About Gifts for Learning
About Me

Headline

Although I started out knowing very little about gifted children, I learned everything I could about them. I have since started a local parent support group and am now an active board member of my state's gifted association. I am also working on a dissertation on verbally gifted children.

Throw away those old parenting books and take a look at the books here. They'll make much more sense -- and you need them to survive!

How I Got Started:

I know first hand what it's like to be the parent of a gifted child.   I know the initial pride, fear, confusion and uncertainty.  I know both the joys and the hardships of raising a gifted child.  I know because I have a gifted child, and it wasn't until I had that child that I knew anything about gifted children.  This is the story of my journey.

All my life I wanted to have children, but it just never seemed to happen.  Finally, at the age of 41, I learned I would at last be a mom.  

I knew that being a parent was going to be a difficult job.  After all, I was older and babies don't come with an owner's manual!  But surely, I thought, with all the parenting books out there, I could quickly learn what to do and when to do it.  Besides, I had a degree in psychology and had taken courses in child psychology and psychology of learning. 

However, I discovered that parenting books are general guidelines, not detailed instructions.  I also discovered that most parenting books are written for parents of average children, not gifted children.  Advice in those parenting books just didn't seem to work for my child.  For the longest time I thought that I was a horrible parent, that I was incapable of using the simplest techniques to teach my son appropriate behavior.   Fortunately, when my son started preschool at age 3, his teacher, the mother of two highly gifted boys, pointed out to me that my son was gifted.  It took me a while to accept and understand this, but I did.  I began to read everything I could find about giftedness.  And then everything made sense.  

I threw away all those parenting books and bought some new ones.  My first book, and still one of my favorites, was a book by James Alvino, Parents Guide to Raising a Gifted Child .   I realized that all the signs had been there, almost from the beginning, but I hadn't understood what they meant.   

Part of the problem was that my son was born 6 weeks premature. When a child is premature, his physical development tends to be delayed compared to the development of other children.  That makes it hard to figure out if a premature child is "on target" with physical development.  Like any normal parent, I worried.  While I was worrying, though, people would often comment on how alert my son looked.  Here was this little guy, 3 months old, weighing only about 10 pounds, and people were telling me things like, "There's a lot going on behind those eyes."  

I still worried, though, especially when at two, my son was still not talking!  Sure that he must be hearing impaired, I would sneak up behind him and clap really loud.  He always jumped, poor kid, but I didn't quit startling him until he started talking -- about 2 months past his 2nd birthday.  A month after that, he started reading.  

I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was.  This child had been fascinated by letters almost from birth.  We could never just go for a simple walk like other parents I knew.  We had to stop at every Lot marking, so he could plop himself down and trace with his fingers the letters L-O-T and then the numbers that followed.  We never got very far.  Once in a while, the license plate on a parked car along the way would catch his eye and he'd toddle over to it and trace the letters and numbers on that.  By the time he was two, he knew the letters of the alphabet.  Although he didn't talk, he'd point to them over and over until we figured out that he wanted to know what the symbols meant.  

When someone would see that my son was an early reader, they'd ask me how I "trained" him, or they'd comment on how important it is to read to our children.  The truth, however, is that I did not train him at all (as if I could!) and he was such an active baby that he'd never sit still in my lap long enough for me to read him more than one or two lines in a book!  

Somewhere, somehow, something clicked in my son's brain.  He had made the connection between the spoken and the written word.  That's when we got to read to him.  Then he couldn't get enough reading!  But this was not the typical reading to a child.  My son would take my finger and point to individual words as I read.  He wanted to know what each word looked like.  When he first started letting me read to him, we were reading a book about some animals.  I read a line about a fox doing something or other.  My son said, "Where fox?"  Thinking he wanted to see what a fox looked like, I pointed to the picture of the fox.  He got mad.  "Where fox?  Where FOX?"  he yelled.  I tried to calm him down and kept telling him that I was pointing to the fox.  After more frustration on my son's part, I realized that he didn't want to see what a fox looked like; he wanted to see what the WORD "fox" looked like.  I pointed to the word "fox" and he settled right back down.  That's when he started holding my finger, using it to point at the words as I read to him.

My son seemed to become obsessed with words, more so than he had ever been with letters. He even refused to look at any book without words in them!  I'd get him some wonderful award-winning picture books to look at and to stir his imagination, but he'd throw them on the floor with disgust and say, "No words!" By the time he was three, he was reading -- fluently -- on his own.  By the time he was 5, he was reading at a third grade level, and I was told by his preschool teacher that he would probably need some special accommodations in school. 

This is where it gets really interesting.  People kept telling me that my son wasn't really reading because children that young can't read.  Huh?  It just LOOKED like he was reading.  Huh?  This was news to me.  My son loved to read and his favorite subjects were space and dinosaurs.  Even before he turned 5, he was reading all about black holes and space and telling me all about what he read.  I remember one time when he came to me very, very upset over something he had read.  He had learned that in 2,000 years Polaris would no longer be the north star.  This was terribly distressing to him and he couldn't go to sleep that night because he worried about it so much.  

See why I threw away those old parenting books?  They don't cover this sort of thing.  I've been looking for answers ever since!  

Now before you get the wrong idea, not all gifted children read early, so if you were wondering whether your child is gifted and he or she isn't an early reader, don't think that your child isn't gifted.  Only about 50% of gifted children read young.  You have to look for the other traits , and there are quite a few