WHY I CRIED WHEN I LEARNED MY CHILD WAS GIFTED

Parents who don’t have children who are gifted often wish they did. It sounds so great to be able to brag about having children who easily excel in school!

But that wasn’t my reaction when I learned about my own daughter.

When my husband and I were expecting our first child, I began dreaming about what it would be like to be a mom. I was an experienced classroom teacher with a master’s degree in special education, but I would be a stay-at-home mom for my child’s early years. I would send my child to school and eagerly volunteer to go along on field trips and help out in the classroom. I would get to know her friends as she invited them over for sleepovers, and I would help her pick out a gift whenever she was invited to a friend’s birthday party. I was going to enjoy helping my child have a normal, happy childhood.

Then the day came. My daughter and oldest child had always shown strong signs that she was gifted—saying the alphabet backwards for fun at age 2, learning to read on her own by age 3, and so on. But it wasn’t until she was four years old that we had her tested. It was August, and we had taken her for the local public school’s yearly early childhood screening event, when public school “Child Find” efforts were trying to identify children who needed early intervention. The teacher who screened my daughter spoke to me afterward with an emphatic, “She needs to be in kindergarten. This year!”

At her insistence, I brought my daughter to the school psychologist for evaluation. Soon after my husband and I met with her and the principal to receive the results. With my education background, I only needed one look at the test scores to instantly understand the results and the ramifications.

My daughter had “maxed out” the IQ test—gone to the final items in each subtest without reaching the testing ceiling. This meant that her IQ was at least 155, but probably higher. It placed her in at least the 99.97th percentile, meaning that her score was equal to or higher than at least 9,997 out of every 10,000 children her age. This wasn’t just giftedness, but profound giftedness. And as soon as I got home from the meeting and found a place to be alone, I cried.

In many ways, my reaction was similar to the reaction of a mom who finds out her child has a disability. (I’ve experienced that too!)

My dreams of a normal childhood for my daughter had just been wiped out. I knew that an “average” IQ score is 100. I also knew what many people don’t understand: that an IQ score of 155 is 55 points away from average—as far from the norm as an IQ score of 45. Just as we wouldn’t expect a child with an IQ of 45 to have a “normal” childhood, learning in a regular classroom without extra help, we can’t expect that of a child with an IQ of 155. I knew that learning among same-age peers was not likely to be the best situation for her. I knew that she would probably have a lot of trouble relating to her same-age peers, so it would be hard for her to form friendships. And I knew that I would need to spend her entire childhood advocating for her special needs, trying to get others to understand that she truly has them.

All of my worried predictions came true.

My daughter, in spite of our repeated attempts at enrolling her in schools among peers her age (or one year older), ended up needing to be home schooled quite a bit because schools didn’t have the resources to work with her. She did have a hard time finding friends she could relate to until she was in college. And I did have to do a lot of advocating for her. It most definitely was not a “normal” childhood.

But I learned a lot of things along the way. And the most important thing I learned is that “normal” is overrated. Even though a child might not have the same type of childhood as many of her peers, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad childhood. God gave my daughter her unique gifts and needs, and he provided her with a unique childhood. God also gave each of my other children unique gifts and needs, whether they were gifted or disabled, healthy or not, and he blessed each of them throughout their growing years.

Being unique is also one of God’s blessings.