This article has been adapted from a virtual event presented by our Family Services team. Members of our Young Scholars program have access to a recording of this virtual event in full on the members-only Davidson Member Community (DMC) platform.
Young Scholars receive free support from our Family Services team. Our Family Services provide insight, resources, and strategies to support families based on the knowledge the Davidson Institute has built over the last few decades and their experiences working closely with Young Scholar families. Our areas of expertise include profoundly gifted and 2e parenting strategies and resources, social-emotional development support, educational options, goal-setting, and gifted research. You can read out the additional benefits of the Young Scholars program or learn how to apply today.
Being a profoundly gifted child can be isolating. Many profoundly gifted children feel different from an early age, even if they can’t articulate it. This makes sense; they are different than their neurotypical peers in some key ways. Profoundly gifted children have different intellectual needs, different friendship needs, different sensory needs, and different emotional needs. Profoundly gifted children can sometimes feel, keenly, that the world is not built with them in mind.
Being the parent of a profoundly gifted child can be isolating, too. Society is all too ready to share misinformed opinions and stereotypical myths about gifted children with their parents. There are some reasons for this continued cycle of bad information:
- There is no singular, agreed upon definition of giftedness, nor is there agreement about whether different levels of giftedness exist. It’s hard to have a nuanced conversation when there isn’t agreement on the foundational vocabulary of the conversation itself.
- Compared to other fields within psychology, child development, and education, there is little funding or research on giftedness generally or profound giftedness in children, specifically.
- There are few university programs focused on this field, and, thus, it can be hard to find professionals who truly know about and understand giftedness because it’s a small community.
- There are only a few publishers and publications regularly distributing knowledge from these professionals. And, even if it does reach them, not everyone within the education, child development, and psychology fields listens to the research that we do have.
Being the parent of a profoundly gifted child can be isolating for other reasons, too. Being a parent isn’t easy in the modern age. We are continuing to feel the effects of the pandemic. Childcare is more expensive, and there are fewer options. School resources are spread thinner, and there are fewer teachers who are stretched further. Enrichment and extracurriculars are more expensive. There continues to be a focus on standardization and testing rather than meeting the needs of each individual child. School shootings continue, and children’s and teen’s mental health is in crisis. Outside of school, parents don’t always have support or flexibility at work. And, families may also be caring for grandparents or other family members as our community ages, and medical care system is strapped to support the increase need across all ages and communities since the pandemic. There’s widespread social unrest which everyone is exposed directly or indirectly through the news and social media. Families are facing multiple unprecedented challenges, and parents are doing their best to navigate this fraught landscape. And yet, extended family members, friends, and strangers may still make unwelcomed comments and critiques.
With all of that in mind:
- You might be in survival mode. It might feel like you are just doing your best to get through each day, so there’s not a lot of time to think about anything outside of immediate needs.
- You might be doubting yourself. When most of the people around you don’t understand what you are going through, they might give well-intentioned but not useful advice. They might share their judgements with parents about their child-rearing or educational choices, without being asked. All of those things can lead to self-doubt. Without easily accessible, reliable information about giftedness, it can also be easy for parents to doubt what their parent gut is telling them about their child.
- You might be trying to fly under the radar and not make waves. If you’ve been burned before by people who were supposed to help you, it might feel easier to stay quiet. Or you might feel like you don’t belong or deserve the same help that others do.
- You might be rethinking the story you tell about yourself and your own upbringing. Depending on the generation you are from, gifted identification may hardly have been used at all, or gifted programming in schools was in its infancy. Diagnoses like autism and ADHD are becoming more widely understood by the public and by professionals. There are parents who, upon discovering that their child is profoundly gifted, do some self-reflection and come to realize new things about their own neurotypes.
Lineage and Connecting
There’s a lot about community that no single person can control. You can’t control who lives in your neighborhood, the ages and maturity level of other children, or other families’ values. It can be difficult to find sustainable and lasting communities when there’s so much outside of your control. So how can you connect with others?
Humans are social animals, and we fundamentally depend on one another to survive. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find other people who get it, understand, and can be relied upon. Many families that apply to be part of a Davidson program note that finding true communities for themselves and their children is one of their biggest goals.
We are going to talk about joining groups, but first, let’s talk about a group that you are already in. You can think of your family as a community. In other words, community can begin at home. Your family unit, whatever that looks like, can be an anchor for each other to weather the seasons together. No matter the season, you can learn to ride the storms together. If you are struggling to feel like your family is an anchor, you’re not alone. Here are some ways to cultivate community at home:
- Outline some family values at a family meeting. Many community groups choose to have some sort of charter or explicit statement of shared values to bind the group. There’s no reason that your family can’t do the same thing! Outlining family values can give everyone a pillar to look to when they are unsure of how to act in a situation. Giving your child a place to outline what’s important to them can help get more of their buy-in. Getting clear on your values is a key social skill; it helps your child understand the foundation from which you make decisions and act from.
- Understand everyone’s role. Similar to the last point, understanding everyone’s role in the family helps to get buy in from your child. Each member of the family can outline what they think their own role is, and, as a family, you can discuss how everyone’s family roles fit together to make your household work. It’s also important for everyone to understand each other’s roles in the household, meaning how to get along living with others. So, this is twofold: understanding one’s role in the family (like as a mother, or a parent) and understanding one’s role in a household can help create strong, unified relationships. While often overlooked in childhood, learning how to be a contributive housemate and a supportive family member are important social roles in adulthood. Building those skills in your children now gives them time to practice them with your guidance before they become more independent.
- Understand oneself in a family context. Once everyone outlines their own roles in the family, then comes the self-reflection piece. Asking oneself some (or all) of these questions can help everyone to reflect on their own roles in the family:
- What actions related to being a [parent/child/caregiver/etc] give me a feeling of connection?
- What actions related to being a [parent/child/caregiver/etc] help me to connect to a larger purpose, or a feeling of something greater than myself?
- What aspects of being a [parent/child/caregiver/etc] make me feel proud of myself (even if other people cannot see this aspect)?
Moving beyond the immediate household, let’s think of the family we belong to more generally. As previously mentioned, being a profoundly gifted or twice exceptional family can be isolating. People might not understand your family’s journey. Other people might make hurtful comments or shame your family for not doing things “their way.” You might shame yourself for not being a perfect parent. It might start to feel like there’s not a place where you really belong. If that resonates with you, let’s look at how Jennifer Natalya Fink thinks about this. In All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship, Fink uses the motif of a family tree to help trace cultural lineages of disability alongside her own personal lineage. She discusses her own isolation of not getting to know past disabled members of her family. She’s not alone in her isolation though. Some people are feeling the empty spaces left by the erasure of disabled family narratives. Others begin the work of relineating and then come to realize later just how cut off from their history they used to be. As her book interweaves the past, the present, and the future, Fink asks all of us to reflect on this question with hope: Who is a part of your family tree?
Her book claims that it’s not only people of blood relation who should be included on the family tree. People to be included on your family tree are family, close friends, caregivers, and something called “found family” which refers to a specific type of relationship that is more akin to family than friends but among people who share no blood relations. You can also think of the more traditional branches of your family tree: the people who came before you as a parent. But this can be expanded from the traditional thinking into impactful teachers, neighbors who play a caregiving role, and even influential pop culture figures who taught you important life lessons. (Who wouldn’t include Mr. Rogers in their family tree if given the chance?)
Let’s keep using the family tree. Are there branches that you can expand from? For some people, it can be difficult to immediately call to mind a wide and vast family tree. Here are some questions to get you thinking about extending your family tree:
- Who cares for you and your child? Who could you call on?
- Who has understood, embraced, and celebrated you and your child?
- Who does your child remind you of?
- Who do you resonate with?
- Get creative! Who else could be in you and your child’s network of support?
- Are there any branches that need to be trimmed?
If it feels too big to think about finding community right now, you can practice something that Devon Price calls “expansive recognition.” Basically, this means accepting your reality for whatever it is without assigning it moral judgements. It means looking at your own context with compassion and humility. It means practicing being vulnerable with trusted individuals, and trying to have hope that people you meet in the future might be willing to be in community too.
Once you start expanding your idea of your family tree, you might start to see that your family is connected to so many other people, alive and passed on. Your family is influenced by neighbors, friends, group leaders, and pop culture icons. We’re all more connected than we think we are, and developing a process to recognize just how small of a world we really live in can bring a whole new layer to feeling grateful. If you’ve ever looked up at the sky and gotten that staggering feeling that every human has looked at the same moon that you look at, or something similar when in the natural world, that is expansive recognition. It’s the reminder to ourselves that we are in this together, with everyone else on earth at the same time as us. Expansive recognition can be used as a token of good will, an extended hand that genuinely means “Nice to meet you.”
If your family is struggling to find others right now, the sense of expansive recognition is one of the things that can help you keep an open mind for people you might meet and make it easier to accept new people when you do meet them. It’s easier said than done to simultaneously see the forest for the trees, while also trying to find a forest where your family can grow. “The future” doesn’t happen overnight. But the work that goes into seeing others with generosity and openness can eventually pay off in a community that meets you in a reciprocal way.
Expanding Community Further
As an adult, you know that community has many levels. Not everyone in every community is our best friend, nor do they need to be. As people living in a society, we are in community with each other to various capacities every day. You are in community with the people who visit the same grocery store, even if you never speak. You are in community with all of the other parents in the pick-up line even when you’re honking at each other angrily. You are in community with the volunteer group that you signed up for, enjoyed once, and really want to commit further to. Being a community member looks different in each one of those scenarios. You wouldn’t act the same way to someone in line at the grocery store as you would to your child’s best friend’s parents would you?
To round out this discussion of community, let’s look at a few different areas of community outside of the home.
Let’s think about a parent community at school. If your child is attending a brick-and-mortar school, then you have a wide community of administrators, teachers, and other professionals working with you all together on your child’s “education team.” Depending on your educational situation, the way that you show up on that educational team might vary. Many parents of PG children find themselves educating their child’s education team about giftedness and twice-exceptionality. Parents also find that they have to work with the wider education team (besides the immediate teacher) in order to find curriculum and levels that appropriately and meaningfully engage their child.
When we’re talking about community at school, it is also important to discuss the cohort that your student is in. Not only are you in community at your student’s school, but your student is in community with all of their teachers, administrators, and all of the other students attending that school. If your student is accelerating or switching schools at all during their career, you might find yourself advocating for your student to be placed in a cohort with other students who share interests, passion, or communication style.
No matter what your schooling situation is, you might find that your state gifted organization has a community for you to join. If your family is in a homeschooling situation, then you may consider joining a homeschooling group, or starting your own (if you haven’t found one that you fit into yet)!
Finding community in your specific local area is something worth considering. Since we are a national organization, and can’t give personalized tips to everyone living in every city, our Family Services team has compiled the best tips. While the article is aimed at families in homeschooling situations, many of the tips in the article are applicable to families in all kinds of educational situations.
If you are thinking about expanding your community even further, you can start by thinking about some of the other people that may already be in your life. For example, summer programs or camps might be a place where your child really enjoys themselves and makes friends with others. Or they might have attended a camp where they really meshed well with the teacher. Looking ahead, people at that camp might become long distance friends that you vacation to see, or that teacher may become a mentor for your student as they mature.
Now more than ever, there are communities online for almost anything that you can think of. Both social media and private websites offer people the chance to connect with others across the world with similar interests, struggles, identities, and hobbies. There are online support groups for people needing to connect with others, and there are online conferences where digital introverts and extroverts can thrive.
There can be real harm in the comparison that social media can plague upon us as individuals. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can choose to fill your social media feeds with people living lives like yours. There are parents getting real about why parents of neurodivergent kids struggle. There are neurodivergent parents trying to figure themselves and their kid out at the same time. There are parents in all different stages of their child’s gifted or twice exceptional journey. If your child has sensory differences, or other exceptionalities there are other families sharing their own similar journeys online.
Children and adults alike also find camaraderie and community in gaming groups. Whether this is a role playing or board game group where you play with other people in real life, or an online gaming group where you talk through a server like Discord, you might find a sense of community and purpose and responsibility to a team that isn’t laden with weight or responsibility. Many students in the Young Scholars program have close, long-term friends through a gaming group of some kind.
If you’re feeling like you are having trouble finding community with other gifted or twice exceptional families, consider joining our Young Scholars program. This program offers families a community full of others on a similar journey. Open for students ages 5-18, our program looks at your family holistically. There are virtual events for both students and parents, an online community for parents to connect, and our annual summit for the whole family.
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