BellaOnline Forums Education Gifted Education How do you nurture their emotional intelligence?

Wow, I am new to this group and reading your posts has brought me to tears as I find myself relating to your journeys. I think that my biggest concern as the parent of a gifted child is his sadness and feeling of disconnect. He just never seems to fit in. At 12yo, he hasfinally learned how to "behave" in class, but I often struggle with the question of "at what cost?" I am sometimes reminded of the horse whose spirit is broken.

How do you all deal with this? I am guessing that is the reason that many of you have turned to homeschooling. Unfortunately, at this point, that is not an option for our family since I am the main bread winner (my husband has a rare disease that keeps him in the hospital over half of the time). So for those who have chosen or been forced to keep your children in traditional school, how do you nurture their emotional development? In the case of my son, he is extremely immature socially. Although he goes to a private Christian school, kids are kids and often intolerant of differences in others. His teacher is extremely kind and he does seem a bit happier this year, but I always worry about his emotional development.

You say he is socially immature -- but there is a possibility that he isn't, it is merely a response to being in an environment that doesn't fit. Did he seem immature prior to school?

My ds always seemed more mature than his agemates -- until some time after he started school. (I can't remember the exact timeline anymore.) When he was very young, he was on the shy side. He blossomed -- around adults -- within a month of starting nursery school (it was a non-academic one, so I didn't have to worry about boredom while they learned about Mr. P or such.) He avoided 3 yr olds, though, because, well, they don't play so nicely, grab things, etc. I had always focused on his social/emotional side, because, heck, the academic was already there.

He didn't meet the state's age cut-off for K, so we put him in private. I didn't worry about the academics, figuring I would give him that year for emotional growth. The next year, he essentially told me that he could've done 1st grade work the previous year. (Not in so many words, though, as he was hesitant to what my response would be.)

After that, I started focusing a bit more on academics.

The school didn't want to grade skip, because there might be -- gasp! -- gaps. So he had some material acceleration, but was with approximate age-mates. (They were older, from months to a year, but not really more than that.) He learned to get positive attention by being a total goofball.

In cub scouts, I always had the feeling that my son was a satellite, orbiting the cluster of the other boys. He never was fully accepted. (Later, in boy scouts, when the troop allowed the boys to form a new patrol, things improved dramatically.)

Now, at 15, he still is a bit out of sync, but in some situations, seems far more mature than he used to. But he also now has had some social settings that were more appropriate for him.

I bet that your son would seem less immature if he had other very gifted kids to socialize with.

I think, as parents, we will always worry about our children. We want what is best for them -- and they don't always come with tidy instruction manuals. (I've looked!)

Wow, you make a great point. He was always advanced (even socially) before school. He still is with adults. How would I go about finding other gifted kids for him to sociallize with?

It's common for gifted children to demonstrate "asynchrony" - the "out of sync" experience you're both describing is a result of cognitive development that is out of balance with socio-emotional development. It's exactly why gifted kids often prefer adult company or tend to be described as "loners," because it's so difficult for them to find similar peer groups.

Gifted kids need a variety of social interactions that reflect their varied interests and levels of development. An 8-year old might be totally comfortable, for example, in a chess club with 15-year olds, as well as one same-age neighborhood friend with whom he likes to play Medieval Warriors! In our area, there is a group of parents who organized a social group for their gifted children, which is one avenue you could pursue. And, you can help your child develop a multitude of peer groups to satisfy his varied interests and developmental levels.

Is there a "talent-search" type organization in your area? Many parents have said that having their child participate in some of these types of activities (they often have after-school, Saturday, and summer programs for gifted kids) was a great resource for helping their child develop positive social relationships with peers. Several colleges and universities offer these types of programs for gifted children, and have scholarships available for them, too!

MsA, your story about the reluctance to accelerate is one of my pet peeves! I wish more schools recognized that this is a very meaningful way to help gifted children both cognitively and socially! The "gaps" excuse is so frustrating, isn't it?!?

Those are great suggestions, Danielle!

BTW, the principal who didn't want to accelerate due to possibility of gaps has raised gifted children, has a masters in gifted ed and used to be the gifted ed teacher in the local elementary school. Sigh.

Thanks, MsA! (And "sigh" is right...good grief!)

And sometimes it takes until they are gone, for my son college was the best. He never really fit in. He was the brain, and an athlete. Enjoyed adults over kids his age. It was always the downside. Enjoyed his family far more than his peers. His sisters are the same way. I never found a solution to this, although the youngest one seems to have it better than the others, not sure why. But again, she's the brain of the class, and the athlete of the class. I think jealousy plays a huge part of it. Then their peers just find things wrong with them, that really aren't wrong, they're just different.

Hey, it's great to see some new faces here! Welcome to the newbies.

Cassie, I think 12 is a difficult age. Kids mature at such different rates, both physically and emotionally, and any age based group will have a huge amount of variation in maturity.

One of my friends is having a hard time with her 12 yo girl. She's doing high school work but making careless errors in math computation, and passing in assignments late. It's totally new behavior from this child, who used to be so careful and detail oriented.

Truth, sometimes kids make mistakes on purpose. They want to fit in. "I'll be smart when I need to be." Is a quote from a very intelligent 7th grader. Sad but true.

Hi, everyone. We had two gifted children, one who was an "out of sync" kid and the other who got along well with just about any other kid. Ironically, adults consistently commented that both kids were amazingly able to communicate with adults. Ultimately, we opted to homeschool the older one, and her personality blossomed. Before that, I used to describe her as especially mature in some ways and very immature in others. What I was labeling as immaturity was rebellious behavior--dressing in black, ditching homework. Looking back on things, I'm sure she was just acting out her feeling of not fitting in. Once homeschooling started, she returned to her original, calmer self.

Ironically, even though #2 child was functioning extremely well in school, she requested homeschooling. She first made the request in the spring of 7th grade. I told her to think about it and ask me again in a month--I figured she'd forget about it and want to be around her friends. Well, precisely a month later, she asked again to be homeschooled. 7th grade was almost over, and I told her we'd start homeschooling her in 8th grade if she still wanted to. Lo, and behold, she never waivered from the request, and we started her homeschooling in 8th grade. She never looked back. Each year I'd ask if she wanted to return to school, and each year the answer was, "no."

I think there's something artificial about the school environment that makes kids nervous. Granted, some of them absolutely thrive on the social aspects of school; but I think the "thrivers" are possibly as unusual as the way-out-of-sync kids. I think most kids fall somewhere in the middle--functioning socially but not truly comfortable. That's just my guess, though.

To address the question of how to nurture emotional intelligence, I think you have to define true emotional intelligence as more than just some kind of "street" smarts where you learn to function in a crowd of people your own age (school). The kind of emotional intelligence you learn in school can involve a lot of manipulation. True emotional intelligence, to me, comes a lot from empathizing. Ideally, you want a kid who cares about being kind to other people--especially when they grow up, marry, and possibly have children. Kids who are fortunate enough to have some core sense of security probably will be more naturally open to considering other people's feelings.

Ironically, providing the security a child needs early on is, in a way, like centering life around him--at first. It's really a question of readiness, I guess. Do we push kids into large groups before they achieve an inner sense of security? Are they truly ready?

Our culture pays a lot of attention to readiness in preschoolers--note the way we postpone first grade for some. What I've noticed is that we do not consider "readiness" much past the age of 7.

I've thought about what I'd do if I HAD to send a child, especially a gifted one, to school now. There are a couple of things I would do. First, I would take the child out of school as much as I could get away with. (I used to believe in making them go if they weren't running fever or under a doctor's orders.) If I could get away with taking them out of school once a week, I'd do it--as long as the child could make up his work successfully. On the days we skipped school, we'd do FUN stuff as long as it was anywhere near "constructive." The other thing I'd do is try to steer the child toward a curriculum characterized by the smallest classes possible (Latin, Greek, Chemistry, etc.). If I had any pull with the principal and if I knew certain teachers were more student-oriented than others, I'd blatantly request those teachers!

We never actually skipped school when we were enrolled because I had not questioned my outlook on school at that point. However, one of my kids had to miss 28 days one year due to a chronic illness. I picked up her assignments faithfully during that time, and she never missed a beat academically--maintained an A average. It wasn't my tutoring. It was the fact that the curriculum was so repetitive that she really had very little catching up to do.

Well, that's the voice of experience (mine) speaking. Hope I've made sense.