Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What drives your interest in gifted issues?

I thought I'd ask this to give others a chance to understand their board peers better. I am sure that some are relatives of gifted children (this includes 2e), some are educators or psychologists with a professional interest...the list goes on.

Understanding where we are each coming from will hopefully build trust and reduce the chances for conflict.

I'll start - father of a DYS girl - came here desperate for answers and guidance a few years ago - 2013, I think. Still looking for more answers and hopefully to share what I have learned. :-)

Madeinuk, you just described me, pretty much...except in my case I'm the dad of a DYS boy and came here for answers in 2015.

I am a mother of a DYS boy came here for answers, advice and suggestions. First came on in 2015 and my first question was whether to test DS. I followed my heart and suggestions I was given on here and had him tested in late 2015. He became DYS in 2016 :-)

What a nice idea, madeinuk.


I'll ask that my post not be directly quoted, as the sum total of information here is fairly identifying in some ways.



I'm the child of a PG person. I'm also the parent of a beyond-garden-variety gifted child, a former gifted child myself, married to former gifted child.

Spouse and self both fully evaluated and HG+ via childhood IQ instruments. We were both publicly educated in high quality settings. Our needs were met relatively well during the previous golden age of gifted educational practices in the 1970's and 1980's in the western US. I have a history of underachievement (maladaptive coping with inappropriate educational setting?), spouse does not.

Our DD's needs have been more extreme than ours.

DD never tested (deliberate decision on our part not to take that snapshot)-- she was grade accelerated 3y and is an academically and socially successful college senior at the moment. She also has a hidden medical disability as part of her profile. She was educated via home schooling and virtual charter schooling prior to college-- though not without difficulties. Our local school district wanted nothing to do with her, and made it clear that they felt she would not be well-served by their programs-- both at 5yo upon kindergarten entry, and again as a 10 and 11yo who needed high school level instruction. We used a national corporate-owned virtual virtual school with a charter in my state as a credentialing step; that's the bottom line. "Education" it probably was not, unless one means learning what bureaucratic corporate KoolAid looks, smells, and tastes like.

Educational policy-- I've been a post-secondary educator, done curriculum development in working with students PreK through graduate, am the child of career public educators, and believe in appropriate education as an individual human right. My professional area of expertise is multi-disciplinary, but intersects with neuropharmacology-- so I have also got some professional interests in play here. I'm also fundamentally someone that believes in civic responsibility.

I have a soft spot for families which are low-income, and those which are struggling to manage the needs of 2e children. They have very heavy burdens, and few choices.

I showed up here on the recommendation of another couple of friends that I knew from another online community, when my DD was about 8? 9? and I really needed a group of parents that weren't going to attack me just for opening my mouth about my daughter. We live in a pretty Tiger-parent-ey community, and it's highly competitive. Not a good place to be a tall poppy, socially speaking.

I don't talk about my child IRL. This was a good place to do that during some of the more difficult years and transitions in raising a PG child. The advice that applies to neurotypical children sometimes is counterproductive in parenting an outlier-- but it is still important to respect the developmental arc of the child, and remember that they ARE children, in spite of how they may behave a lot like tiny adults at times.

My son is 2e. It took years to figure it out. in that process, I figured out that I'm also gifted .... and ended up with an ADHD diagnosis myself.

I suffered from academic mismatch and educated parents who were uneducated about non-neurotypical children. I was in a parochial school that actively "cut down tall poppies" directing telling me that I couldn't be me/smart/talented because "it might make someone else feel bad."

I was miserable, suicidal, for most of my life. I'm not sure how I survived high school, honestly. I ended up with a long, long, long list of psychiatric misdiagnosis and plenty of damage done from psychiatric medications. After a series of major life changes and years-long process of getting the misdiagnoses resolved, I'm doing okay-good. The damage is deep though, and remnants of the childhood academic mismatch are hard to shake off. I'm left with an eating disorder, tendency for anxiety, underachiever, fear of success, fear of malicious envy, and squandered musical and artistic talents. It's a crappy situation to be in mid-life.

I learned from my parents' example and my childhood that "do nothing" does not necessarily result in "do no harm". I learned that I needed to "do something" for my son(s). Figuring out what to do has been difficult. Heck, figuring out what he might potentially need has been difficult!

I am continually learning. This forum has been immensely beneficial, and I pass on the advice I received which has been true.

Parent of a DYS son and younger child who tested HG (but we suspect may be PG as well). Child of an almost certainly PG mother and sibling of a likely PG brother. (I'm guessing based on experiences and learning since DS...)

Am some level of gifted myself, however I did not grow up in a town that had any such thing as gifted ID or assistance. Although, I wanted to be accelerated but my mother had been double skipped and was against it. She had felt like an outlier. She likely would have anyway... I was an excellent student until I hit anything that required additional effort (aka didn't want to ask for help and thought if I couldn't figure it out, I wasn't good in that area). Spouse is also gifted and describes most of school as boring.

I've always had an interest in education and that, combined with all the above, have led me to dig for information about best practices, evidence-based recommendations, etc., etc. This community has provided a great deal of support and understanding, even when individual members disagree. As HK mentions, it's also been lovely to be able to "talk" openly about our children without seeming like I'm bragging.

Another parent of two twice-exceptional children, and a former gifted child myself, from a family of former gifted, high-achieving children. (My grandmother had the highest score in the state on the Missouri pharmacy exam when she took it around 1940, and you know that was not a time when women were particularly welcome in the professions, especially in STEM fields.) My DD-almost-13 is a DYS; my DS-almost-9 is not, although we may test him again soon. I suspect that his autism has interfered more with his test results than hers.

I also grew up with an interest in education - my mother was a teacher for many years before she switched to designing educational software, and my own first job was teaching a community center class on how to solve the Rubik's cube.

I appreciate having a place where I can be myself and also not self-censor talking about my kids.

Hmm. Pretty hard to deny the genetic component here, right?

We're a lot like everyone else here, but more in the MG to HG range. Not sure about the 4 year old yet... she didn't freak us out by spontaneously reading at 3 like her older brother.

Thank you for this, madeinuk.

My personal and extended family history is highly enriched for GT identifiers (measured cognition and proxies, such as terminal degrees), including documented EG/PG, so I've always had an interest in GT ed. At one point, I seriously considered pursuing ed psych studies with a GT focus (was accepted to a doctoral program on that basis), but ended up in a different, but related, professional field, as an assessment professional in public education.

Though our children have not been formally assessed, I'm pretty comfortable identifying them as GT of some description (probably MG/HG, though I might be lowballing the little one). At least one of them is also likely 2e.

While I do enjoy contributing my professional perspectives (because I'm an admitted assessment geek!), I also benefit from reading about the experiences of others.