The Davidson Young Scholars program provides program participants free seminars that offer a unique opportunity to ask questions from experts in the profoundly gifted field and to support one another while discussing the common challenges of raising a gifted student. We have compiled summaries of many of these seminars in the Tips for Parents section of our Davidson Gifted Database. Today we are including a number of these articles that relate to helping students who are coping with anxiety, fear, frustration and difficult feelings. Tips for Parents: Anxiety, Sensitivities and Social Struggles among Profoundly Gifted Kids Megan Foley Nicpon discusses how the concepts of anxieties, sensitivities, and social struggles can manifest within profoundly gifted kids and identifies ways to positively intervene. If your profoundly gifted child is experiencing these difficulties, Dr. Foley Nicpon offers a series of strategies, including recognizing the benefits of getting professional help, accepting that sensitivities are outside your student's control, praising students when they take educational risks, and modeling "letting go" and facing fears. Tips for Parents: Coping with Fear In this article, Dr. Maureen Neihart describes a number of ways parents can help their gifted students cope with fear. It can be argued that highly gifted children’s high intelligence and sensitivity make them aware of more things to fear than other children. They may also be more reactive to emotionally loaded information. Neihart also describes how young gifted children typically have older friends who may be prepared to handle exposure to some kinds of information that the younger gifted child is not ready for. This can be especially problematic for young gifted children who are radically accelerated and are learning in classrooms with teenagers. It can also be argued, however, that common characteristics of highly gifted children also equip them with a deep reservoir of coping mechanisms, enhancing their capacity for resilience. Tips for Parents: Managing Frustration and Difficult Feelings in Gifted Children This article by Dr. Dale Stuart seeks to help parents understand their gifted student’s intense and difficult feelings, and offers guidance to help their children manage these difficult feelings. Detailed information is provided on validating student feelings, dealing with anger and conflicts, frustration over not being in control, fear of being a failure, how to imagine others’ perspectives and more. The basic approach to helping a child deal with difficult feelings is (a) to help them build the capability to observe themselves while they're in the midst of experiencing the feeling, (b) to help them form a story or narrative about their experience of the feeling and the situation, and then (c) to help them make conscious choices about their behavior and the ways they express their feelings. Further Reading: View the entire listing of Tips for Parents articles in the Davidson Gifted Database. The Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted (SENG) Library provides a wealth of great articles. View past Davidson Gifted blog posts here >
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