Helping Your Highly Gifted Child
ERIC Identifier: ED321482
Publication Date: 1990-00-00
Author: Tolan, Stephanie
Source: ERIC Clearinghouse on Handicapped and Gifted Children Reston VA.
Most parents greet the discovery that their child is not merely gifted but highly or
profoundly gifted with a combination of pride, excitement, and fear. They may set out to
find experts or books to help them cope with raising such a child, only to find that there
are no real experts, only a couple of books, and very little understanding of extreme
intellectual potential and how to develop it. This digest deals with some areas of
concern and provides a few practical suggestions based on the experience of other
parents and the modest amount of research available.
DIFFERENCES
To understand highly gifted children it is essential to realize that, although they are
children with the same basic needs as other children, they are very different. Adults
cannot ignore or gloss over their differences without doing serious damage to these
children, for the differences will not go away or be outgrown. They affect almost every
aspect of these children's intellectual and emotional lives.
A microscope analogy is one useful way of understanding extreme intelligence. If we
say that all people look at the world through a lens, with some lenses cloudy or
distorted, some clear, and some magnified, we might say that gifted individuals view the
world through a microscope lens and highly gifted individuals view it through an electron
microscope. They see ordinary things in very different ways and often see what others
simply cannot see. Although there are advantages to this heightened perception, there
are disadvantages as well.
Since many children eventually become aware of being different, it is important to
prepare yourself for your child's reactions. When your child's giftedness has been
identified, you might open a discussion using the microscope analogy. If you are
concerned that such a discussion will promote arrogance, be sure to let the child know
that unusual gifts, like hair and eye color, are not earned. It is neither admirable nor
contemptible to be highly gifted. It is what one does with one's abilities that is important.
A UNITED FRONT
As in most other aspects of parenting, it is important for both parents (or the adults who
bear primary responsibility for raising the child) to agree on some basic issues regarding
the child's potential. Some parents of exceptionally gifted children were themselves
gifted or exceptionally gifted children. If they did not learn to accept and understand
their own giftedness, they may find it difficult to accept their child's unusual capacities.
Raising a highly gifted child may help parents come to terms with many difficult aspects
of their own lives, but it helps if they focus first on the needs of the child and come to an
agreement about how to meet them.
WHAT HIGHLY GIFTED CHILDREN NEED
Exceptionally gifted children have two primary needs.
- First, they need to feel comfortable with themselves and with the differences that simultaneously open
possibilities and create difficulty.
- Second, they need to develop their astonishing potential. There is a strong internal drive to develop one's abilities.
Thwarting that drive may lead to crippling emotional damage.
Throughout the parenting years, it is wise to
keep in mind that the healthiest long-term goal is not necessarily a child who gains
fame, fortune, and a Nobel Prize, but one who becomes a comfortable adult and uses
gifts productively.
THE EARLY YEARS
Before your child begins formal schooling, differences can be handled by your
willingness to follow the child's lead and meet needs as they arise. It is possible and
important to treat an infant's or toddler's precocity with a degree of normalcy. For
example, a 2-year-old who prefers and plays appropriately with toys designed for
6-year-olds should be given those toys. The 3-year-old who reads should be given
books. The child who speaks very early and with a sophisticated vocabulary should be
spoken to in kind.
PUBLIC ATTITUDES
Even when parents can take precocious achievements in stride, friends, family, and
strangers may not. Unthinking people will comment (often loudly and in front of the
child) that a 2- or 3-year-old who sits in the grocery cart reading packages aloud is a
phenomenon.
It may be surprisingly difficult to avoid letting parental pride lure you into encouraging
your child to "perform" in public. Keep in mind the goal of making the child as
comfortable as possible with individual differences. The more casually you accept
unusual early accomplishments, the more your child will be able to see those
accomplishments as normal. Later, when gifts are not quite as noticeable, the child will
no longer feel that what made him or her valuable has somehow been lost.
MULTIPLE AGES
Highly gifted children are many ages simultaneously. A 5-year-old may read like a
7-year-old, play chess like a 12-year-old, talk like a 13-year-old, and share toys like a
2-year-old. A child may move with lightning speed from a reasoned discussion of the
reasons for taking turns on the playground to a full-scale temper tantrum when not
allowed to be first on the swing. You can help yourself maneuver among the child's
ages by reading about developmental norms (Gesell is a good guide) so that you are
ready for (and avoid punishing) behavior that, although it seems childish in a precocious
child, is absolutely age appropriate.
SCHOOL
If your 9-month-old begins speaking in full sentences, you probably will not tell the child
to stop and wait till other 9-month-olds catch up. You would not limit such a child to
using nouns because that is as much speech as most 9-month-olds can handle.
However, in public or private school that may be the approach some educators use.
It is important to realize that they are not purposely setting out to keep your child from
learning, although that might be the effect. Many educators have never knowingly dealt
with a highly gifted child. They do not recognize them, and they do not know how to
handle them. Some educators base teaching methods on developmental norms that are
inappropriate for highly gifted children. Although they may be willing to make an effort to
accommodate these youngsters, they may lack sufficient information or experience and
not know what type of effort to make.
When a child enters school already able to do what the teacher intends to teach, there
is seldom a variety of mechanisms for teaching that child something else. Even if there
were a way to provide time, attention, and an appropriate curriculum, it would be
necessary for the teacher to use different teaching methods. Highly gifted children learn
not only faster than others, but also differently. Standard teaching methods take
complex subjects and break them into small, simple bits presented one at a time. Highly
gifted minds can consume large amounts of information in a single gulp, and they thrive
on complexity. Giving these children simple bits of information is like feeding an
elephant one blade of grass at a time--he will starve before he even realizes that
anyone is trying to feed him.
When forced to work with the methods and pace of a typical school, highly gifted
children may look not more capable than their peers, but less capable. Many of their
normal characteristics add to this problem. Their handwriting might be very messy
because their hands do not keep pace with their quick minds. Many spell poorly
because they read for comprehension and do not see the words as collections of
separate letters. When they try to "sound out" a word, their logical spelling of an illogical
language results in errors. Most have difficulty with rote memorization, a standard
learning method in the early grades.
LACK OF FIT
The difficulty with highly gifted children in school may be summarized in three words:
They don't fit. Almost all American schools organize groups of children by age. As we
have seen, the highly gifted child is many ages. The child's intellectual needs might be
years ahead of same-age peers, although the gulf may be larger in some subject areas
than in others.
Imagine 6-year-old Rachel. She reads on a 12th-grade level, although her
comprehension is "only" that of a 7th grader. She does multiplication and division,
understands fractions and decimals, but counts on her fingers because she has never
memorized addition and subtraction facts or multiplication tables. Her favorite interests
at home are paleontology and astronomy; at school her favorite interests are lunch and
recess. She collects stamps and plays chess. Although she can concentrate at her
telescope for hours at a time, she cannot sit still when she is bored. She cries easily,
loses her temper often, bosses other children when they "don't do it right," and cannot
keep track of her personal belongings. She has a sophisticated sense of humor that
disarms adults but is not understood by other children.
Putting Rachel into a regular first grade without paying special attention to her
differences is a recipe for social, emotional, and educational disaster. Even if a gifted
program is available (they commonly begin in third or fourth grade), it is unlikely to meet
her extreme needs.
Educating a highly gifted child in school is like clothing a 6X child in a store where the
largest available garment is a size 3 (or with a gifted program, a 3X). Parents have to
resort to alterations or individual tailoring of whatever kind they can manage.
In dealing with school issues, it is important to remember that you know more about
your child than anyone else. Your knowledge, information, and instincts are useful and
important, and they should be recognized in designing a school program. Your child
needs individual attention. Anything else may be directly and seriously harmful. There is
no ideal school pattern for the highly gifted child. However, when normal school patterns
lead to difficulty, it is important to obtain real differentiation.
ACCELERATION
Because highly gifted children may begin school already knowing much of the material
covered in early grades and because they learn quickly, some type of acceleration is
necessary. For some children and in some situations, grade skipping is the best choice.
Placing a child with older children who share interests may be socially and intellectually
beneficial and result in a more appropriate curriculum. It is also a simple and
economical solution for the school. Some children begin school early; others skip
several early grades; others skip whole educational levels, such as junior high or even
high school. Skipping a single year is seldom helpful, because the difference between
one grade level and the next is too small. Grade skipping is not without problems, but
allowing highly gifted children to stay in a class that meets few if any of their needs may
do serious and long-term damage.
Another type of acceleration is subject matter acceleration. A child may take
mathematics with a class four grades ahead, reading with a class two grades ahead,
and physical education with age peers. This type of acceleration takes into
consideration the varying developmental ages of the highly gifted child. For further
flexibility, you might consider evening classes or weekend classes at a high school or
college and ask the school to excuse coverage of those subjects in regular classes. A
child might go to school with age mates only in the morning or only in the afternoon.
This method calls for school and parent flexibility and may lead to logistical problems
with scheduling and transportation, but it is often more satisfactory than grade skipping,
because the child associates at least part of the time with age peers.
WHEN THE SCHOOL WILL NOT CHANGE
When parents approach teachers and administrators with information and
documentation, in a spirit of cooperation rather than confrontation, offering suggestions
and help rather than attacking, some positive changes in normal methods usually result.
Sometimes, however, schools refuse to make changes for one child. When this
happens, parents have few choices. One is to move to a school system that will make
changes. Another is home schooling.
For many highly gifted children home schooling is a nearly ideal solution to the problem
of fit. Instead of laboriously altering ready-made programs, parents can tailor an
education precisely to the child's needs. Clubs, sports, scouting, and other activities
supply social interaction with other children while parents serve as teachers or
facilitators or engage tutors or mentors in various subject areas.
Home schooling is seldom an easy choice. In some districts it is either illegal or beset
with regulations that make it almost as rigid as classroom schooling. When both parents
or the single resident parent must work, it may be impossible. Some parents and
children find the level of togetherness stifling, while others cannot avoid pushing and
demanding too much. However, home schooling may be a positive choice for many
families. Many children move surprisingly smoothly from home schooling in the early
years into high school or college when their intellectual needs outgrow the home
environment. One of the major benefits of education at home is the maintenance of
self-esteem, which is highly problematic in a school environment.
SOCIAL/EMOTIONAL NEEDS
In the movie E.T. there was something heartrending in the small alien's attempts to
"phone home," in his constant longing for others of his kind despite the loving concern
of the family who cared for him. Highly gifted children endure some of that same pain. It
is hard for them to find kindred spirits, hard for them to feel they fit into the only world
they know.
Highly gifted children may have trouble establishing fulfilling friendships with people of
their own age when there are few or no other highly gifted children with whom to
interact. As a high school student told his mother, "I can be that part of myself that is like
my classmates, and we get along fine. But there's no one I can share the rest of me
with, no one who understands what means the most to me." For most highly gifted
children, social relationships with age peers necessitate a constant monitoring of
thoughts, words, and behavior.
One of the greatest benefits of the talent searches proliferating in colleges across the
country is the chance for highly gifted children to spend time with others like
themselves. For 3 weeks in the summer, children who qualify (by scoring high enough
on the SAT or ACT in the seventh grade or earlier) attend class on a college campus
with other highly gifted children. Rather than feeling like oddballs, they suddenly feel
normal. Lifelong friendships may form in a matter of days. Many summer program
participants consider the social interaction as valuable as the classes.
What else can you do to help highly gifted children find friends? It helps children to
understand that there are different types of friends. They may play baseball, ride bikes,
and watch TV with one person; talk about books or movies with another; and play chess
or discuss astronomy with another. Some of these friends may be their own age, some
may be younger or, more often, older. Only in school is it suggested that people must
be within a few months of each other in age to form meaningful relationships.
CONCLUSION
Raising a highly gifted child may be ecstasy, agony, and everything between. Adults
must perform almost impossible feats of balance--supporting a child's gifts without
pushing, valuing without overinvesting, championing without taking over. It is costly,
physically and emotionally draining, and intellectually demanding. In the first flush of
pride, few parents realize that their task is in many ways similar to the task faced by
parents of a child with severe handicaps. Our world does not accommodate differences
easily, and it matters little whether the difference is perceived to be a deficit or an
overabundance.
We have covered only a few issues in this space, but the most important help you can
give highly gifted children can be expressed in a single sentence: Give them a safe
home, a refuge where they feel love and genuine acceptance, even of their differences.
As adults with a safe home in their background, they can put together lives of
productivity and fulfillment.
Copyright 1989, Stephanie S. Tolan. Properly attributed, this material may be
reproduced. Stephanie Tolan is a noted author of children's books and one of the
authors of GUIDING THE GIFTED CHILD.
ERIC digests are in the public domain and may be freely reproduced and disseminated.
This publication was prepared with funding from the Office of Educational Research and
Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, under contract no. RI88062007. The
opinions expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of
OERI or the Department of Education.
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