Appreciate Eccentricities & Embrace Quirks

Parent the child you have, not the one you imagined you would have. I am not sure anyone's child is quite what they envisioned when they thought about having children but as the saying in preschool goes, you get what you get and you don't get upset. You can't predict your child's personality and temperament but you can adjust your own expectations and figure out how to be the parent your child needs. Some of us learn the hard way. It took bricks falling onto my head years ago for me to wake up and realize that my child's idiosyncracies weren't going away and, in fact, needed some pretty unique support.  

Many new parents with young children who exhibit developmentally advanced characteristics presume their children are gifted and they are probably right. Oftentimes parents are very good assessors of their children's abilities.  There are a clear set of characteristics that demonstrate giftedness and the reason it is important to know whether your child truly is gifted is that it will change your entire life. It doesn't just mean they are smart and it will not mean they are academically successful in a traditional school environment. You will have to parent differently, consider alternative educational options, seek out mentors as they mature and develop and in some instances counseling will be in order as well. There are so many facets that make up a gifted child and a different approach to parenting cannot be understated.  For a gifted child to develop optimally, awareness of the gifted child's unique temperatment and abilities is quintiessential to helping support and nourish them in the way that they need.  Identification does not necessarily need to be obtained through a standard written instrument like the popular WISC IV or Stanford Binet 5 tests that are often administered when seeking out an IQ number. The number one gets on a test becomes relevant when entering certain gifted programs and therefore is a necessary evil but I am personally not a fan of these methods as the only relevant way to assess gifted children. I am a bigger proponent of the The Method of Qualitative Assessment developed by the late, great Annemarie Roeper. She had a philosophy of meeting with and assessing the whole child through observation. She was a progressive thinker and way ahead of her time. I am pretty sure that she would appreciate unschooling as a viable choice for educating gifted children.

We do; however, often have the child we were meant to parent.  Mick Jagger may have been right. You get what you need. That sentiment resurfaces for me throughout my own life journey. What I envisioned for myself may also have been different than what I actually need. I didn't plan for this alternative, against the mainstream path but my children, circumstances and increasing awareness have brought me here. I love it now and do not look back in fondness at the years my unidentified gifted child was enduring the boredom of school with the psychological torture and behavioral developments that sprouted from the worst mismatch in environment that one could imagine.

Gifted children are often noticeably different in their interests, mannerisms, sense of humor, social development, emotional expression, and, of course, in their advanced and depthful intellectual abilities. A gifted child may have a lot of quirks. Embrace them; don't pathologize quirks and don't let your school do that for you either. My own children are quite eccentric and our home environment and lifestyle afford them the opportunity to be just who they are. Too much rigidity in parenting a gifted child may suppress their curiosity, creativity and zeal for life. I may not always understand what motivates them to engage in some of their puzzling behaviors but I appreciate their unique qualities and foster authenticity. They are who they are and I am not in the business of stifling creative expression. 

Different neurological wiring, overexcitabilities and asynchronicity inherent in gifted children are what make them such a different type of challenge in terms of parenting and education. We need a short way to describe the multitude of quirks and eccentricities that most gifted children espouse, or we would have to provide others who engage with them with a fairly long narrative in order to make sense. Whenever my child used to be in a classroom, the first day I would have to provide the new teacher with a breakdown of all the idiosyncracies she was about to experience with my child and no matter how much I prepared them, they were always baffled and underprepared. Gifted, like all labels, succinctly describes this vast set of attributes that go hand-in-hand with virtually all gifted children and they become even more pronounced with profoundly gifted and twice exceptional children. Even within the traditional school setting, the gifted label is shunned and misunderstood; however, in theory, it sheds light on the uniqueness of the child as compared to the norm. 

I get it now and if you are reading this, you either get it too or are on the path to realization. The lightbulb turns on at some point when your children just don't fit into the mold of the Everykid. I would never have put my child through the torture of school if I knew then what I know now to be the truth about gifted children and learning. I want a Mulligan. School is oppressive and banal for gifted children and it is a mental prison. I would never advise any parent to send their gifted child to school if they had any other alternative. It is cruel and unusual punishment and most kids will either dumb down to fit in or they will develop behavioral problems and acquire pathological labels because they just won't conform and perform to the baseline standard and they shouldn't have to. Both cases are a sad, unfortunate truth for many gifted children. The few others that come through unscathed are no better off for enduring the time wasting boredom that is school. Those that survive school are still not reaching their optimal development and may never become self-actualized. Awareness of one's self is an essential ingredient in personal fulfillment and gifted children tend to be acutely aware of their short comings and dissatisfaction with life when it doesn't unfold as expected. Experiencing existential depression is a sad reality for many unfulfilled gifted children who coast through life without enjoying an authentic, meaningful and productive existence. For us, radical unschooling has alleviated the burden of in the box thinking, rote memorization, coercive learning and controlling parenting. Our unconfined lifestyle has removed anxiety, bullying and the need to dumb down to fit in. We aren't trying to fit in anywhere. My kids are self-directed, passion-driven learners who march to the beat of their own drum.  They are funny little kooks with big personalities and they express themselves freely and openly with no judgment. No adult is the authority over my children; they are autonomous, freethinkers capable of managing their own lives. It is a different approach to parenting and education and as the gifted definition states, these two modifications are a requirement.  

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