Gifted Students: Parents and the Schools

Parents Assume They Can Work with the Schools — Ha!

Once parents know that their children are intellectually advanced, they generally approach the school hoping that the instructional pace can be sped up or that the child can work at a higher level with others — either the same age or older — whose intellectual levels are similar. However, most schools — since the late 1970s — offer a list of reasons why they can’t or won’t do what the parents want. It is often difficult for the parents of highly intelligent children to believe that their children’s emotional and intellectual well-being is either misunderstood or relatively unimportant to the educational establishment. Parents’ initial faith in the ability — and desire — for the schools to help generally adds one to two years to the time period in which the child is in the wrong educational environment before the parents give up and decide to work outside of the system.

Although my writing only shows examples of families who wanted to make changes for their children, there are many parents of gifted children who do not advocate for educational modifications. In fact, their lack of advocacy sometimes undermines the efforts of others to obtain educational accommodations. There are a number of reasons why some parents simply accept how the schools are educating their…