Sallie Schaaf Borrink
"He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young." Isaiah 40:11
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This is an introduction to the Gifted, 2e, and Highly Sensitive Playlist I’ve created. I explain why I created this playlist and the kinds of topics I will be covering.
You will find the chat below under the title “Gifted, 2e, and Highly Sensitive Playlist Introduction.”
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This playlist features chats and posts about gifted, twice-exceptional (2e), and highly sensitive people. Although it includes content about both children and adults, the emphasis is on parenting gifted/2e children.
This will be a growing playlist. I hope you find it encouraging and helpful.
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I first saw this video when it was shared in a gifted/2e online group many years ago. It’s appearance is dated, but it has good basic information for parents who are trying to figure out if they have a gifted/2e child. It is especially helpful for pointing out the pitfalls of gifted/2e children being medicated for something that isn’t truly their problem rather than getting a proper diagnosis.
My comments continue after the video.
I wrote about our experience with gifted/2e testing in:
I learned through my experience that you do need to trust your gut. As the professional says in the video, parents are the most accurate at diagnosing if their child is gifted/2e.
If you have a child you believe is gifted/2e and is being educated in a traditional classroom, it is imperative that you understand your child, what she needs, and whether or not the classroom will actually work for her. The classroom is a terrible fit for many gifted/2e children as I explained in detail in:
As the professionals explain in the video:
The view of what is normal and what is acceptable, especially in the classroom, seems to be shrinking. And as a result of that, many many children are being labeled with things such as attention deficit disorder.
An even more critical issue that has developed since this video was released is the gender insanity we are now witnessing. Although we got the information we needed when we had gifted/2e testing done, I don’t know if I would take my child for the same testing now.
I would assume that this area of practice has been significantly infiltrated by the gender ideology zealots. I don’t know if I would let them near my child. So if you are in this particular situation regarding deciding whether to test or not, I strongly encourage you to do your due diligence before you let any professional near your child. I don’t think I would use anyone who isn’t a professing Christian and even then I would ask a lot of detailed questions before I would agree to trust my child to anyone else – even if he or she claims to be a Christian. There are too many sick people who are eager to plant all kinds of ideas into the minds of children and youth today, even in the church.
In the end, being confident that you understand your child and her needs is incredibly valuable. It is worth the effort to make sure you get the right answers and avoid the quick answer of throwing medication at a problem that doesn’t require medication. Many gifted/2e children will thrive simply with understanding and involved parents who advocate for their needs each step of the way as they grow up.
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There are so many warnings out there to enjoy your children when they are little because the tween years hit and things are never the same again. It’s strongly implied that the years are difficult and the parent-child relationship becomes a constant struggle.
I’m here to say this was not the case for us.
Our daughter is wrapping up her tween years (9-12) and I can honestly say that we have all thoroughly enjoyed the past few years as a family. I easily identified some choices we made that greatly contributed to this. I asked my husband why he thought these years have been so positive and he also made some excellent observations.
So here are the big things we think we did right with our tween daughter. Each one of these could be a lengthy post in and of itself, but I’m going to keep each point brief in order to keep them in one place.
I’m also smart enough to know that we still have a lot of parenting years ahead of us and no one knows what can happen in the future. But to this point of our parenting journey, the following have worked very well for us.
By way of context if you are new to my site, we are a homeschooling family of homebodies. David and I are self-employed at home. Our daughter is twice-exceptional (2e) and our only child.
We parented the child we had, not the child we thought she should be or we wanted her to be. We have worked hard to be in tune with how God created her and parented accordingly. This has involved lots of prayer and lots of research.
For example, when it became clear that she was struggling in certain areas, we had her tested so we could all better understand her strengths and weaknesses. We’ve adjusted our life for her since very early on and we’ve continued to do this. We firmly believe that it doesn’t matter what any other family is doing with their child. We are the parents of this child. It’s our privilege and responsibility to parent her in the ways she needs us.
Parenting the child we have has impacted our homeschooling choices, curriculum choices, church choices, and so many other things I’ve written about at length on my site. It didn’t matter what we thought we would like to do as parents if it didn’t square with the child we had.
We parent her.
Building strong relationships takes time, energy, focus, and listening. We prioritized these above other aspects of parenting because we believed we could better accomplish things as parents with a strong relationship with our child.
This has meant that while we have always expected and required respect, we did not obsess about authority and being in charge. We thought of our family as a group of relationships, not a power structure. We respected that she had her own agenda and priorities because even a tween can have a strong idea of what is important to her.
Because Caroline was a challenging baby/toddler/preschooler, learning to control our anger and exasperation was very important. Early on we had to remind ourselves daily (and sometimes hourly) that we were making choices not just for the moment of frustration but also for two, five, and eight years down the road. That meant learning to deal with our expectations that could provoke our own anger and exasperation that didn’t need to be expressed because it was not beneficial to building the parent-child relationship.
We carried that attitude on into the tween years.
There are some things that can be caught even better than being taught. David and I have modeled how to be wrong so Caroline can see it in action. We’ve never told her how to do this. She simply saw us do it and started doing it herself.
When David is right about something, I say, “You are right. I was wrong.” He does the same thing to me.
We don’t say, “Fine” in anger and then stomp off to sulk. That’s not admitting you’re wrong. That’s just being someone with a bad attitude.
If Caroline is right and we are wrong, we acknowledge it the same way. She is due the same level of respect as an adult who is correct. Truth is truth whether it comes from the mouth of an adult or a ten year old.
If someone presents a better argument and shows us that we are wrong, we say, “Good point.” We’re not afraid to acknowledge that someone else in the house is correct and we’re wrong. It’s part of the ebb and flow of our relationships. It’s what healthy families do.
The bottom line is how could we expect our daughter to acknowledge when she is wrong and we are right if she has no idea what it looks like? We all have the opportunity to be right and wrong in this house. And we respect each other in the process.
We made sure she knew that we understand success and failure are a part of life. We expect to fail. We expect to succeed. We expect her to succeed. We expect her to fail. There is no shame in failure in our home.
Because we’re self-employed and have been for a long time, we’re entrepreneurial so we are constantly teaching ourselves new things. We are always showing her something new we’ve learned along the way.
As an example, she’s watched me recently go through the process of launching my podcast. She saw the work that went into it such as researching equipment. She saw what worked and what didn’t. She heard all of the music tracks I sampled and we joked about the different moods they evoked and what kinds of movie scenes they could be used in. She heard all the ones I rejected and when I found the right one, she knew why. She knew I had to record the first few podcasts multiple times to learn how to get them right. She saw David teach himself and experiment with multiple editing techniques to get the right one for my podcast. She literally heard the failures and successes as we worked for weeks to get it right prior to launching. She knew all the work that went into the successes and failures.
We celebrate loudly when one of us has a major success. We help each other try to figure out how to fix a mistake or learn from it.
There is no fear of failure in our home.
I’ve written an entire post about the fact that we negotiate with our child and why. I honestly think it’s one of the most important posts on my site even though it has never generated a lot of traffic or comments.
I wrote it when Caroline was nine and a half. I stand by what I wrote and I’m confident this approach was a great help during the tween years.
Caroline has learned how to negotiate a compromise, understands the reasoning behind it, and can approach a situation with a give and take attitude in which both parties think win-win. Can she clearly articulate that? Probably not. But she’s had experience practicing it and has begun to internalize those skills. Our job in the coming years is to help her continue to hone those skills to prepare her for adulthood.
I cannot emphasize enough how important this was.
Too many parents are worried to almost obsessed with making sure their tween is “responsible” to the point they won’t let their growing child get the sleep she desperately needs.
An observant parent can generally tell the difference between a child who is growing and needs massive amounts of sleep (and food!) and a child who is lazy. If we woke Caroline up at her normal time, gave her another nudge ten minutes later, and she was barely comprehending it, we let her sleep. Sometimes she slept for hours past her normal wake up time. Her body needed rest, especially since most growth happens while children/tweens sleep. (Remember when your toddler would get up and look like a different kid? Yes, children can change that much overnight.)
Allowing her to sleep meant she was rested and could tackle her life without running on fumes just so we could keep up the appearance of being “good parents” who make our child stick to a schedule.
I truly believe she was pretty even keeled emotionally during this season of life in large part because she wasn’t tired all the time.
I think this also offered tremendous benefits during the tween years. We were selective about social interactions, including peer activities.
Before someone accuses us of keeping her locked up at home and keeping her from the “real world,” nothing could be farther from the truth. For privacy reasons, I’m not going to list all the things she’s involved with, but she has a number of activities she enjoys and that allow her interaction with people of all ages, including people who would be considered her peers.
However, we controlled peer interaction so it was generally positive. Does that mean we never had any drama or hurt feelings? Of course not. But it does meant that she (and we) wasted almost zero energy on excessive social drama and peer pressure that most kids that age deal with on a daily basis.
Caroline’s humor developing to more mature levels has been a fantastic part of the tween years.
The truth of the matter is that we laugh as a family if we’re in the room together for sixty seconds. Quips, puns, good-natured teasing, quoting movies or television shows, etc. are all part of our family culture.
We simply have fun and enjoy laughing together. There is plenty of give and take in the humor department in our home. Because we love and trust each other, we can trust each other’s humor as well.
A family that can laugh together at the drop of a hat is a healthy family.
I’ve written so much about this part of our journey already on my site that I’m only going to mention it here in brief.
We have emphasized that we are interested in Caroline learning and finding life interesting, not performing. We’ve been low key regarding academics and grades to this point. She has had massive amounts of time to pursue the things that interest her and that she is especially gifted to do as an artistically inclined child.
(For those freaking out about what I just said about academics and grades, here is what happened when we gave her her first standardized test.)
This is one area where my thinking and strategy are very long term. I reviewed a book this week in Homeschooling a Child with Language-Based Learning Disabilities (LBLD) that showed me I’m correct in my approach in this which has thrilled me no end.
David made this observation and it really is the summary statement of all of the choices we’ve made.
Our daughter knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that we love her and she’s safe with us. She can trust us to do what is best for her because we’ve demonstrated it time and again. We’ve also explained to her why we make the choices we do so we get buy-in from her. When necessary, we back it up from other sources.
This trust was not automatic and it is something we’ve earned and she’s bestowed on us. We might think that children should automatically trust their parents, but I don’t think this is the case. Trust is something that is earned and re-affirmed over time. It’s not something to take for granted. We continue to make trust and safety a priority so this does not erode in our relationships.
We truly have enjoyed these years which honestly surprised me because I thought there was something to the fear mongering that is so prevalent. It was hard work to get to the tween years and I anticipate parenting will continue to be hard work. But David and I both feel like we’ve already reaped a harvest for all the sowing, weeding, watering, and such that we’ve done over the years.
We’re very grateful.
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When I began to understand that my daughter fit the description of a highly-sensitive child, I also realized some new things about myself. When someone pointed out that my daughter was probably gifted/2e, I started to notice things about myself. Then when I realized that I had the gifted intellectual overexcitability, everything really started to fall into place.
This post is going to sound to some people like a lot of navel gazing. It may not resonate with many of my readers. Some people will read this at some point either today or in the future and think, “Wow. This lady needs to get a life and stop focusing on herself so much.” This post isn’t for them. I’m writing today for some very specific people.
This post is for you if your child fits the following:
I came to the realization this week that the combination of gifted intellectual overexcitability, being highly-sensitive, and being strongly oriented toward truth is a hard combination to live with. I put it on a similar level to the realization I had a couple of years ago about holiday overwhelm and highly-sensitive children. I believe God allowed me to experience some things this week so I could see the truth in them and help others understand the same thing. This post might sound like it’s wandering a bit as I share some disjointed experiences and situations. It probably won’t be the most orderly and structured thing I’ve ever written, but I need to just write and get it out there or it won’t get written.
But I really am going somewhere with all this.
As I quoted on my Start Here page, gifted intellectual overexcitability looks like this:
Intellectual OE is demonstrated by a marked need to seek understanding and truth, to gain knowledge, and to analyze and synthesize (Dabrowski & Piechowski, 1977; Piechowski, 1979, 1991). Those high in Intellectual OE have incredibly active minds. They are intensely curious, often avid readers, and usually keen observers. They are able to concentrate, engage in prolonged intellectual effort, and are tenacious in problem solving when they choose. Other characteristics may include relishing elaborate planning and having remarkably detailed visual recall. People with Intellectual OE frequently love theory, thinking about thinking, and moral thinking. This focus on moral thinking often translates into strong concerns about moral and ethical issues… Intellectually overexcitable people are also quite independent of thought …
That’s all well and good if a person is interested in dinosaurs or Ancient Egypt or Jane Austen or historical costuming or whatever. If it is a topic that is removed from current moral debate and topics, then kids can immerse themselves in it and get happily lost in satisfying their intellectual hunger.
But something very different happens if that topic is contemporary. And controversial.
And if your child is wired to truth-seeking, it can become very difficult.
For many years I had a side website where I collected information about women in the church, how women should use their gifts in the body of Christ, etc. I shared my thoughts as I did different reading. I would sometimes post about church and ministry scandals that had a significant impact on women. But for the most part it was a place where I posted information, research of others, etc. It was an intellectual endeavor where I shared my thinking with others who were interested in similar topics. For the most part it was low stress except for the occasional person who would attempt to shame me and school me on what a terrible woman I was for asking questions and studying these topics for myself.
I shut it down last year. Due to changes in our culture, the topic was becoming increasingly impacted by many other things happening in our country. The rise of intersectionality, social justice, and other things over the past two or three years meant that this topic was being overwhelmed by more “stuff” than I had time to read and process. It was no longer about some fairly cut and dried theological debate where you generally ended up on one side of the argument or the other based on trying to understand how to correctly interpret the Bible. I became increasingly concerned that I would be tangentially associated with some things I vehemently disagreed with and decided to take it all down. Those weren’t battles I wanted to fight. They weren’t topics I wanted to deep dive into. I found much of it so distressing and unbiblical that I simply took down the site. I wasn’t willing to invest the energy into it.
When I quit Facebook last year, I immediately lost several pounds. I had done absolutely nothing different. I truly believe it was from a drop in stress due to no longer being on that platform. I thought of that this week because I have inexplicably gained several pounds. Then I realized why.
It’s because I’ve been researching and writing for my new understanding culture and politics site (Finding the Truth in the Noise). My stress levels have gone way up. I’ve been stress snacking. And my sleep has been disrupted by my agitation which always causes me to gain weight.
The current political arena is absolutely toxic. It is stressful. And it is moving at such a breakneck speed that it’s virtually impossible to keep up with what is going on.
For someone with an intellectual overexcitability, reading and thinking and writing even in basic ways about culture and politics right now is like trying to fill a half a teaspoon from a fire hose that is fully open.
For someone who is strongly oriented toward truth, the current situation in our country is absolutely Orwellian. What some people are doing provokes such a strong response in me that it makes me physically ill.
So I question if I can even spend time thinking about these things long-term. As much as I find them interesting, I cannot simply make them an intellectual exercise and walk away. I’m not wired that way. So I’m looking at that website now and vacillating between knowing I probably made a mistake in starting it and being mad for being wired this way so I have to deal with this and can’t just be a “normal” person.
(NOTE: Since writing this post I have decided to delete that site and the related Twitter account. And then I re-opened it. And then I shut it down again and moved it to a forum here on this site. See how hard this stuff is if you have a child like this?)
The other thing that happened this week was a movie. Caroline wanted me to watch Big Hero 6 with her so I did.
It was a cute and funny movie. It was also intense. It was visually overwhelming. I felt the same way about it I felt about The LEGO Movie. Great movie and well done, but absolutely overwhelming for a highly-sensitive person.
By the time we were done with Big Hero 6, I felt visually, mentally, and emotionally assaulted. It might have been worse because I was already in a heightened emotional state due to the political stuff. But if I had been an immature child, I would have melted down at that point. I was absolutely raw. If I’m going to be totally honest, I was actually scared of how I felt for about an hour afterwards. It pushed me that much to the edge.
Just like the night I realized how much a simple Christmas program had left me on the edge of a meltdown, so I realized it anew this week.
Being a highly sensitive adult is a challenge. Being a highly sensitive child who doesn’t fully understand what is happening is even tougher.
Being a person with an intellectual overexcitability can be exhausting. How much more for the child who can’t figure out what to do with all the big emotions and thoughts that can come with it.
If you have a child who fits these descriptions, I sincerely hope you will take to heart what I’ve written. It is TOUGH to navigate all this.
So how do we help our highly sensitive kids navigate this stuff? How do we help our gifted kids who are wired to devour information and seek truth handle big topics?
These are some thoughts off the top of my head. I haven’t fully thought this through because this is truly fresh and raw for me. I went to bed thinking about this and woke up thinking about it. I hope other people will add their thoughts in the comments so we can support each other in this challenging parenting area.
(Or maybe this is YOUR life and not just the life of your child. I hope you will find encouragement as well.)
One thing I would suggest is really keeping an eye on what your child is consuming. What might seem like no big deal could be a very big deal.
For example, I went through a period in college when I was fascinated by World War 2. However, reading about the Nazis and seeing photographs of what they did gave me nightmares. I’m talking sitting-up-in-bed-drenched-in-a-cold-sweat-and-crying-out nightmares.
That study ended pretty quickly. Even now as an adult, I would never ever visit the Holocaust Museum or anything like that. I know my limits.
You need to know what your kid is reading and watching. Not because you don’t trust her, but because you need to keep an eye on her well-being.
Keep an eye on how politics and cultural happenings are being understood by your child. Our kids hear so much that they absolutely should not have to deal with. It makes me sick the way they are being robbed of their ability to be kids without worrying about every insane topic that fills the media today. Keep communication open in the way that works for your kid. I’ve learned how to best broach sensitive topics with my child. Know what works best for yours.
Please keep an eye out for overwhelm with your child. Is she quick to melt down over small things? Maybe she is entering a zone where she is truly starting to become overwhelmed. Adjust schedules and expectations as needed. Show her grace.
Above all else, recognize that meltdowns are a cry for help. Tantrums are selfish and self-centered. They are something totally different. Meltdowns tell us that our child is in desperate need of our help.
I sincerely hope this post helps at least a few parents better understand and support their child.
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The oft-repeated story is that if you are in a plane and the oxygen masks drop, you always put on your own mask first. Once your mask is on, you are free to help others without endangering your own well-being. The point of the story is that we need to take care of ourselves first so we are free to help others. But what happens to gifted women struggling with motherhood and homeschooling to such a degree that they cannot get their figurative oxygen mask on?
What happens to gifted women when they become mothers and, especially, when they homeschool their children?
Gifted/2e kids are complex individuals and it takes a tremendous amount of energy to understand them and meet their needs. Gifted children are intense and are often voracious learners with overexcitaiblities that vary depending on how they are wired. Twice-exceptional (2e) gifted children not only get the gifted part of the equation, they also have at least one learning difference (and often many more) which further complicates things.
One author describes parenting gifted kids this way:
Misperceptions about gifted children can add an unwelcome layer of complexity to this situation. Because the general public imagines gifted children to be simply “smart,” and not tremendously complex, multilayered, asynchronous, and intense little people, other adults may be less sympathetic to the plights that gifted parents experience — and may not see them as “plights,” at all. Despite a deeply human need to connect with others, sharing details about daily life with a gifted child can be fraught for their parents.
Well, all of this intensity, overexcitability, and complexity doesn’t just peter out when these kids become adults. These gifted girls grow up to be young women. These women get married and have children. The complexity that comes with being gifted/2e doesn’t disappear when a woman gets married and starts a family. It doesn’t stop because she now has a gifted/2e child (or two or three) who has her own set of needs.
No, the gifted woman simply goes from being a gifted woman with all that THAT entails to also being responsible for all the “stuff” that comes with parenting a gifted child. Throw in homeschooling on top of the parenting (because most schools are ill-equipped to deal with gifted/2e kids) and you have a recipe for some serious overload for the average gifted woman.
How do we know?
In Warning: Parenting a Gifted Child May Be Hazardous to Your (Mental) Health, Jill Williford Wurman discusses a study by Australian researcher Natalie Rimlinger.
So while there is a general and enthusiastic consensus that parenting is normally quite demanding and difficult, do parents of gifted children actually experience more anxiety in any scientifically significant way, or is that just a self-pitying misperception?
This question bothered Natalie Rimlinger, an Australian researcher with a degree in clinical psychology. Given that “parents of children with ADHD and developmental problems show higher levels of stress in comparison to parents of children suffering from HIV and asthma and [typical] children,”[i] it seemed possible that other significant departures from the “average” child were likely to create parental stress and anxiety, as well. Did giftedness in a child in fact actually cause stress to parents, as she suspected, rather than confirming the societal misperception that gifted children are “easier” to parent?
Rimlinger’s study is fascinating and, frankly, very encouraging for gifted women who find themselves struggling with navigating both parenting and homeschooling in their family while wondering if it’s all in their head.
An exhaustive search showed Rimlinger that studies on the psychological well-being of parents of gifted children were… nonexistent. She therefore embarked on doctoral research to evaluate whether or not parents of the gifted truly do have a quantifiable and significantly elevated level of stress compared to parents of “average” children.
Dr. Rimlinger’s conclusions were perhaps more striking than even she had anticipated. Using an instrument called the Depression and Anxiety Stress Scales[ii], Rimlinger profiled the parents of 265 parents of gifted children in the US and 117 parents of Australian gifted children, and her results were clear: while the parents were less stressed[iii]and depressed than she had expected, they were much more anxious than she had expected.[iv] And during her analysis, she realized that the DASS scoring profiles looked familiar.
Indeed, the Americans were strikingly similar to another group: parents of developmentally-delayed children.[v] The Australians “looked like” those parents, as well — and also very much like parents of clinically-referred children, meaning children whose psychological issues were pronounced enough that they were seeking professional help.
What Rimlinger found, then, is what you no doubt suspected: the effect of parenting a gifted child is indeed quantifiably (and significantly) similar to the impact felt by parents of children whose struggles are widely acknowledged to actually be struggles.
In other words, it’s not your imagination — these extraordinary children, unsurprisingly to those who know them, do not always feel like a “gift” in terms of ease of raising them. In fact, this effect may be partly due to the fact the there is a widespread societal misapprehension that advanced intellect in a child paves a smooth road for their progress through life: while it’s hard to feel supported in your efforts as a mother or father if your child’s needs are out of the ordinary, it’s all the more stressful if no one believes you.
When Caroline was only a few years old and before we fully understood how she was wired, we shared with a couple of church leaders who visited our home our struggles with parenting. The response? Laughing and telling us we should have several more children so we wouldn’t have time to worry about it.
Zero understanding, zero empathy, zero support.
Later, after we had gone through testing (and then went through it again), I tried to explain the challenges we faced to a few people in order to help them understand choices we were making that they clearly didn’t understand or support. The answer I received was, “Well, you wanted her.” And then they changed the subject.
Zero understanding, zero empathy, zero support.
I’ve learned the hard way to not discuss these topics with people unless I know in advance they have a gifted/2e child. The pain of being minimized and dismissed is worse than the pain of being alone in your journey.
Gifted women, like gifted children, are wired differently. They don’t have any control over it and they don’t know life any other way. They have an innate driveness that can turn to quiet desperation and eventually depression if it is not fed.
Gifted women cannot give when their tank is empty. And yet they often have no opportunity to fill their own tank (or put their own mask on) because of the needs of their child. They spend so much time and energy dealing with the intensity of their child, they do not get the opportunity to deal with the needs related to their own intensity.
It truly is not an overstatement to say that gifted women who do not have an outlet for their drivenness become seriously impaired. Unless you have experienced it, it can be hard to understand. But the wiring in a gifted woman is so strongly made in certain directions that it can create a true sense of desperation to find an outlet for it. To access information. To create. To do whatever it is her wiring actually demands of her.
The impairment that results often means that gifted women struggle to fully embrace and enjoy motherhood and homeschooling. It isn’t because they don’t want to. It’s because their own deep needs go unmet so frequently that they aren’t able to do so. They repeatedly put the oxygen mask on their child first because they feel there is no other option. When there simply isn’t time for both, the gifted mom will put on her child’s oxygen mask first and take her own chances.
For women who are fortunate enough to understand their giftedness, it often has come at the end of a long struggle. Light bulbs have gone on and the various pieces of their life start to come together to create a more cohesive picture. But once they have that self-knowledge and then find it impossible to act on it, it’s a recipe for massive amounts of stress and frustration. It isn’t something they can turn off and on. It’s something they can only figure out ways to cope with.
But coping can only last so long before burnout starts to move in. No gifted woman can live in the area of constantly giving and dealing with the stress of an intense child without beginning to break down herself. As we see in the study above, the anxiety is real.
One thing I have (anecdotally) noticed over the past few years is that there seems to be a much higher level of just-under-the-surface anger among moms who homeschool gifted/2e kids. Online discussions go south much more quickly, people are very quickly offended, and there seems to be much less empathy when you get a larger group of these moms together. I think much of this is due to the significant stress and pressure on these moms. Many of them live with incredibly intense kids and rarely get a break. Homeschooling a gifted/2e child can be incredibly lonely. I know how much my own situation wears on me and I readily admit mine is mild compared to what many moms of gifted/2e kids deal with on a daily basis. The compounding of their own unmet needs along with the anxiety of parenting and homeschooling gifted/2e kids can build up significant amounts of anger that can break through very quickly.
These are very real struggles in the homeschool community. I think they are needs that are invisible because most gifted homeschool moms aren’t going to voice what they are dealing with within the broader homeschool group. It’s bad enough to label your child as gifted and be judged for having the audacity to believe your child is different. To be a gifted woman and express concern or distress about how it is impacting your own overall well-being is a place most gifted women don’t want to go. It’s too painful to be misunderstood by the other homeschool moms around them.
I think this can be even worse if you are a gifted mother in Christian circles. The Biblical concept of dying to self is real and true. But what does that mean for the gifted woman who becomes a mother of a gifted child? How does she balance her own very real emotional and mental health needs with the needs of her child? It’s not like you can say in your small group or Sunday School class, “I’m a gifted woman with a gifted child and I feel like I’m drowning and losing my mind.” I just laughed while I typed that because the idea of saying that in a church setting is honestly so ludicrous. And that’s really sad.
I don’t know what the answer is. I really don’t. My heart goes out to all these gifted women who struggle every day. It is a hard and lonely road to walk. I don’t have three suggestions to give to fix it and make it better. It’s not that simple and I’m not going to insult gifted women by doing so.
Reading about that study did help. It made me realize that the struggles I deal with are real and not my imagination. It helped me understand other gifted women better and inspired me to work harder to embrace a more compassionate frame of reference with them when they lash out in anger toward me or other people due to their own pain.
And if there is anything we all need, it is more understanding and compassion.
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Having a highly sensitive child is a challenge, especially when she is younger. She can’t fully explain what she feels and thinks. She is unable to think abstractly about topics in the way an adult can so it can be difficult to sort out exactly what is going on. That’s why picture books for highly sensitive children can be a powerful way to help children begin to understand their hard-to-express feelings and experiences.
Someone asked me about picture books for highly sensitive children in the comments of my post The Reality of Holiday Overwhelm for Highly Sensitive Children. I linked to a few books I found on Amazon, but mentioned I hadn’t read any of them.
Thankfully, one of the authors jumped in and offered to send me her book (all the way from Singapore!). I was so pleased to receive them so I could share more about them with my readers, many of whom have highly sensitive children who struggle with life beyond the quiet of home.
Leila Boukarim wrote All Too Much for Oliver to help highly sensitive children see themselves in a story and understand how they interact with the world around them.
Illustrated by Barbara Maxham, this lovely book is a fantastic and peaceful look at the challenges and joys of life as a highly sensitive child.
The book is very simply designed to be gentle and relaxing.
There is lots of white space and the pen and watercolor illustrations are lovely.
Boukarim and Maxham also collaborated on Aiden Finds a Way, a look at a boy who is overwhelmed when he goes to a special event at the firehouse.
Aiden has to work through his fears.
I can guarantee you that every child who is highly sensitive has felt just like Aiden in the illustration. So wanting to participate, but being overwhelmed by all the “other” stuff that goes with it. (Actually, plenty of highly sensitive adults struggle with the same dilemma on a regular basis.)
Both are lovely books with a strong message. The one tiny thing they didn’t address and I wish they did was the need for recovery time once a highly sensitive child gets home. That’s such an important part of being a highly sensitive person – decompressing afterwards. It doesn’t take away from me recommending the books at all. It’s simply an aspect I wish had been included.
I think they are wonderful books if you have a highly sensitive child who struggles with feeling different from other kids or simply struggles to fit into the world around her. All Too Much for Oliver and Aiden Finds a Way do an excellent job of starting the conversation about being comfortable with who you are while also taking brave steps forward and making small changes.
All Too Much for Oliver
Aiden Finds a Way
