with masculine pronouns as if the speaker is unwilling to accept a girl in boys’ clothing. Teachers expect her to “act like a girl” and often come down on her harder than they might a rambunctious boy. Other kids make open, hurtful comments about her.

All this, and she doesn’t even go to school.

School is a minefield for all kids with gender differences. Gifted kids, according to research, are less likely to adhere to gender roles than other kids (see Webb et al., Misdiagnosis). When you add giftedness and gender differences together, you get a lot of fodder for bullies.

My daughter is homeschooled, and most of the above experiences happened in the context of homeschooling. You’d think I might think twice about homeschooling, but the fact is, these experiences have been few and far between. Homeschooled kids, in general, are so much more accepting of differences because they haven’t been socialized to enforce conformity. I know that things would have been much worse in school.

Not long ago a homeschool group we belong to took part in a science workshop. Included in the group were my daughter, a boy with long hair who wears girls’ clothing, and a boy with long hair who wears boys’ clothing. After the workshop, our group received a letter from one of the teachers. She said that as a transgendered person, it was heartening to work with kids who accepted each other’s differences with respect, unlike most of the kids she works with.

It was lovely to hear that, but it also made me think of all the gifted kids in school who suffer because of their gender identity. Although many schools are making the right moves toward creating a more supportive atmosphere, the enforcing of conformity is still alive and well, and often has tragic results.

I have no idea what kind of woman my daughter will be. A friend tells me that her daughter dressed like a boy until puberty, when she suddenly changed without comment. Sometimes my daughter muses about growing her hair out, and since her softball team was forced to wear pink uniforms, she has decided that wearing pink isn’t the worst wardrobe nightmare by far.

But no matter what kind of woman she grows up to be, I want her to feel comfortable in her own skin. I want her to know that whoever she wants to be is fine with me, with her father—with everyone who loves her. And those people who feel threatened by someone who doesn’t follow their expectations of gender roles? I’ll just remind her of her attitude when she was six:

Those people are just “stupid”!

Continue to Part 5.

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.

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