Your Gifted Child: How to Recognize and Develop the Special Talents in Your Child from Birth to Age Seven

Rating:
Summary: Treasure Chest of Ideas
Review: Book contains many useful lists / charts / comparisons to define giftedness. Many helpful hints about raising a gifted child. Main criticism is that the book is more about raising children in general -- and may push those with "normal" kids into thinking they have gifted ones and down that track -- when they should not. Gifted kids are the exception, not the norm as this book makes it seem.

Rating:
Summary: Titles are deceiving
Review: Book contains many useful lists / charts / comparisons to define giftedness. Many helpful hints about raising a gifted child. Main criticism is that the book is more about raising children in general -- and may push those with "normal" kids into thinking they have gifted ones and down that track -- when they should not. Gifted kids are the exception, not the norm as this book makes it seem.

Rating:
Summary: Treasure Chest of Ideas
Review: I first read this fine book when it was published in 1989. Because of the abundance of timeless, insightful ideas it contains, I gave it to my daughter when she became a mother. Potential readers looking at the Contents page will immediately see the wide range of topics discussed on the subject of giftedness, and how to recognize and nuture it during the critical developmental years of birth to seven. The chapters abound with ideas on stimulating the creativity, curiosity, social, emotional and intellectual development of this young individual.

Services which are available and what to expect upon school matriculation are discussed. My daughter found the Appendix section especially useful. It contains helpful developmental checklists. By matching the lists to the child's ability parents have a practical way to identify strengths and weaknesses of their child. Parents and grandparents who are curious to know if their child is gifted and/or how to effectively deal with that special individual will find this book to be a treasure chest of ideas.

Rating:
Summary: Good Tool for Defining Giftedness
Review: I'm grateful to the authors for defining giftedness in terms of innovative and syncretic thinking-also providing a profile of the emotionally and morally gifted child-and thereby helping me reclaim an understanding of myself as gifted. Not until after the birth of my daughter, who clearly displayed from infancy so many signs of giftedness, did I revisit my early educational experiences. I think that the person gifted in language and liberal arts-the "Goethe" type as opposed to the math savant-more readily slips through the cracks, as a technological application for these gifts does not exist. I was identified as gifted by the public school I attended when I was seven years old; the only reason I drew attention to myself was that I was so chronically bored, I got up to use the toilet every ten minutes! Testing showed that I read at a high school level. (And I was lucky; my brother, one of the most brilliant thinkers I know, was never identified as gifted; he dropped out of college, and only recently after taking and passing the Mensa exam on a whim, did he begin to think of himself as especially bright.)

The public school gave me cheesy young adult novels to read and proposed advancing me several grades; my parents transferred me to a private religious school with military discipline and an emphasis on rote memorization-hardly the ideal environment for a sensitive, gifted, creative child (though the ability to diagram sentences and to quote large portions of the Bible from memory, as well as to list prepositions in alphabetical order, came in handy years later when I took the GRE test.) Anyway, I always wondered what happened. (If I was given an I.Q. test, I don't know the results, nor do I wish to know.) I muddled through the rest of my education, never sensing that I "fit." Recently, in my early thirties, I received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and got such a perverse kick out of the fact that Stanford was paying me to attend-had there been some mistake? And again, I found myself unable to fit well into an environment supposed to encourage creativity but thoroughly conventional, so that once again I left early.

While Your Gifted Child is a wonderful tool for thinking about advocacy and defining giftedness, it disappointed me in areas where the authors adopted a conventional tone and language saturated in the pedagogical, as if the authors, parents themselves, had spent too much time wrestling with educational bureaucracy and had not yet surfaced for air. For example, I cannot imagine a set of circumstances existing in the universe in which I would send away to the Disabled Citizens Foundation for workbooks on thinking skills. Why reinvent the wheel? Parents of gifted kids would do well to read brilliant thinkers on wholistic education such as Montessori or Steiner, whose work applies to all children. Or read Rahima Baldwin Dancy's You Are Your Child's First Teacher for something more comprehensive. Or even flip through a catalogue from the Michael Olaf Company for inspiration.

Perhaps the most bizarre instance of what I'm describing occurred in a section titled "Stimulation for the Infant," in which the authors encourage parents to purchase crib mobiles. For starters, if your gifted infant is also highly sensitive, this may over-stimulate and cause colic. And is there really any modern parent-to-be out there who is not already programmed to run out to the local infant superstore and register for loads of crud shortly after conception? A gifted parent, it seems to me, would rather consider alternatives such as co-sleeping in lieu of purchasing a crib in the first place. In fact, I think an inverse relationship exists between the amount of stuff a parent-to-be purchases and the parent's intelligence; or rather, a relationship exists that could be plotted on a bell curve.

Helpful as it was, this is not the book I was hoping for, which would be something along the lines of a book that addresses the emotional needs of the gifted parent as she parents the gifted child. (Because any existential loneliness with which the gifted adult may have made peace will be reawakened and magnified upon parenting the gifted child.) I am particularly interested in the convergence of research on I.Q., giftedness, and temperament, relative to parenting the gifted. When my 19-month-old circumvents any and all attempts to get her into her car seat, for example, to what extent does temperament or giftedness come into play? My daughter is so persistent and intense that, while I know she is joyful and thriving, she paradoxically often seems incapable of satisfaction; parenting her is not easy. Perhaps the best lesson for the gifted parent is that perfection is not possible or desirable and that one must necessarily embrace the entropy, triage and critical mass inherent in parenting in order to experience the spiritual riches.