Crushing Tall PoppiesBlindsided by Giftedness
“Looking at Sam’s recent test scores that we just received, it puts your son in the highly gifted range. Your son is gifted, Mrs. Welch.”
Well hey, swell—that’s great, right? That means he’ll have an easy time in school and have a leg-up on education and life in general. Heck yeah, that is excellent news!
Whoa mama–
Not so fast. All of us here who have raised gifted kids can tell you it’s not a net-positive and we aren’t always traveling down easy-street with our gifted kids—in school or in life. Sure, being gifted has its obvious perks like catching on quicker to new information, having an excellent memory, thinking creatively and divergently, an intense curiosity about many topics, and attaining developmental and academic benchmarks ahead of his same-age peers. Absolutely, giftedness has its upsides. But like so many things in life, things are rarely all good or all bad.
It’s no different with giftedness—it’s rarely all good or all bad. You just need to be prepared for the bad.
What can be bad about giftedness?
Well, many of us parents were blindsided, just gobsmacked, by our child’s giftedness. It didn’t turn out the way we had initially envisioned. Our child’s giftedness turned out to be a bit of a chore, a problem at times, and sometimes even traumatic. Many of us parents will tell you being gifted can suck sometimes, really, really suck. And I so hate to be the one to burst your bubble, but you do need to be prepared. I’m here to offer help, resources, and support.
SCHOOL AND ADVOCACY
The area where you may hit the first roadblocks in your gifted child’s life is in school. In our educational system, here in the U.S. and in so many parts of the world, the unique learning needs of gifted students pose an inconvenience of sorts. Gifted students, on the whole, need acceleration in their learning, both horizontally and vertically, and not always across all subjects. Gifted students do catch on quicker and need less repetition to master a new skill or concept, but then must often sit through additional repetitions while classmates catch up.
Also, gifted students are known for their need to delve much more in-depth and for more extended periods into topics often covered briefly in the classroom due to time constraints. Their learning needs are often entirely different from most of their classmates but need to be addressed which requires modifications in instruction—additional work for teachers who already lack the time and are pressured to make sure everyone in the class does well. Those necessary modifications for your gifted child are often the priorities to be cast aside in the classroom. As a parent, you’ll likely need to niggle, remind, advocate or downright fight for these modifications.
SCHOOL AND ADVOCACY RESOURCES
Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page—Gifted Advocacy
Advocating for Your Gifted Child. Institute for Educational Advancement
Advocacy—Texas Association for the Gifted & Talented
Advocating for Your Gifted Child Within the Public School System. Noodle Education
SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL NEEDS
Okay, so we briefly touched on the obstacles which may befall your gifted child in school, but gifted kids, because of their differently-wired brains—you have noticed how your child thinks and acts outside the box, haven’t you?—have different social and emotional needs than their same-age peers.
Some say gifted children’s brains are on fire or they experience the rage to master. It’s an intensity often seen in gifted individuals. This urgency to learn, to explore, to talk incessantly about what is burning in their brains, and the passionate pursuit of their interests makes them stand out. Any hindrance to their passionate pursuits may cause an emotional outburst, a total nuclear meltdown. Due to our gifted kids’ emotional and intellectual intensities, many call our gifted kids outliers, and being an outlier can set one up for bullying, difficulty finding like-minded friends, and can instill a sense of not belonging in our kids.
Along with their high-octane brains, gifted children often have intense emotions and sensitivities. Yeah, giftedness is not just a construct of school—our kids are gifted 24/7 for a lifetime. These emotional intensities are known as OE’s—overexcitabilities, and if you haven’t heard of these, you should check out the resources below. OE’s have had many a parent of a gifted child in tears, wanting to run away from home, or just out-and-out confused. Knowledge is power here, and knowing what to expect from OE’s can save your sanity.
By now, you may be thinking giftedness is no gift, but wait. With the educational roadblocks and the OE’s, your child may also have trouble finding like-minded friends. Remember that outlier thing? Where you will likely need to help your gifted child navigate his social needs. As parents of gifted children, we hear over and over, “my child only likes to socialize with adults or much-older kids.” work and focus–finding groups, clubs, and activities, where your child will most likely be able to find friends who get him, is crucial. Gifted education programs are important here—so our gifted kids can spend time with like-minded peers with who they can relate.
SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL NEEDS RESOURCES
Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page—Social/Emotional Aspects of Giftedness
Third Factor—A Magazine for Catalysts and Creatives (Learn all about OE’s)
SENG—Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted
TWICE-EXCEPTIONAL: OUR 2E’S
Twice-exceptional? It means that your gifted child can have a learning difference or disability—an additional exceptionality on top of his exceptionality of giftedness. These learning differences such as dyslexia, autism, ADHD or anxiety may mask your gifted child’s academic abilities. It is not unheard of for 2E gifted children to be misdiagnosed so often that they are put in remedial classes, special education programs, or be held back a grade.
Teachers may see your child’s above-average intelligence, but not understand why your child is not performing as expected. This disconnect can lead to mental, behavioral or educational misdiagnoses, or your child being considered lazy and not “working up to his potential.” This one truly hits home for me as one of my gifted children was told, more than once, by teachers, “if you are so smart, why aren’t you making good grades?” Yes, those things really can and do happen, sadly.
Twice-exceptionality can also mask your child’s giftedness. If you suspect your child is gifted, but also see she is struggling in school, having a learning difference or disability may be the culprit. Many gifted children have gone unidentified because of being twice-exceptional. Twice-exceptionality often misunderstood, and you may find, not a well-known issue in school or elsewhere.
RESOURCES FOR TWICE-EXCEPTIONAL: OUR 2E’S
Gifted Homeschoolers Forum—Resources: Twice-Exceptional (2E)
Twice-exceptional (2E). Tilt Parenting
WRAPPING IT UP
Here was a brief summation of how and why giftedness can blindside us as parents. I was not able to discuss every gifted trait or behavior—because, darn, giftedness is so utterly complex and seriously misunderstood. This article is intended to be brief and touch on generalities of giftedness. I hope it helps you see that giftedness can be incredible, but it can also be a burden at times.
With giftedness,
the mountains are higher, but the valleys are deeper.
If you want to learn more about giftedness, check out my RESOURCES page for blogs, websites, and articles about everything gifted. If you have questions or concerns, or just want to be pointed in the right direction for something more specific regarding giftedness, leave a comment, and I will get back to you—I’m pretty good about that.
GENERAL GIFTED RESOURCES
Gifted Homeschoolers Forum—Resources
Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page—Gifted Resources
Ten Facts You May Not Know About Gifted Children But Should. Fractus Learning
I’m not discounting the existence of 2E children and adults, but I have noticed that for more people seem to be on the spectrum now than 40 years ago. I’ve heard many theories about why, many of them centering on having better ways to test. But it might be simpler than that.
My dad was an IT person, so we had computers in the house about 10-15 years before most people. And back then, even the most sophisticated computers (IBM, HP, Olivetti) could only show words on a screen. There was no internet, and no GPS.
Now, it has been said that people on the spectrum tend to process the world through images, rather than words. So I would imagine that back then, it must have been fairly easy to differentiate between neurotypical and autistic. But technology has changed, and with it, so has our thought process.
Back in the 1990’s, if I had to get from point A to point B, I would say, or write down, “Take Main Street to 3rd, turn right , follow 3rd to Chestnut, make a left……..” Today, if I want to get from point A to point B, I go to Google maps, type in my address, and the destination address, and it shows me a picture of how to get there.
But I remember when we didn’t have Google Maps, or GPS. Children who grew up with this technology are more likely to think in pictures than we were, and because we thought in words at that age, we could mistake the new thought process for an autistic approach.
So it could be as simple as the autism testing criteria needing to catch up to technology.
That could certainly explain one of the 2E exceptionalities—visual spatial learner. In the regular classroom today, learning takes place in an auditory-sequential format, and that flies in the face of students who learn and think in pictures, which we call visual spatial learners.
I think you are on to something!
Thanks so much for sharing this interesting theory!
I have found that the website Smart Kids with Learning Disabilities has been very helpful with may grandson who is ADHD and has Dysgraphia. He has a 504 and it has been very helpful. Thank you for all the resources you have listed.
You’re welcome and thanks for sharing the Smart Kids with Learning Disabilities website!
Do people really learn about the giftedness of their children with surprise? I had always assumed that the inherited component is rather large, and thus most parents of gifted children are themselves gifted, and recognize the symptoms early on. I hear stories of unusually brilliant children born to rather mundane parents… I guess that’s what happened with my mother, genius level IQ mathematician born to a sausage factory worker and a housewife.
Anyway, glad you’re still posting sometimes. I read an interesting story about IQ over at Nautilus and thought of this blog.
We always figured our children would be gifted, because we both are, but we were surprised when it turned out that our son is what you call twice exceptional. Smarts in the 99.9 but other skills down in the 5-10% range. Livin’ in th now in a big way, with a startling lack of planning ability and executive function.
His mother and I are both somewhat unusual, and it’s like our deficits got squared when we made him. He’s 14 now, and he speaks like a professor, sings like an angel, and plans like a toddler.
At least his new school is super-cooperative.
Yes, some are blindsided if the parents themselves never knew they were gifted. Also, many are blindsided by the struggles–educational, social, and emotional. 2E is a whole different ball of wax within our schools!
I was totally blindsided by my son’s giftedness. There are several reasons for this:
1. My “highly gifted” son is my oldest child, so I didn’t know what was “normal” for various ages and, more importantly, what wasn’t “normal.” (He was meeting the milestones I heard about through his pediatrician, so with each appointment, his doctor checked those deficit markers off his list and I checked them off mine.)
2. For the past 18 years or so, I’ve worked with physicians, nurses, healthcare executives, engineers, engineering school executives, etc., so being around people with advanced vocabularies, ideas and observations is normal to me.
3. I didn’t do much “baby talk” with my son, so I figured that was why he was well-spoken. Lol
4. Everyone in my family is very humble. My father, who is a chemist, couldn’t stand colleagues who put their children (or themselves) on pedestals. Therefore, anytime I mentioned something my son did that seemed really smart, my dad would remind me not to brag, even though I kept assuring him that he was the only person I was telling.
5. By kindergarten (barely five), the bullying and exclusion started so I was very distracted by trying to continually address issues related to that.
6. By first grade, he had become the class clown to gain other kids’ acceptance. As I now know, this was my little extrovert’s way of dealing with what had become social anxiety.
7. In second grade, I glanced at his STAR test scores and thought the rankings were for second graders in his school. A few days later, when I looked at the summary more closely, I realized they were for the entire country, which blew my mind. When I emailed his teacher about it, her reply was, “Yes, that’s correct. I’m very proud of him!”
8. His social challenges were so pervasive that they overshadowed everything else. (And because they persisted, by the time he was a rising third grader, he also was showing signs of more severe anxiety as well as depression.)
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but when you’re humble, everyone around you is humble, and none of you know what giftedness does and doesn’t look like (especially when there’s more than one exceptionality at play), it can be difficult to figure out what the heck is going on. You just see your child suffering and no one (even child experts) seem to know why.
This and a few other things I’ve been reading lately have clarified some thoughts.
As I said previously my solution was comprehensive gifted programmes. That would satisfy intellectual needs and put gifted children together so they could have friends like themselves (even if it could be done, serving all needs in one classroom wouldn’t achieve the latter). It would also create concentrated expertise in the emotional needs of the gifted and allow the staff to advise parents on things like having to cut labels out of clothes being normal. They would also have credibility to liase with medical personnel about the specific health-related aspects of giftedness. But as well as the difficulty of getting something like that set up in the first place, it would put a great deal of power in the hands of the organisation running it. Through mistake or malice they could do a lot of damage. Apparently there was some kind of gifted provision in Britain for a while, but it was such a bureaucratic nightmare, most people were happy to see the back of it.
I was reading about all the places people can go for things like safe sex materials and STI testing, and it’s quite a long list (at least it is where I live, I don’t know how things are in Texas). Obviously this is a different demographic as there are far more people having sex than there are gifted children, so the same carpet-bombing approach wouldn’t work. But it did rub in how many different types of organisations can be involved in the same goal. With responsibility spread like that there is more resiliance to something going wrong. The gifted community is kind of structured like that now, but it could also extend to official organisations.
As you said, giftedness isn’t just about education, so that extends the pool of organisations and people who could be involved beyond teachers. This would be the case whether you were recruiting for a comprehensive gifted programme or a more dispersed network. I got IQ tested and counselling at a community health clinic and they did it right. Everything the Gifted Development Center sells itself as, I got locally and for free. That sure beats air fare to Colorado. 🙂 It also took responsibility away from the school, who may have a vested interest, one way or the other. They were psychologists and it’s pretty easy to see how others like some social workers, council youth and community workers, and nurses would have the right personalities and experience to work with gifted children with minimal additional training. I saw an interview with Sara Rowbotham who ran the sexual health clinic that uncovered the Rochdale child abuse case, and thought she’d be perfect for that kind of work. The number of parents of gifted children who just had to adapt shows there are a variety of people who can learn how to do it. There is precedent for this – in Britain the schools for the most troubled children are actually run by the NHS.
Spreading it over multiple organisations offers some protection from sabotage by both officials and trade unions. I really don’t know which way unions would jump with gifted children, but I’ve heard some horror stories from both America and Australia. I was reading about the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike and part of how the miners were beated was British Steel had its own docks and dockworkers who were in the steel union rather than the transport union, and they would handle coal and coke other dockers wouldn’t. The last thing I’d ever want to see is armoured buses ramming children through picket lines, but I’ve been wondering if it came to it, would I go there? What do you think the state of things is with the unions and gifted children?
Coming back to what can be done outside of schools, I was interested to see the differences in American summer programmes. Some were obviously primarily intellectual – the university programmes and Space Camp. Nobody is suprised by the sort of children who go to Space Camp. 🙂 But others are more like conventional summer camps, doing fun stuff in the woods, but with other gifted children. I thought there was nothing more for the gifted when I was at school but recently discovered Britain used to have a National Association for Gifted Children too. I don’t think they had any influence over the schools but maybe summer holidays in Skegness with other gifted children could have substantially changed the 80s and early 90s for me.
The other thing outside of schools could be some kind of after school club or drop-in centre. Because of the low numbers of gifted children you’d probably need to be on a transport hub in a highly populated area to reach a critical mass, especially if you wanted to serve the 1 in 40,000 and rarer IQ levels. But that would allow them to get together and make friends, could provide some services and be an ideal place to use people recruited from areas other than teaching. Also a drop-in centre is the sort of thing they have for teenage drug addicts. That would keep envy at bay and warn off the pushy and ambitious parents. 🙂 it would also give the whole thing more of a feeling of defiance and rebellion against the system, rather than elitism.
However, despite all the good things like that could do, I can’t really see it as being more than harm reduction as long as gifted children are forced to spend 14 years in places that aren’t good for them. However, any government that did take proper care of its gifted would likely very quickly aquire an army of very loyal and extremely capable supporters. I’m pretty happy the state doesn’t have that. Small mercies I guess. 🙂
Your thoughts and ideas are brilliant—the drop-in centre, having more organizations involved in providing for gifted children to avoid damage from “mistake or malice” –brilliant ideas, if only we could make them happen.
It would take the few non-profit gifted organizations throughout the world to join forces to devise a plan which, as you say, should include the mental health and medical communities, and not just the educational community alone.
I know here in America, we have many businesses that focus on offering therapy and aides for autistic children. There is no lack of them. Why not the same for gifted children? If only we could convince the medical and mental health communities that addressing the needs of gifted children is a medical/mental health need and should be covered with little to no expense for the parents.
I love your ideas and they are reasonable, doable and morally, they should be implemented–any or all. Our gifted kids are having their potential squandered for so many reasons, but all those reasons are rooted in the misunderstanding of giftedness and its unique needs.
I SO appreciate you sharing your insights and ideas–you offer so much for all of us to think about. All brilliant, all insightful, but that’s what gifted people do, right?
Take care and I look forward to hearing from you next time!
I very much appreciate the thorough explanation of the complexities of giftedness and even MORE appreciate you bringing up 2E! My children are both gifted learners and have all the peaks and valleys you describe, while at the same time working through Tourette’s Syndrome. How difficult for school districts to understand that a child may need a grade acceleration AND a 504 plan!
YES, schools do find it difficult, sometimes outright confusing, serving a gifted child who has learning differences!
Great overview of how much of a challenge it is to raise a gifted child, along with a wonderful list of resources. Thanks!
Thank you, Gail!
Thank you for this! I’ve appreciated reading your blog as I love and lead my son and navigate the intellectually gifted realm.
I’m wondering if you can speak into dysgrahpia. A recent conversation with a fellow gt parent brought to light that her daughter has it. I’m trying to learn about it and pass along what I find.
Thanks again!
Hi Aimee,
I don’t know a great deal about dysgraphia, but I would be happy to look up some resources for you!
Understanding Dysgraphia
Dysgraphia from Learning Disabilities Association of America
Dysgraphia Q & A from Davidson Institute
Dysgraphia in Children: Essentials Parents Should Know from Noodle