Love, laugh, listen, and learn. Raising and nurturing a gifted child can be an exciting yet daunting challenge.
Learn to be positive. Giftedness
can be an exciting challenge or a chore, depending on how you see a
child's characteristics. For example, persistence and stubbornness are
the same trait.
Understand the way that your child's
giftedness affects his or her needs: Intellectual, social,
emotional, and physical needs. For example, ideas forged by
eight-year-old minds may be difficult to produce with five-year-old
hands.
Be a knowledgeable advocate. The
brighter the child is, the greater is his or her emotional complexity
and potential vulnerability. You might have to educate the educators.
Read aloud to your child. It is
important that parents read to their gifted child often, even if the
child is already capable of reading.
Help your child discover personal
interests. Stimulation and support of interests are vital to the
development of talents. Parents should expose their child to their own
interests and encourage the child to learn about a wide variety of
subjects, such as art, nature, music, and sports, in addition to
traditional academic subjects such as math, reading, and science.
Encourage the support of extended
family and friends. As an infant, a gifted child can exhaust new
parents because he or she often sleeps less than other babies and
requires extra stimulation when awake. (It can be helpful to have
extended family in the home, grandparents who live nearby, or close
friends in the neighborhood who can spend some time with the child so
the primary caretakers can get some rest and to give the infant added
-- or different -- stimulation.)
Speak and listen to your child with
consideration and respect. From the time he or she can talk, a
gifted child is constantly asking questions and will often challenge
authority. "Do it because I said so" doesn't work. Generally, a gifted
child will cooperate more with parents who take the time to explain
requests than with more authoritarian parents.
Teach your child how to find
information and resources in a variety of ways. Gifted children
need to know, to learn, to solve, and to ponder. There will be times
when your child's expertise on a topic will be greater than yours, and
you will not be able to provide answers or solutions.
Be a welcome person in your child's
school or educational environment. If educators know you first as
a willing volunteer, they will be more responsive when you want
something for your child.
Become involved in a local, state, or
regional parent group. Or join an email list. Parents of gifted
children need opportunities to share parenting experiences and problem
solving strategies with one another. And it takes the persistence of
large groups of parents to ensure that provisions for gifted children
are kept firmly in place.
The key to raising gifted children is
to respect their uniqueness, their opinions and ideas, and their
dreams. It can be painful for parents when their children feel out
of sync with others, but it is unwise to put too much emphasis on the
importance of fitting in; children get enough of that message in the
outside world. At home, children need to know that they are
appreciated for being themselves.
Love, laugh, listen, and learn.
Brought to you by the
Council for Exceptional Children
Excerpted from "How Can I Support My Gifted Child?" published
by ACCESS ERIC, 1998.
Source:
Family Education Network
