Gifted Children

A Guide for Parents and Professionals

Kate Distin

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781849856065
• eBook ISBN: 9781846425073
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Winner of the NAGC Celebrating Gifts and Talents 2007 "Most Important Book" Gold Award

Gifted Children is a lively and informative exploration of the mystery of the gifted mind and the social and emotional needs of gifted children and their families.

The authors give an insight into what is 'normal' for gifted children, acknowledge the difficulties they experience, and offer pointers for parents on how to support them at home, in the interaction with siblings and other family members, and at school. The authors identify self-acceptance and communication with others as key skills for gifted children, whose exceptional abilities in fields ranging from music and maths to linguistics and art are often complicated by poor social skills, dyslexia or other difficulties.

This excellent book, written by counsellors who are also parents with first- hand knowledge of living and working with gifted children, is an accessible and positive guide full of constructive advice and encouragement for other parents. It includes practical information such as useful contact details, as well as opportunities for reflection.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This is the book that we needed when our children were younger. Our babies were not born with labels on their foreheads, ‘Gifted – Handle with Care’. We were often not even sure that our children were gifted; afraid to admit they might be; struggling to believe that we really knew them better than anyone else. What we did know was that our children seemed different from most others, and that this made us feel different too. In our isolation we had no idea that our experiences were quite normal for the families of gifted children: that we were part of a scattered community of people-like-us. It is the companionship of this community which our book hopes to provide: the reassurance that the parents, grandparents and other carers of gifted children are not on their own; that they do know their own children best; that it is possible to find a comfortable place for giftedness in their family lives.

What is giftedness?

Intelligence is one of many human characteristics which, roughly speaking, follows a pattern called the normal curve of distribution, or the bell curve. What this means is that, like height and weight and longevity, intelligence is one of the areas in which most people are fairly average. Statistically speaking, there is not very much difference between the height, weight, life-expectancy or intelligence of about two-thirds of the population. Most people are pretty average in these areas: somewhat above or below, perhaps, but not very different from what we might think of as normal. The further away we get from the average, however, the more rarely do we see people of a particular height, weight or level of intelligence.

If we apply this information to school children and their performance, it means that we can expect approximately two-thirds of them to be reasonably clever, finding school work sometimes hard, sometimes easy, but generally appropriate for them. On either side of this block of children, though, there are others who will almost always struggle with the work set, and others still who almost always find it manageable. These are the people who fall into roughly the top or bottom sixth of the population, in terms of intelligence. Even amongst these children, there will be many who usually find that they can cope, both with school and with the other challenges that life throws at them. Some of them will need more help than others, but most of them will do all right in the end.

Within these groups, though, there are people at either end of the scale who need more support than anyone else – say the top and bottom 5 per cent, in terms of their ability. Self-evidently these children are in a minority. At the most, only 1 person in every 20 whom they meet will be very much like them. To put this in terms of an ordinary school, it means that few classes will contain more than one other person of similar intelligence to them. Some classes, and perhaps even some schools, will not have any at all. In this book, ‘giftedness’ refers to children who are of above average intelligence in this way.

It does not necessarily refer to people whom we might instinctively describe as geniuses. When we think of gifted people, names like Newton, Mozart and Bunyan spring immediately to mind, but in many ways these are unhelpful examples of giftedness. They are unhelpful firstly because there may be as big a gap between their abilities and those of most gifted children, as between children whose abilities are roughly average and children whom we might call gifted. They are unhelpful secondly because they are all people whose extraordinarily high abilities have been realized in correspondingly high achievements. As a result, thinking exclusively in terms of people like them can easily mask the important distinction between ability and achievement. This book is about the average gifted child, who has great potential but who, as a result of the complex mix of personality, opportunity and circumstance, may or may not go on to achieve great things as a result of her abilities.

Indeed the immediate response of many parents to the suggestion that their offspring may be gifted is frequently along the lines that, ‘I wouldn’t describe him as gifted, necessarily: he’s bright, but he’s not going to be the next Einstein.’ For these parents the term gifted child is unhelpful in itself. In England, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) uses the longer term ‘gifted and talented’. It identifies gifted learners as those who have abilities in one or more academic subjects, and talented learners as those who have abilities in art and design, music, PE or performing arts such as dance and drama. In the US, most states also prefer the term ‘gifted and talented’, although a significant minority talk simply about ‘gifted’ students. Alternatively, some teachers prefer to talk about ‘more able’ children, and indeed this description may be less misleading and feel more comfortable to many parents. Nevertheless, ‘gifted’ is the word most commonly used in this area, and it is actually quite hard to replace with another so succinct. For these reasons we persist with its use.

How does it feel to describe your child as gifted?

In a sense the terminology is unimportant anyway: what does it matter whether John is gifted and Jane is highly intelligent rather than the other way around? The important thing is to gain a better understanding of each child. Good teachers try to find out each pupil’s abilities, not with the aim of giving each a label (clever or average), but so that they know how best to help each child: by supporting one to grasp the most basic material and enabling another to tackle the most difficult, for instance. Similarly, if you can gain a good understanding of your own child’s gifts then you are much better placed to support and guide him. Although each gifted child is an individual just as much as any other human being, it is possible to make some generalizations about this group of children. Nothing is cast in stone, but we can say things like it is often the case that,or many gifted children have this characteristic. When tempered by what you know of your own child, such generalizations can serve to shore up the foundations of your parental wisdom.

What is in this book?

Our subject matter is inevitably biased towards the problems that gifted children can face. Of course this should not be taken to imply that all gifted children will face all, or even any, of these problems. It is simply that their needs are brought most sharply into focus by the difficulties that some do encounter. There is also plenty here about the joys and advantages of being gifted or of having a gifted child, but the brutal fact is that there would be no book if that were the only side of the story. The positives are genuine and numerous, but the negatives are what provided the impetus for writing a book to support the families of gifted children.

Our aims in writing it are to help gifted children, their families and carers (including grown-up gifted children) to learn more about what is typical or normal for gifted and talented children; to shatter some of the myths about these children and their parents; to enhance their awareness of the emotional impact of giftedness and thus to enable gifted children and their families to live more comfortably with their giftedness, shifting their focus from its challenges to its rewards and possibilities.

Our book’s content is somewhat idiosyncratic, being based on the knowledge and experience of a somewhat idiosyncratic group of people. All of us have in the recent past been counsellors for the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) in Britain, for between 3 and 30 years.1 As such, we have a huge collective experience of being approached by the families of gifted children who felt, at that moment, that they had no other source of support. These parents were isolated by their experience of having a child with this sort of special need and wanted desperately to talk to someone who shared their concern for her social and emotional well-being. Of course we believe that it is crucial for these children to be fulfilled creatively and intellectually – indeed, for many such children their emotional well-being will depend on high levels of intellectual and creative stimulation – but we also recognize that for each individual the needs and priorities will be different. Our concern is to enable gifted and talented children to live fulfilled and happy lives.

As volunteers, the background that each of us brought to our counselling work was extremely varied: all of us have different experiences of giftedness within our own families or personal backgrounds. For each of us that experience has been enhanced and our understanding deepened by the many conversations that we have shared with the families of gifted children, as well as by the ongoing training that the NAGC provided to support us in our work. It is unavoidably the case, however, that the collective experience of such a relatively small group of people cannot cover the whole gamut of issues that gifted children face. Although we have amongst us people with a deep understanding of the issues faced by musically gifted children and by gifted children who also have Asperger Syndrome, for instance, we have less understanding of artistically gifted children or of those who also have cerebral palsy.

In some ways, then, the topics covered here are incomplete. On the other hand, no book can hope to contain the whole of a given subject. What this one does offer is the product of many decades, between us, of work with gifted children and their families. It offers those families a place within a community of gifted children’s families: a community which to a certain extent has common experiences, shares common delights and faces common difficulties. It is not an academic work, but one that hopes to offer support and understanding to a group of people who are all too often unsupported and misunderstood.

In particular, our aim is to explore the twofold theme which, more than any other, unites the families of gifted children with whom we have worked. First, there is the need to help gifted children and their families to find value in their difference: to be able to accept giftedness as an integral and valuable aspect of themselves, and to find a way to give voice to it in a culture where the response to giftedness is not always positive. Second, there is the need to find a place for themselves in that wider world: to be able to make contact with their age peers and to feel that they are a part of the context in which they find themselves. As for any minority community, then, their task is to find and preserve their own identity, whilst at the same time making mutually rewarding connexions with the predominant culture. Our hope is that this book will enable more gifted children and their families to avoid both the isolation that can grow from problems in interacting with other children and their parents, and the miserable frustration that can result from lack of provision for their gifts.

How does the book work?

There are three parts to this book. Part 1 is a truly collaborative work in which, as a group, we explore the world of gifted children and their families. We look at what it means to be a typical gifted child and at the impact that giftedness can have on a family. We examine the ways in which giftedness can affect the interactions of both children and their parents with others outside the family, and at the relationship with schools in particular.

Part 2 leaves behind the collective voice of our writing group in order to allow individual members to speak for themselves on their particular areas of expertise. This is a necessarily idiosyncratic collection of topics, covered in an inevitably heterogeneous range of styles, but its content draws on a wealth of personal experience and research on the part of each writer. Not all of these topics will be relevant to every reader, and for this reason each chapter within Part 2 is complete in itself, allowing readers to dip in and out of this section without losing any ongoing threads. If you have an interest in multi-talented children, for example, but no experience of Asperger Syndrome, then it would make sense to read the one chapter and skip the other, and Part 2 has been structured to allow you to do this.

Finally, in Part 3 we speak collectively once more, drawing together the twin threads that run through all of the topics that our book has raised: self-acceptance and communication with others.

Many chapters throughout the book end with a list of organizations and books that readers might find useful. Full details are given in the Appendix. All of the information is correct at the time of going to press, but it should not be taken as an exhaustive list of potential resources for gifted children and their families. Rather, it is a starting point for those who wish to explore particular issues in more depth or breadth than we have space for here.

Questions and case studies

In contrast to the self-contained nature of the chapters in Part 2, there is a more consistent style and structure to the writing within Parts 1 and 3, where we frame each chapter’s discussion between an introduction and a bullet-point summary of its main points, and offer many illustrative personal stories in the course of our discussions. It is worth clarifying the nature of these personal stories. Although our knowledge springs to a great extent from our experience as NAGC counsellors, this book is not about the individual families with whom we have had contact. Those contacts were, and will always remain, confidential. When we write many parents say or families often find, that is exactly what we mean: we are not hiding real people behind our generalizations. Many of our case studies are amalgams: fictional in that there is no individual family which matches those exact details; factual in the truths that they illustrate. When we do use direct quotations or individual case studies to illustrate a point, it is with the full knowledge and consent of client families.

In addition to these case studies, the text is punctuated by opportunities for you to consider how our thoughts might be reflected in your own family’s circumstances. These take the form of questions set aside from the text in shaded boxes, like the one earlier in this chapter. It should be noted that there is, amongst our group, a real divergence of views about the merits of such contemplative questions. Reading through the first draft of our book, some of us welcomed the space that these questions provided for reflecting on our experience of giftedness in the family. We thought that some readers would also value this opportunity to pause for thought. Others of us, it has to be said, were infuriated by the way that these questions-in-boxes interrupted the flow of text and thought! We wanted to read straight through without them. An animated discussion ensued … and the conclusion was that the questions should stay, with the proviso that readers who do not wish to reflect at that point on the issues they raise should not feel obliged to read them. The questions are not an essential part of the book’s content and you will not miss any information if you do skip them. We hope that you will find them stimulating – helpfully so – if you choose to read them. We hope that you will not find them intrusive if you do not.

Note

1 There is also an NAGC in the United States. Unless otherwise specified, ‘NAGC’ refers throughout this book to the UK organization.

PART 1

Gifted Children and their Families

CHAPTER 2

What is Normal for a Gifted Child?

We have already noted that gifted children are a minority: few of the people they encounter will be like them in this important respect. Of course being gifted does not define the whole person, and they may have plenty of other things in common with their friends and acquaintances. Giftedness tends, however, to pervade the personality in ways that set...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Foreword
• The Writing Group
• 1. Introduction
• Part 1: Gifted Children and their Families
• Part 2: Special Talents and Special Needs
• Part 3: Conclusions
• Appendix: Related Contacts
• Index