Learning Curve Blog

A collection of thoughts, resources, and more.

Gifted and Challenged Parenting 101


by Carol Lewis

9/16/2020

Hello and welcome to the new Gifted Education Advisory Council (GEAC) blog!


I have been asked as a long time GEAC member and past President to write a guest post focusing a bit on gifted kids who may be running into challenges at school.

For those of you who are newly minted Quest/Highly Capable parents (and seasoned parents who could use a refresher) I want to give you a taste of the vast knowledge out there about being gifted that you may not be aware of.



First off, just being gifted includes a whole set of behaviors and ways of being that are part and parcel of high intelligence, and are unrelated to academic achievement. Learn about this. Really. And you’ll likely see that a lot of your own behavior looks really familiar.

For example, gifted (especially highly or profoundly gifted) kids tend to have asynchronous development. This means that their various abilities may mature at different rates (or some, like handwriting, may never fully mature) which can be really confusing and frustrating for teachers, parents, and children alike. They may be able to do advanced math at a young age, but struggle with memorizing addition and multiplication tables (which frankly, is really memorization and unrelated to math abilities!). They may be able to read at an advanced level, but not be emotionally ready for the content.


Gifted kids are also usually pretty intense. In fact, gifted kids often have a number of what are called Overexcitabilities (OEs). These include:


  • Intellectual OE (eg, kids with endless questions, hyper focus on topic of interest, intense curiosity)

  • Emotional OE (eg, strong emotional sensitivity, intense feelings and empathy)

  • Sensory OE (eg, heightened awareness to senses, keen enjoyment of music/color/words, intense sensitivity to smells, sounds, touch)

  • Imaginational OE (eg, creative and divergent thinkers, strong sense of humor, inventive, love fantasy and drama, visualize easily)

  • Psychomotor OE (eg, energetic and active, constant talking or humming or rapid speech, difficulty sleeping or relaxing)


Gifted kids (again, especially highly or profoundly gifted) tend to be late bloomers in executive functioning. This means that skills in organizing, planning, initiating, judgement, and evaluating the quality of their work tend to mature later (or never fully mature). They may need support in these areas for longer than expected. It might help to consider adjusting your expectations of what type of support your kid might need: https://www.nagc.org/gifted-learners-and-executive-functioning.



And, while some of you parents may have a kid who excels academically, school achievement is not necessarily guaranteed with a gifted kid. They may be differently motivated and enjoy learning for its own sake and may not be inspired by grades. They may be creative kids who want to forge their own paths to learning and question the need for mastery of some other subject or find it very boring.


Importantly, a good number of gifted kids who struggle in school might be Twice Exceptional (2E). These are gifted kids with learning disabilities or differences. Often twice exceptional kids are hard to identify because their giftedness masks their disability or vice versa. Examples include learning styles like visual spatial learners in an auditory sequential classroom, dyslexia, attention disorders, sensory processing disorders, Asperger’s, and specific learning disabilities.

So, that’s just a taste of the knowledge about giftedness. The more you learn about these kids, the more you can support their optimal academic, social, and emotional development while maintaining a good relationship with them.



View Carol’s Presentation here.

Wishing you good things on your parenting journey! Carol Lewis

About Carol
Carol has been involved with GEAC for 15 years, and five of those as GEAC president. She has two twice exceptional sons who went through Quest and choice schools in LWSD. The oldest is a Senior in the Honors Program at Western Washington University. The youngest graduated from Lake Washington High School in June as a Running Start student at LWTech and is continuing there this fall to complete an Associate’s degree. She was deeply involved in supporting her sons during most of their school years and developed resources on Twice Exceptional learners for the gifted community. Carol trained as a clinical psychologist before turning her attention to parenting and volunteering.