Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Communicating with your gifted child

This is our biggest problem. My dd6 goes from 0-10 in seconds. She carries on a cries over minor issues and thinks the world is against her. She is very competitive and has a hard time dealing with her things being out of order, but is also a people pleaser so will fake her way through school emotionally and then unleash her pent up frustration on us when she gets home when she has had a bad day.

Over the years, I have come to many counter-intuitive conclusions.

- A person's ability to deal with the input of language does not necessarily equal their ability to output language. In fact, their input ability may be extremely limited even though they are very talented at outputing language.
- A strong ability in one aspect of communications is often associated with a strong weakness in another aspect of communication.
- Very good communicators may have no understanding of what they are actually communicating.
- Extremely early signs of advanced communications skills in children are often an indicator of limited communications potential later in life. The opposite is also often the case.

I think the biggest difference for me is that I find I have to be very honest and very detailed when I talk to dd. It isn't enough to simply dismiss her worries with a 'you don't need to worry about that, it's very unlikely to happen' or "just do x and I think you'll find that works'. She needs to know why we have responded the way we have. For example dd is very sensitive and was worried about fire at one point. It wasn't enough to say we're very safe and have fire alarms so no need to worry about it (which was what we went with first). Instead we had to admit there is always a possibility there might be a fire, look up the major causes of fire, speak honestly about whether or not we were at risk etc, etc. Then she was ok.

Similarly she was being picked on by a little girl and so we had to have discussions about whether or not this little girls opinion mattered to her, do we have to like everyone/does everyone has to like us, what might be causing the girl to behave the way she is, why different responses might or might not be effective etc. Once we'd been through all of this, dd adjusted her thinking and response to this girl and never had another issue with her. None of which I was expecting to have to go in to such detail about with a then 4yo (and I certainly would not have expected her to understand to the level she evidently did).

What an interesting discussion! After reading all the posts I'm thinking a lot about how this topic affected me growing up as a gifted child and how it has carried over into my adult life. And it's also showing me how I've naturally adjusted my communication with my kids based on my past experiences and ways in which I could further adjust it. So thanks, everyone, for all the thoughtful responses! You've definitely given me a lot to think about for my book group.

LOL, we just went to a weekend science extra, hoping to find DS5's people, and the instructor said that very thing! And to make it worse, kept saying, this is really complicated!!! Here is a special and the kids there are into this stuff and still, they are talked down to! I asked DS 5 later if he thought it was complicated and he said no, since he knew most of it already!

DeHe