Gifted Children: A Guide for Parents and Professionals

By Kate Distin

Book Overview

Winner of the NAGC Celebrating Gifts and Talents 2007 "Most Important Book" Gold Award

Gifted Children is a lively and informative exploration of the mystery of the gifted mind and the social and emotional needs of gifted children and their families.

The authors give an insight into what is 'normal' for gifted children, acknowledge the difficulties they experience, and offer pointers for parents on how to support them at home, in the interaction with siblings and other family members, and at school. The authors identify self-acceptance and communication with others as key skills for gifted children, whose exceptional abilities in fields ranging from music and maths to linguistics and art are often complicated by poor social skills, dyslexia or other difficulties.

This excellent book, written by counsellors who are also parents with first- hand knowledge of living and working with gifted children, is an accessible and positive guide full of constructive advice and encouragement for other parents. It includes practical information such as useful contact details, as well as opportunities for reflection.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1843104393
• ISBN13: 9781843104391
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

More info. from the book's editor

'Gifted Children' is written by a group of people who previously worked together for many years as volunteer counsellors for the National Association for Gifted Children in the UK. This is the book that we needed when our children were younger. Our babies were not born with labels on their foreheads, "Gifted - Handle With Care". We were often not even sure that our children were gifted, afraid to admit they might be, and struggling to believe that we really knew them better than anyone else. What we did know was that our children seemed different from most others, and that this made us feel different too. In our isolation we had no idea that our experiences were quite normal for the families of gifted children: that we were part of a scattered community of people-like-us. It is the companionship of this community which our book hopes to provide: the reassurance that the parents, grandparents and other carers of gifted children are not on their own, that they do know their own children best, and that it is possible to find a comfortable place for giftedness in their family lives. Our subject matter is inevitably biased towards the problems that gifted children can face. Of course this should not be taken to imply that all gifted children will face all, or even any, of these problems. It is simply that their needs are brought mostly sharply into focus by the difficulties that some do encounter. There is also plenty here about the joys and advantages of being gifted or of having a gifted child, but the brutal fact is that there would be no book if that were the only side of the story. The positives are genuine and numerous, but the negatives are what provided the impetus for writing a book to support the families of gifted children. Our aims in writing it are to help gifted children, their families and carers (including grown-up gifted children) to learn more about what is typical or normal for gifted and talented children, to shatter some of the myths about these children and their parents, to enhance their awareness of the emotional impact of giftedness, and thus to enable gifted children and their families to live more comfortably with their giftedness, shifting their focus from its challenges to its rewards and possibilities. We hope very much that our book might act as a primer, not only as an introduction to the subject of gifted children, but also in detonating a great explosion of confidence in parents to ask for their gifted children's needs to be met, to live more comfortably with giftedness in their family lives and to resist the pressure to deny that part of themselves or their children.