The Challenges of Gifted Children

Book excerpt: Educating and raising gifted children presents highly specific challenges. This book explains how parents can learn to optimize their child's potential and work with schools, spouses, friends, and specialists to create a nurturing and stable life. Having a gifted child is a joy, but it is also one of the greatest challenges of parenthood to help that child find the right fit for education. In this remarkably insightful text, noted psychologist Barbara Klein, PhD, EdD, explains the emotional and social issues of giftedness, identifies parental actions and reactions that can exacerbate or soothe the challenges, and describes how these key factors tie in to identifying the best school and educational program to enable a gifted child to achieve his or her goals and maximize success. The text includes many vignettes from children and families who have sought guidance across 30 years from the author, an accomplished psychotherapist recognized as a national authority on raising gifted children. This single-volume work presents an understandable theoretical overview of the psychological problems parents face raising their gifted child and clearly explains why the parent-child interaction can be so intense and stressful—a reality that is rarely acknowledged in the existing literature on giftedness. Parents of gifted children will learn how to make decisions about their children's social emotional development and educational future and understand how their actions can be helpful or harmful to their gifted child and his/her education. Educators will fully grasp why and how gifted kids are different and why they need different educational environments, while mental heath professionals will gain insight into their gifted patients' emotional struggles. And gifted individuals will realize that others experience similar struggles.