In my experience, some of the poorest environments for gifted children are those in which intelligent, high SES parents chronically neglect their children for self-serving reasons.
I'm reminded of my former SVP's children. Both parents had PhDs, and both of their children had either failed a grade or were poised to do so, despite being gifted, I believe as a result of parental failure to be present.
Here's another double PhD couple, a former consulting partner where I worked whose wife was a genetic counsellor. (Really, all of the partners were some flavour of this trend.) When he learned I was pregnant with DS, he made an effort to sell his version of family balance which, in a nutshell, involved his being physically in the same room as his son on evenings and weekends while keeping his eyes scrupulously glued to his laptop 24/7.
We live in a high SES area, and I am constantly surprised at the disconnect I see between parental knowledge of best practices (and buzz words) and the lack of parent-child relationship in which those best practices take root. What advocacy would look like with this target is a big question mark for me. Effectively the advice is, "put down your device and get involved with your child." Most of the iParents I see won't. For many gifted children, parental ego and insecurity are the greatest stumbling block to accessing appropriate care and education. The parents would have to extract their heads from their lower halves to begin to care about someone other than themselves, including their children. Harsh but true.
