Parents of gifted and talented children from diverse background often experience unique challenges as they advocate for their prodigies. It is crucial that these parents develop strong advocacy skills which can help mitigate the many barriers this population of gifted children often faces. These skills help to ensure that their children receive the types and levels of services that will meet their specialized needs.

In order to become strong advocates, parents will need to become "unauthorized" experts about many things .  More...

I met with a distraught client the other day. Her son, who attends an independent school priding itself on specializing in differential learners, had a very bad week. The school's disciplinary point system - an ad hoc way for teachers to let students know they are unhappy with their behavior - yielded a number of points well beyond the accepted threshold for her son.

The guidelines for giving out negative points at this school aren't clear. The child just knows that he gets a lot of them and has internalized that he is a "bad" kid, the "annoying" kid. The one thing that is crystal clear is that her gifted child's learning difference is ADHD, presenting with severe impulse control challenges. Most of the points, the head of discipline wrote in an email to my client, were due to "excessive talking." But giving negative points to an extremely bright child who struggles with a known challenge of impulsivity seems a bit like disciplining a blind person for excessive "not seeing."  More...

What are you, really? Who are you apart from being a partner, a worker, a parent, a teacher, or even a "formerly gifted child"? 

What real decisions have you yet to make? What influence do you want to exert through your life? What do you want to become, and how will you get there?

In short, do you know if you are living up to your potential?

Does the very question provoke a rush of anxiety?  More...

Gifted education is not going to fix itself. No matter how many gifted people talk to each other about how much their children need different educational experiences, we still cannot move the mountains of politicians and corporations who stand in our way. 

We can have all the gifted education conferences that we want. We can publish magazine articles and counsel gifted families and teach gifted children and beg our school districts and states to change policies. Sometimes they throw us a bone. But mostly the states and federal people take bones away from education in general these days. Or, if they are giving things to education, usually it is tied in with things like standardized testing, standardized teaching, standardized everything... which we all know do very little to help gifted children in schools. More...