SCIAM: "Gifted Children: How to Bring out Their Potential"

A recent Scientific American article "Gifted Children: How to Bring out Their Potential" examines whether acceleration or enrichment is the best path for bringing out a gifted child's true gifts.

The article explains, "One common problem gifted kids face is that they, and those around them, place too much importance on being smart. Such an emphasis can breed a belief that bright people do not have to work hard to do well. Although smart kids may not need to work hard in the lower grades, when the work is easy, they may struggle and perform poorly when the work gets harder because they do not make the effort to learn. In some cases, they may not know how to study, having never done it before. In others, they simply cannot accept the fact that some tasks require effort."

Similar to an earlier SCIAM article exploring the negative and positive effects of praise, this article discusses how recognizing or labeling a child as being smart or "gifted" isn't where it ends. It's more what do we do with this child after he knows he's gifted in order to stimulate his advance mind. "One way to avoid such difficulties is to recognize that IQ is just one ingredient among many in the recipe for success. Children thrive or struggle in school for a host of reasons apart from IQ, according to psychologist Franz Mönks of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. These include motivation and persistence, social competence, and the support of family, educators and friends. Emphasizing the importance of persistence and hard work, for example, will help a child avoid the laziness trap. Gifted children also need intellectual challenges—to teach them how to work hard."

A great article with eye-opening points it continues to explore accelerating a gifted child's schooling versus providing an enriching program for that child. This section of the article speaks to all of us as parents, not just the ones with a gifted child. I firmly believe, being myself an educator in the public school system for some time, that what all kids lack in their education right now is meaningful experiences. This is happening for many reasons that I'm not going to point fingers right now because the pure fact that it's happening at all is terrifying. And I believe as cheesy cliched as it is "it takes a village to raise a child." And while we're all busy pointing fingers at each other we're missing the point and our kids are missing out on a rich life full of experiences.

A wise and highly active volunteer parent at my son's school summed it up today when she said to me that the job of the parent goes beyond just sort of knowing what happens in a school day based on what little or no information she's able to drag out of her kid at the end of the day (mine is usually "School was good. We did work."). A parent's job is to get into the classroom and observe it moving and breathing. Then, take that information and look around at your environment and ask yourself "How can I help my child fill up all these new ideas with juicy enriching experiences?" We need to transform academic information in a way that leaves our children thinking this isn't something we have to learn, this is something we know all about. Face it, the kid is only in the classroom an average of 186 days of the year, six hours a day. How are we filling up all that extra time?

Link: SCIAM article on Gifted kid's potential