I will always be grateful the Lord impressed upon me the importance of learning from parents further along than I was. The greatest warning about gifted/2e children was something that was never directly said by parents but became apparent to me after observation.

The greatest risk to gifted/2e children isn’t the academic portion. It’s the emotional and psychological aspect.

While observing and learning from dozens and dozens of bloggers, YouTubers, authors, Facebook group members, etc., it gradually became clear there was something truly significant in this aspect of parenting these children.

What I noticed, however, is that very few of the discussions centered on the source of these issues. Most of the conversations were about the existence of the problem and what they were doing to fix it. If causes were mentioned, it was usually blamed on either the teacher/school or medical/chemical issues (or both). The fixing usually involved arguing with school officials for years while advocating for their child’s needs and dealing with doctors or specialists prescribing medications. I read so many heart-breaking stories of children who were just a complete and total mess (along with what it did to their parents).

I did not want any of that for my child or myself.

So I asked myself where gifted/2e children were being failed before all of this happens. Because I’m a Christian, I looked at it through a biblical lens. It became apparent that some of the issues involved the following.

• Stress overload and lack of downtime
• Lack of God, truth, and moral framework
• Lack of sleep and physical refreshment
• Works-based faith
• Emotionally unhealthy parents
• Immersion in liberal thinking circles

Each of those could be an individual post. I will write specifically about some of them in the days ahead.

I then tried to determine where our family’s situation was most vulnerable to making the same mistakes. What proactive steps could we take as a family to mitigate as much as possible the likelihood of falling into the same unhealthy spiral I saw in so many families with gifted/2e children?

It seems to me that many to most gifted/2e families rank the following priorities like this:

1. Academic
2. Social
3. Emotional
4. Spiritual

Honestly, I don’t even know if many of the families even consider the Spiritual. It’s like it isn’t even a part of the equation. 

Instead, we almost completely flipped the list. Among these needs, our priorities were (and still are):

1. Spiritual
2. Emotional
3. Academic
4. Social

Clearly there are other aspects of life I didn’t include in the list (such as physical and diet) that play into all these as well. But these are the ones that seemed to show up over and over again. 

In the coming days, I’ll flesh this out in terms of the choices we made and how we handled various aspects of homeschooling and parenting our gifted/2e daughter. Some of these topics I’ve written about in the past, but without revealing the framework I had running in the back of my mind during that time.

Now that we’re finishing up our homeschooling life, I’m ready to talk more openly about what motivated some of the choices we made and how it worked out.

I hope what I share will bless you and give you courage to make the choices you need to make for the well-being of your child and family.

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