Helping Gifted Pre-schoolers

How Can You Help Your Gifted Pre-schooler?

This is one of the most common questions I'm asked by parents, and it's an excellent one because there are very important things you can do during the toddler years, which will help your preschooler greatly.

The pre-school period is quite critical in a gifted child's life. It's the period when all children are learning insatiably about the world around them, including laying down the basis for their own future personality including their self-knowledge, self-confidence and self-esteem. This basis is like the foundation for a house; your child's whole future personality and functioning in life will be based on it, and if it was damaged while being laid down it's very difficult to repair later.

What does a child need during this period? It can be helpful to read Steve Biddulph's books "The Secret of Happy Children", and "More Secrets of Happy Children", to get a feel for what's going on during childhood. Although his books aren't directly about gifted children, they can help us to understand the process which is going on as children develop. This is a constant process of observation of all aspects of the world around them, involving experimentation and interaction with it, followed by gradual development of "understanding" of that world, based on the feedback and messages the child gets. This especially includes all social interactions and experiences.

The Importance of the toddler years

Why is this period particularly important in the case of gifted children?  The most important single thing that every gifted child needs is a firm and confident self-concept of his or her self as a gifted child, and a realistic understanding of what he or she can achieve and aspire to.  The process of laying down this self-concept begins in babyhood, and continues very strongly during toddlerhood.  It then needs to be supported strongly through the school years, but if it's not established strongly during the toddler years, it's much harder to repair that later.

Gifted toddlers observe a wider sample of what's going on around them, in more detail, and because of their intelligence, can extend and extrapolate, understanding more implications and ramifications of what they observe - in other words, the feedback they get from life all has more impact on them. Also, unless strong specific action is taken to prevent it, the socialisation they experience from other children and adults during this critical time, the toddler years, won't usually be socialisation with children who are their intellectual peers, or adults who are used to interacting with gifted children.  So the social feedback they get is mostly not likely to be appropriate for them, and quietly, often without anyone noticing anything, they can begin the processes which are seen in older children in the school years - underachieving in order to fit in socially, being confused that they don't seem to fit in, and becoming either anxious or aggressive about that, depending on their personality - and deep inside, being very confused about who they are and where they do or don't fit into the world.

Apart from interactions with loving and supportive parents and other family, the two most important things that all children, including gifted children, need during the toddler and preschool period, are:

1     A wide range of activities and stimulation, both mental and physical, so that the physical and developmental tasks of early childhood can proceed normally with a balanced profile.  This is why nature has designed toddlers to throw themselves into everything, whether appropriate or not - so that as far as possible they experience everything available to them, and develop a full profile of knowledge and skills accordingly,  that is, without some areas being neglected because the child has very early become interested in and focussed on a few areas only.

2     A range of social interactions, especially with other children, which give them positive social feedback as they interact with life: "Yes, I understand where you're coming from", "Hey, you do that? I do that too!", "I like this about you!", "You did that really well", "You seem a really great person", etc. They need this feedback both from adults around them, AND from other children they interact with.

Problems

For gifted preschoolers problems can begin early in both the above areas.

Regarding 1 above:  Because gifted children have a longer concentration span and higher intelligence than most toddlers or preschoolers, they may begin early to spend more time doing cognitive, sedentary tasks and play, to the neglect of the physical and fitness developmental work all toddlers need. I've worked with groups of gifted preschoolers, some of whom could read anything in the room, including any instructions for the parents and teachers, yet during a "kindergym"-type activity most of them were physically "retarded" compared to a group of average children. The development of fine and gross motor coordination which toddlers and preschoolers need, can't proceed if the toddler is sitting reading or doing puzzles most of their waking day.  Thus their developmental "profile" can begin to become unbalanced very early in life.

Regarding 2 above:  Netting & Networking

To try to avoid both problems I've described above, I suggest a process which I call "Netting and Networking".  The word "netting" is used because I'm comparing the process to netting for fish in a pool, or butterflies in a garden.  "Networking" means that, having found the "fish" or "butterflies", you actively network with them on behalf of your gifted preschooler.

Netting

To go netting, you find out every possible type of activity in your suburb, town or area, for toddlers and preschool children, make a list of pleasant combinations of them, and systematically work through the list a few activities at a time. You are not primarily doing this for the activities themselves, although of course you can continue with any activity your child enjoys, and the process of doing everything available will greatly help to make sure your child has a full range of activities, and keeps a more balanced developmental "profile", as described above.

Types of activities may be for example: playgroups, free activities at your local library or council, several different kindergyms if possible, "pre-kindergarten" afternoons at different kindergartens - you'll find some are much better than others. Then there are the more commercially provided activities such as "Music for toddlers/pre-schoolers", swimming lessons, the various types of dancing, pre-sport groups, Montessori pre-schools - anything you can find.  Activities provided by any Gifted and Talented Association near you are an obvious place to try; but even here, the activities themselves are not your highest priority.

In all these activities you are primarily "netting" for other gifted children whom, with some encouragement from you if necessary, your child can befriend. Parents who take their children to such activities are a sub-group within the community, and there is likely to be a higher proportion of bright children than in the population as a whole. Even so, you may find none or only one other gifted child in many activities; in this case, if your child doesn't enjoy the activity, simply move on to the next on your list. It's important always to keep some physical activities in your child's program even if he or she doesn't like them much - kindergym is very good, as the activities are self-directed and most kids can find something there they enjoy. Be aware that most gymnasiums run "kindergyms", separate from the "Kindergym Associations" as such; the better space and equipment there may be more appropriate as your child grows older (2-3-4 years).

How will you recognise another gifted child?  You probably won't find it difficult; among a group of children interacting and working at an activity, it will probably be fairly clear if another child is working at a similar level to your child's.  In many cases your child will "find" any other gifted children in the group, because they will be the ones she or he feels socially at ease with.  However you can't rely on this because gifted children can be very task focussed, and if they enjoy the activity they may not pay much attention to the other children.  So don't leave it to him or her: interact with the other children yourself, (thereby providing as a free social benefit, some of the interaction with a range of supportive adults from which all children benefit greatly), and you'll get a feel for any child in the group who's also gifted.

Networking

Whenever you do find another gifted or bright child, it's time to start networking. Invite him or her, with his or her caregiver, around to play, and foster the friendship both for yourself and your child. If you leave that activity to move on with your "netting", keep in touch.  You'll often find that other parents of gifted children, whether or not they're aware their child is gifted, are as glad to find you as you are to find them. Even though they're probably not netting & networking as systematically as you are, they'll almost always recognise the special value of the friendship between their child and yours. 

When you've found as few as 3-4 other gifted children, you can now move into the serious "networking" stage, and begin to maintain these children as a small peer group for your child.  Even though they often don't remember them clearly in later life, young children have a greater capacity for forming ongoing friendships than adults usually realise.  Their experience of such friendships probably forms the basis of their capacity for long-term relationships in later life, so by facilitating this type of experience you'll be doing your child a double favour, and you'll know that among this group at least, your child is now spending time among intellectual peers, and is getting that crucial positive social feedback.

Try to organise at least one get-together of this peer group per week; if you have a good yard for kids to play in, you can simply invite them around, probably more often than once a week. When my daughter was a toddler we had no yard, but I found that the other mothers I'd met were all casual tennis players. I found a park with good children's play equipment, and tennis courts, and we had a "tennis morning" every Thursday.  We found a babysitter the children liked, and each put in a $1-2 per hour for her to come to push the kids on their swings, watch out for their safety and so on, while we mothers played very casual tennis, or often simply sat and chatted - it was an enjoyable peer group for us too.

This was simply a social and play occasion for the children, but the importance of this can't be over emphasised.  As much as the intellectual stimulation many gifted children crave, social interaction with other gifted children is probably their most important need.  All  of the 4-5 families who were involved in our tennis group over a 2-year period (from approximately age 2 until the children began to start kindergarten) said it was their child's favourite activity of the week. Understandably, because this was the one where they were all getting the "Hey, I like you, you make sense to me" positive feedback they needed.

Intellectual Stimulation

If your child is one of the gifted toddlers who craves knowledge and intellectual stimulation, "networking" can go a long way to meeting that need too. Depending on the interests of the children & parents in the group you end up with, there are really no limits to what you can organise with a little thought.

Among our group, it emerged that 3 of us mothers had learnt Japanese, but were now rusty and wouldn't mind brushing it up. So after a while, when we had become a group of friends, we decided we would have a "Japanese play-group" for the children. By advertising at our local university and enquiring at the "Australian-Japanese Association", we found a native Japanese speaker, and each put in $5 once a week for her to come and play with our children at one of our houses for an hour and a half, speaking to them "only" (in practise mostly) in Japanese.

This was an enormous success, but we were in for some eye-opening surprises.  When we began, our plan was that we would provide a craft activity each week and all do it together, with our Japanese tutor directing the activity in Japanese and teaching us the Japanese vocabulary for everything we were doing.  We expected to have to practise vocabulary with the children during the week, and kept notes of new words and phrases.  However by the third week, the children rebelled against this, took the tutor into their bedroom to play with her, and shut the door on us. Almost with incredulity we realised just in time to prevent ourselves turning this  into a boring, inappropriate activity, that the children were learning so fast and in such a different way from what we expected, that they were leaving us and our original plan far behind.  

We mothers never did get any "brushing up" of our Japanese, but lapsed into chatting over cups of tea. Through the bedroom door we could hear non-stop chatting in Japanese by the tutor. Apparently our children had no difficulty understanding her; they answered in English to begin with, but with a mixture of English with more & more Japanese as the weeks went by. Two of us mothers had done Japanese at tertiary level, but we couldn't begin to understand the level of their conversation. It was a shame that we only began this Japanese play-group about 5 months before some of the children began kindergarten, because it was clear they would quickly have become quite fluent at chatting and playing in Japanese.

I later organised a similar group for drama, again finding a drama "leader" for the group by advertising at the local university. Once you've networked your small peer group, however, any interests your children have can easily be followed up in this sort of way - my experience was that university students were charmed to have the chance of such novel and enjoyable work; we never lacked for applicants. I can imagine maths playgroups would work very well; if any of the children have a second language, that could influence your choice for a language play group; music would also be good, as the community "pre-school music" groups quickly become boring for gifted children.  I can imagine that a "group" with a Uni electronics or physics student, pulling apart some of the old cassette players, cameras, etc, which most of us have in our sheds or garages, could also be a great success.

Be warned by the trap we nearly fell into, of underestimating our children, and over-structuring our Japanese group.  Try hard not to structure too strongly any groups you form; your child will get years of over-structuring once he or she begins school. It's a very healthy (if annoying) toddler characteristic to want to be in charge, and to dislike being organised, even when they don't have the wisdom to organise themselves very well.  As parents, by adulthood we should have learnt the patience to allow our toddlers to be in charge of their play most of their time - whenever it won't cause a life-threatening situation.  Gifted preschoolers, who probably have more creativity and intelligence, are often even more self-determined and should be given all the scope possible to develop their confidence and organising skills. They are mostly naturally self-directed, and should be allowed to enjoy it while they can.

Also, play is children's most important work during the toddler and preschool ages.  So if your peer-group tries to take charge of the maths, Spanish, music, or whatever else you provide for them, and turn it into their play as our children did with their Japanese, be alert to what's actually going on, and unless you're sure nothing constructive is resulting, let them do it. They'll be getting what they need socially, and they'll probably be learning better than we yet understand how to organise for them.

Please note that in the above, the issue which I'm stating is the very important issue for gifted preschoolers is not rushing to make an early start on schoolwork; it's helping the child in as many ways as possible to have positive experience and develop social confidence with at least one group of other bright children, and also to develop confidence in his or her own ability to function at her or his intelligence level, that is, to lay down some confidence in him or herself as a gifted child.  This latter objective may obviously involve some activities which come within the future school curriculum, but that's not the main goal in making them available to the child.  The amount of genuine academic content in the 7 years of primary schooling is relatively small, and no gifted child is likely to have any trouble mastering it in the future.  In the Australian school system most gifted children will have quite a few negative experiences, and the greater the self-confidence in themselves and their level of intelligence that has been laid down during their toddler years, the greater the personal resources they will have to draw on to help cope with these.

The Super-demanding Gifted Pre-schooler

Some parents can be reduced to almost suicidal desperation by the unceasing energy and demands of their gifted child. For these parents, I can only suggest the following:

1     Again, it's worth knowing that super-demanding behaviour isn't found only in gifted toddlers. It's worth reading Dr Christopher Green's book "Toddler Taming", which explains that this is perfectly normal behaviour of many toddlers, and yes, it can easily reduce parents to suicidal desperation. It can help just a very little to know that you're not alone, and that this behaviour's not even necessarily due to the giftedness - although unfortunately the giftedness can make it more formidable.

2     Many activities, including "netting" followed by serious networking, may be necessary for these super-demanding toddlers. "Serious networking" means organising more activities each week than other parents may need.  You may need to go "netting" until you can form two small peer-groups, and organise different activities with each group, to meet your child's social and intellectual needs.

3     It's essential for you, the parents, to begin teaching your gifted toddler something he or she, for all his or her intelligence, will probably be very dense at learning - that there are limits, and that parents need time off sometimes. So it's essential for you to plan at least one or two times in the week, whether through the "Family Day Care" scheme, or whatever other low cost scheme you can find, when your child spends time somewhere else while you have a break. You should do this even if you know that this time is not particularly stimulating or enriching for your child - this is your sanity time, and you should be rigorous in giving it to yourself.

Quite early, you can explain this time honestly but not derogatively to your child: "You are a wonderful person, and I really love all the exciting things you do, and that we do together. But Mummies (or Daddies) need some time for themselves too." (Your child may gradually learn this concept sometime during his or her 30's or 40's.)

It's much better to do this, and explain the reason for it, than to try to soldier on, setting impossible standards for yourself, inevitably cracking sometimes and shouting really damaging things like: "You drive this whole family nuts! Why can't you just stop being such a selfish little brat!" -- unfortunately your child will learn this type of concept almost instantly, and will retain it; (there's not much fairness in parenting sometimes).

So, for the super-demanding gifted toddler - try to keep hold of perspective about demanding toddlers - provide many varied activities - and never fail to plan respite times for yourself.

Thinking Ahead - School

Sadly, in my experience, school, which we parents all hope will provide our gifted children with the challenges & mental stimulation they need, often brings its own problems and may even become the biggest problem time in their lives. Our current Australian school system is simply not flexible enough to meet the full needs of gifted children. Therefore, during these toddler and pre-school years, as you learn more about your child and the interests he or she develops, it's worth spending time looking very carefully at every schooling option available in your area, because if you can find a school which will suit and support your child a little better than some other would have done, it will save you all a lot of grief.

Don't forget to keep home schooling in mind as an option, if it suits your circumstances - it can be an ideal schooling option for many gifted children, particularly during the first few years of school.

© 2000  Helen Dowland
This page was last updated on Wednesday, 25 January 2006 06:45 PM

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