Supporting Gifted Children
This may come as a surprise since I’m such a goofball, but I was considered a “gifted” child in elementary school. I was already able to read when I got to Kindergarten. In first grade, I was a guinea pig in a university research program about gifted children. I personally don’t believe I was actually gifted. I think my mom just did a good job reading to me and teaching me at home, so I was well-prepared for elementary school. However, this was in the mid-eighties, and giftedness was only beginning to be understood. There were many debates in academia about what it consisted of, how to identify it, and how to treat gifted students. No one was quite in agreement, which led to some interesting experiences.
A-Team for Gifted Children
In fourth grade, for example, my school created a gifted student program called the A-Team after the popular television series (“I pity the fool!”). I was singled out along with a handful of other students to be part of the A-Team. The problem was that the teachers did not understand what they should do with us. They ended up sending us down to the library to do work “self-directed.” Here, they fell for one of the classic blunders, wrongly equating intelligence with maturity. No matter how bright we were, we were only fourth graders, and once we were on our own in the library, we just goofed around. The librarian soon noticed our misbehavior and sent us back to our classes, and the A-Team program was quietly terminated.
My school wanted to help its gifted students but had no idea what to do. What about your homeschool? What should you do if your child conjugates Greek verbs in third grade, writes sophisticated 3D printer programs at age ten, or performs Bach piano concertos flawlessly as a freshman? Let’s talk about some ways you can support your gifted child.
Be Generous in Letting Them Direct Their Interests
Most gifted children are gifted in particular areas of interest—they excel at music, languages, programming, or the humanities. These interests should be nurtured and encouraged, even if it means allotting more time to them at the expense of other subjects. If my seven-year-old daughter is sitting in the living room performing John Dowland pieces on the lute, I won’t tell her to put the lute down because it’s time for geography. I will be generous in allowing her to invest the time and effort in pursuing her passion.
That’s not to say I will completely abdicate direction like my teachers did when they sent the A-Team to the library. But I will understand that my child’s special interest takes pride in place, and I will structure a curriculum generously around that interest.
Let Them Do Hard Things
On the other hand, gifted children still need to be pushed to do hard things that don’t come quickly. One problem gifted children often encounter is that so many activities meant for their age seem easy. They blow through math effortlessly; they devour a book of philosophy in two days that was meant to take a semester; and they memorize their lines to Hamlet in a week. This can accustom them to life being easy, perhaps too easy. Then, when they inevitably face a difficult task down the road, they have no idea how to grapple with it.
When I was a child, I was a talented artist. Everybody assumed I’d be a professional in that field. I was told my entire life I was meant to be in the arts, as drawing came so easily. I internalized this to the point where I just assumed I’d never have to struggle in the arts. When I began college at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, I was not prepared for the intensity and rigor of their fine arts program. It was actually hard. I had no experience struggling with art and didn’t have the study skills to succeed. I quickly became demoralized, my grades tanked, and I eventually dropped out.
It’s essential to ensure your gifted child has opportunities to do hard things, either in their field of interest or elsewhere. They need to develop the discipline and study skills to wrestle with a subject, struggle, and grow. If we don’t do this, we are setting them up for a rude awakening later in life when they inevitably are hit with something that genuinely challenges them.
Model Failure
In that same vein, it’s crucial for you, as the parent, to model failure. Gifted children are actually at risk of developing into perfectionists because, their entire childhood, people tell them, “I expect great things from you”—or alternately, if they do poorly, they are told, “You can do better than this.” They can develop an anxious neurosis about failure; to fail is to “let people down” to be unworthy of the confidence placed in them. This is not a healthy attitude to have. It is important, therefore, that you help your gifted child develop a balanced approach to failure. Failure is a necessary part of growth. Failure is how we learn, how we grow, and how we deepen ourselves. Find opportunities to model this in your own life. Demonstrate a constructive approach that removes the stigma of failure and teaches your kids to embrace their missteps.
Praise Efforts, Not Achievements
When your gifted child does something exceptional, condition yourself to praise the effort, not the achievement. Remember, your gifted child is still a child and craves validation. You want to make sure you are validating them for the right reasons. To this end, you want to praise them for their efforts, not because they churn out impressive work. Focus on process, not product. You don’t want your child to grow up thinking that they are primarily valued for what they do or produce. It’s not wrong to praise them for a job well done, of course, but make sure your child understands that what’s truly important is the ethic they bring to their work, which reflects their character. For more on this, read our article “Excellence, Not Perfection.”
Care For the Whole Person
When my teachers sent the A-Team kids down to the library unsupervised, they mistakenly thought that our intellectual astuteness equated to responsibility. They couldn’t have been more wrong! Their approach reduced us to just our giftedness, effectively ignoring the other parts of us that were still in development and required attention.
If you have a gifted child, ensure you care for the whole person. Your child still needs to flop down on the couch and watch some TV now and then. Send them outside to goof around with siblings, or make sure she has time to talk about boys with her girlfriends. They need time baking in the kitchen with Mom, rough-housing with Dad, and lots of hugs. They need all the little experiences that makeup childhood. Gifted children may be bright, but they are not adults. Be careful not to parentify them. Never reduce your child solely to their gift.
Reevaluate Frequently
Finally, reevaluate your homeschool plan frequently. This is good advice for any homeschooling family, but it has a special weight in the case of gifted children. You may need to up the difficulty of certain subjects if your child is blowing through them too easily, or, conversely, allow extra time if they hit an unexpected wall. You must find the proper way to balance your child’s particular interests with all the other demands on their time while ensuring the proper difficulty level. It can take a while to hit your stride, so return to your plan frequently and make amendments as necessary.
Conclusion: Identifying Giftedness
In closing, a word of advice: don’t be too hasty to label your child as gifted. For one thing, there’s really no clinical definition of giftedness beyond the ability to demonstrate exceptional aptitude or competence relative to one’s peers of the same age, which is incredibly general. For example, how much better does your twelve-year-old son’s need to be at the piano than his peers before he is considered a “gifted” pianist? Hastily identifying a child as gifted can generate a whole host of expectations with little understanding of how to meet them, which is a recipe for frustration.
Furthermore, many other things can look like giftedness. Certain spectrum conditions can appear as giftedness. For example, an autistic boy may demonstrate an intense interest in World War II aircraft and display a stunning amount of technical knowledge about the subject. Indeed, his autism may very well result in true giftedness in that particular field of knowledge. But this giftedness would have to be understood and engaged within the broader context of his autism, which would be radically different than how one would engage with a non-autistic child with a similar level of interest.
In other words, take your time! Giftedness is often assessed not based on singular factors but on cumulative experiences observed over a long period. Don’t be too quick to apply labels. Therefore, always ensure that your child feels advocated for and supported no matter what.
What are your thoughts on this topic? To continue the discussion, join me and other homeschooling parents at our Homeschool Connections Community or our Facebook group!
