Trust Your Parent Gut

The following article shares highlights and insights from one of our Expert Series events, which are exclusive for Young Scholars and their parents. 

Trusting one’s “Parent Gut” when raising a gifted child can be difficult. Robin Goldberg’s Expert Series for Young Scholar families shared insight into how both inner and external biases can breed self-doubt in parents. As a parent of an unusually gifted child herself and Young Scholar community member, she had found several tools that can help parents better tune into themselves and their child. Together these tools create a synergy that gives parents of unusually gifted children the inner resource to improve the lives of themselves and their children.

The human mind is built to learn from experience. This can become a blind spot when one experience does not match a previous experience or expected outcome; we see things that don’t exist, and we don’t see things that do exist. This blind spot in human perception has been described as “Myside Bias” or “Confirmation Bias.”  Without special training and commitment, all of us are vulnerable to becoming reactively defensive when encountering an exceptional situation.

For better or for worse, many parents of gifted children find themselves spending a lot of time and energy trying to call attention to blind spots regarding their profoundly gifted (PG) children. They may also find blind spots in their own thinking or in the expectations from important adults in their child’s life. Goldberg proposes that it takes three powers to overcome the strain of having an unusual child, who often doesn’t match people’s expectations. The three powers are:

• Gut-Trust (learning to refine and trust one’s own Gut-sense)
• Love (the power of a parent’s love for their child)
• Mental Concentration (the power of mental concentration, such as developed in Mindfulness, to experience “what is” and Creative Vision to develop what “could be.”)

This article outlines

• 3 practices to increase ease of decision making
• 3 practices to increase confidence in one’s decisions, and
• 2 practices to build energy

Any of these practices can be explored in any order, depending on each family’s situation. They will help strengthen the combination of Gut-Trust, Love, and Mental Concentration that are needed to overcome one’s own Myside Bias and to handle the difficulty of dealing with other people’s Myside Biases as well.

There are a lot of techniques mentioned in this talk. Please don’t feel that you have to master all of them. They are presented more in the manner of a buffet. Taste a few of the most appetizing dishes and then load up your plate with your best guess as to what will be the most nutritious and delicious at this stage. You can always return to the buffet in the future for a second helping of something else. Thank you for your time and consideration. I hope I can be a helpful part of your pioneering efforts.

Authored by: Robin Goldberg, DMD
Bio: Robin Goldberg, DMD, the Dentist who teaches Meditation, grew up feeling like such a weirdo, ugly duckling. Slowly but surely, with the help of DITD family, she finally learned to recognize that she is a dazzlingly beautiful, and still deeply weird, swan. When she is not fixing teeth, teaching Meditation, or searching for something to watch on Netflix with her Covid-Pod, she might be found playing the Ukulele, walking in minimal footwear, or learning something new. – Graduated from University of Pennsylvania, and University of Connecticut School of Dental Medicine – 30 years experience as a Dentist – has been teaching meditation for 10 years, a style call Heart Rhythm Meditation, iamheart.org – Mom of a 24 year old 2E Davidson Young Scholar Alumni – I’ve been there darlings – 36 years teaching a practicing peer counseling, 20 years of with RC.org