How To Encourage Your Gifted Child to Succeed
Depending on your child's age, you will want to focus on different things.
Early on, students should learn how to study and develop a vast vocabulary so that reading makes sense.
The ability to read well will solve many of the problems that students have academically but also with social emotional issues, since kids who read tend to hang out together and talk about books and enjoy talking, debating and analyzing.
Issues with over praising
When young students are praised excessively, they start on a road of reliance on the "magic" of giftedness that is supposed to solve all problems. They stop doing work which in turn leads the way to losing practice with executive function.
Being Gifted: the panacea for all academic difficulties? Not at all!
Just because your child is gifted, it doesn't mean that he/she doesn't need academic support.
Everyone has to move through the same journey of learning, but at a different pace and with different enthusiasm.
Misdiagnosis or is it the real thing?
Some gifted kids get misdiagnosed with various problems that are not necessarily present.
Children who are unhappy and can't fit in, are sometimes diagnosed with various disorders they do not have.
The reasons for this can be many. Lots of times those are relevant, and must be addressed. It's good to eliminate these problems first, mostly likely by starting a conversation with the family doctor.
Additionally, it could help to revisit that the child's intellectual needs are being met once in a while if things are not going well. Sometimes reworking various academic strategies can lead to a lot of improvement and the regaining of self-esteem.
What's happens in the long term?
The parents of children enrolled in gifted programs currently, must ask themselves what happens in the long-term. How will the children continue to surround themselves with like-minded peers if they do not intend to continue their education?
Poorly designed academic trajectories will hurt the ability to stay in intended programs:
Here are few examples of how gifted kids describe themselves after graduating from high school (click here for the source website) or while in post secondary programs. Notice how many of them refer to themselves as gifted only in the past tense:
"I was considered the smart kid"
"I bombed my first year cuz no study habits"
"in high school, i was in the top 1% of my class, multiple awards and extracurricular activities. now i am mediocre and have no motivation to study or do things"
"Some feel like the shell of what they used to be. Others somehow pull through."
"I was considered "gifted" by my elementary school teachers"
"I spent most of my public school years being the in class tutor for my fellow classmates... During my first year at ubc I failed 3 classes in my first semester"
"In a room full of hundreds of people that are that much better, on top of the fact that you can go through the whole course without the prof knowing who you are, that validation is gone which leads to no motivation, leads to etc…"
"there's way more smarter people than me and I'm never good enough :("
"I was a gifted kid. I didn't mature at all though. I failed out of UBC. I ended up back home and worked the 9-5 grind for the better part of the year."