New Zealand celebrates Gifted Awareness Week from 17th to 23rd June this year and we are delighted to join in their blog tour in anticipation.Ours is a very small contribution, but during the week there will be many more posts looking at giftedness from all sorts of angles. We hope our readers will have a look at the blog tour page or follow #NZGAW on Twitter, and be inspired.
Parenting a gifted child can be a very lonely and frightening role to play. Our kids most certainly do not come with an instruction booklet and, at times, it can seem that no one knows how to help us figure things out.
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| Courtesy of Kidspot.com.au |
All too often, we defer to the wisdom of professional experts. Yes, there are many wonderful experts out there, advancing the fields of gifted education and psychology, and we must be grateful and supportive of them. (Does it ever strike you how many of these people are either gifted or parents of gifted children themselves?) However, the vast majority professionals with whom we come into contact, do not have training or expertise in giftedness and are liable to misinterpret and misdiagnose. Don't ever forget, there is no one more expert in your child than you! We live with these kids 24/7. We see them in all sorts of situations and moods. We know what makes them tick....well, sometimes!
Parents of gifted children come from diverse backgrounds, educationally, financially, and culturally, but we all have one thing in common: No matter what life throws at us, we will always love and support our children unconditionally. Regardless of career opportunities and politics, we will always look for what is best for our children and we will be relentless in our quest.
As a group, we include educators, psychologists, paediatricians and psychiatrists. Others are great leaders and motivators; some make great coffee; some are wonderful listeners; some provide the much-needed light relief when the going gets tough! Each and every one of us has something to bring to the party.
As a group, we have so much to offer and our challenge must be to find each other, to use each others strengths to support each other, to learn from each other and to develop a loud and powerful voice on behalf of our children.
As individuals, we may often feel swamped, unsure and inadequate. As a group, we have the passion, the skills and the expertise to really make a difference. We should not wait about for others to do this for us. Join your local support group and get stuck in. If there isn’t one, start one. We urge you to rise to the challenge.
Thank you for the encouragement to reach out to other parents who are tackling similar challenges as I am! I recently started blogging about my adventures raising my gifted kids and am already surprised how many other parents have contacted me craving support and connection with other parents of gifted kids. In the US, giftedness is a sensitive subject amongst parents with young, school-aged children, so it makes it difficult to find other "safe" parents with whom to discuss our joys and challenges. I just might have to take my journey into real-life meetings, as well as online! Thank you again for this resource!
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment, Erin, and well done on taking the plunge with your blog. I had a sneaky peek and it's great! We have found that there is a role for both online and real-life support. It's all very well "chatting" in a facebook group or forum, but nothing beats a coffee and a good old vent! Plus, there is always the privacy issue online and the fact that you don't really know who you're talking to. Some people are very different online and IRL!
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