Fertile Ground
Anne van Roden, LMFT
Last week I had a new client express a point of view I’ve been hearing from parents for over 20 years. The basic idea is “I want my child to grow up and make their decisions for themselves rather than having me put labels on them or put them into a box.” This comes up frequently regarding talking to their child about being “gifted” or “twice-exceptional.” Many parents hate the word “gifted” and avoid ever having a conversation with their child about their high IQ.
I am a gardener, and have been all my life. The analogy that I have landed on when having this discussion is a gardening one. I have a garden plot in my backyard, and today we prepared it for spring planting (it’s currently early March). We weeded it, rototilled it, added soil conditioners and trace minerals. It is rich black soil that is now perfect for growing good things!
The parents who are expressing this view have usually created very rich soil in their children - their children are well-fed, safe, well-loved, given great books to read, attend excellent schools and engage in many enrichment activities from an early age. The “soil” or conditions are perfect in these children for thinking and growing ideas.
But here’s the thing - if you create perfect soil in a garden and then wait 18 years before you plant anything, the soil will not just sit there perfect and ready and waiting for someone to decide what to plant. Weeds will grow there, and if left unattended, the weeds will take over and be very hard to remove!
If you are not providing any context at all, or framework for your child to understand their giftedness (or substitute any words you prefer here to explain high IQ), then I can guarantee that there are weeds growing in your child’s mind to explain why they seem to be different from so many other children. After over 20 years of working with gifted children, I pretty much know exactly what those weeds are. The kids who come to me without any explanation at all of their giftedness universally report the same words to describe who they think they are: “Weird,” “Like and Alien,” “A Freak,” “Stupid” or “Something is terribly wrong with me.” I can’t tell you how many kids come in thinking these thoughts. The weeds grew where there was no other explanation provided for why they are different from others - and their difference was abundantly clear to the children.
In the 6th grade my whole grade was given some sort of IQ test in our school district. I didn’t know it was an IQ test as no explanation was given. When the results came back, no one shared them with me. But both my parents and my teacher admonished me, “don’t be telling the other kids your scores and don’t brag about them!!” My first thought was, “how can I brag about something I don’t even know?!” And my main takeaway was that I should be embarrassed and ashamed about my results (whatever they were) because they made me “different.” This is a common experience for gifted kids - the parents are often excruciatingly worried that their children will become full of themselves and braggarts if they know they are “gifted” while the kids (who in my experience, like me, wouldn’t do that and are more likely to be focused on their challenge areas where they feel stupid) are just baffled. Enter the weeds.
Planting some positive frameworks in your child’s garden is how you get them started. Language which helps your child understand their differences - their amazing strength areas, their intensities and sensitivities, and their asynchronous challenge areas where they are behind their peers is the key. Keep an eye out for the weeds that grow so prolifically in a gifted child’s mind. The self-criticism, the self-doubt, even self-hatred. How are they supposed to make sense of the fact that they are the only 6 year old who has memorized “Hamilton” (or calculated pi to the 64th decimal) and yet they still can’t tie their shoes without help! Planting seeds of understanding in the fertile ground allows healthy plants to grow and our children to thrive.