Parenting a child who shows unusual talent or intelligence can be exciting as well as daunting for mothers and fathers. Is the way your four year old plucks out a tune on the piano a sign of unusual talent? What about a third grader who speaks like a college student? Are those structures your six year old is always building the precursor of a brilliant mechanical engineering career? Especially if the child is a first born or showing behaviors which are markedly different from siblings, it can be difficult to know the difference between average and bright, and bright and gifted.
The good news is that more and more school districts and even states are paying more attention to the definition of giftedness. Concentrated efforts are made in many institutions to identify and foster exceptional children, and professionals can dedicate entire careers to gifted education, meaning that harried school psychologists need not try to fit in time or attention to such programs in addition to other duties. While it can take some time and a team of educators to properly identify a gifted child, parents can help by knowing which signs to look for. Becoming an advocate for your gifted child can boost his or her chances of success even in learning environments in which education for the gifted is not a priority.
Identification of Gifted Children
Some parents defer the classification of their child as gifted to the start of formal schooling. As mentioned earlier, school districts and individual institutions usually have in place at least some sort of gifted identification program. Parents can help by charting specific examples of exceptionalism, such as videoing their child playing an instrument with proficiency at an early age or in the act of creating complicated engineering schematics. Scanning and organizing outstanding samples of artwork, writing, and footage of athletic performances can be useful as well.
When your child is on a school’s radar for giftedness, a number of screening methods are ideally employed to differentiate him or her from the merely advanced or bright students. Your child may undergo standardized testing. This may include traditional IQ tests or other evaluations which resemble college placement exams. A close look at your child’s grades will also likely take place, along with a discussion of how he or she interacts in the classroom. In this sense, gifted education evaluators and teachers or staff members discuss excitement for learning, leadership skills, and how often the student asks unusually insightful questions.
Some schools also place potentially gifted children with identified gifted children to see how they interrelate. No one element alone is a definitive indicator of giftedness; a properly balanced gifted education discernment program will consider an aggregate of these factors.
Advocating for Your Potentially Gifted Child
Parents can best help their potentially exceptional children by refraining from making affection or approval dependent on performance or gifted expression. Over-focus on gifted children, identified or not, can backfire. Some gifted children are wary of the extra attention and bury their gifts; others become overly anxious under the weight of parental expectations or lean into the bossiness which may sometimes accompany an exceptional nature. Concentration on a potentially gifted child to the detriment of siblings may cause resentment in brothers and sisters.
Professional opinions vary on whether or not children should be identified as gifted before they are old enough to attend preschool. Some argue that doing so can help encourage a child’s exceptional abilities while helping him or her address such issues as social integration and asynchronous development. On the other hand, parents may feel that doing so places undue stress and expectations upon the child, and educators point out that some forms of giftedness cannot yet emerge by this age.
In the event that your child attends a school without attention to exceptional students, parents may best help their student by knowing what district, state, and federal regulations are regarding gifted education. Some prefer to homeschool their children or place them in private enrichment tutoring when classroom instruction just isn’t enough.
What If Your Child Is Not Classified as Gifted?
The definition of “gifted” is wide and ever changing, and it includes students who are twice exceptional, or who must work with a learning, physical, or processing disability in addition to their giftedness. Some of these children are misdiagnosed as autistic or suffers of attention deficit disorder. Many of these students fall through the cracks of traditional structured education.
If your school has evaluated your child and decided that he or she does not fit the school’s understanding of gifted, parents have several options. Some schools allow parents to appeal such decisions; others ask parents to wait a year and then apply for re-evaluation. Private testing and identification is also an option.
Different Roads to Gifted Education
Where gifted children are concerned, traditional classroom education, with its schedules, peer mixing, and single pacing, can be a double edged sword. Students who perform well on standardized tests, who memorize well, read above grade level, or who are contentious about homework and studying can be misidentified as gifted since they fit an established construct of “smart.” However, more often than not, these students may be of above average intelligence, but lack the complexity of thought and far-reaching talent that gifted children tend to demonstrate. These students tend to perform along with their average peers when confronted with tasks that test their creativity, ability to apply intricate patterns, or grasp profound concepts. They are usually best served by advanced placement courses or perhaps skipping a grade.
At times, gifted students perform poorly in typical classroom settings because they are bored, bullied by classmates, or in their own world. This may also indicate a child who is twice exceptional. These underscreened students may receive little scholastic support at home or become behavior problems due to lack of engagement with classroom material or frustration with the comparatively juvenile interests or conversation of their peers. Such students should be evaluated for exceptional abilities.
