What is it like to be the parent of a gifted child? featuring Katie Hulett

Welcome to the Vanguard Gifted Academy educational channel. This is the first episode of our new exploration series, “What is it like to be the parent of a gifted child?” I am Katie Hulett, the parent of a gifted child, and I'm looking forward to sharing our experiences with you. We had a little bit of an unusual path to realizing that our son was gifted. We knew he was smart. We also knew that he was loving, kind, funny, and everything you want your child to be; he's a great kid. 

We dropped him off on his first day of second grade happy, healthy, thriving, excited. Over the next two to three months we watched our child get lost. He was no longer the happy, engaged, excited-for-school child that he had been. We didn't understand why this was happening. So we decided to do a little bit of further exploration as to what was going on.

We had him evaluated by a neuro-psych doctor and found out he was gifted. We felt very isolated. You try to talk to other parents about your concerns, about your child, and the minute someone hears the word gifted, they assume you're bragging.

All I wanted to say was “I'm fearful,” and the diagnosis of a gifted child is fantastic in some regards, but also terrifying in other regards because I now have a child who needs different learning, planning, needs a different learning environment and has so much potential, and, if he doesn't find a way to express it, he might never get a chance to reach that potential.

I hope you don't feel isolated. It was one of the hardest things for us to go through, that no one really understood that this wasn't a diagnosis that we were wanting to shout from the rooftops.

We just wanted to help our child. And I'm sure if you're in that same boat, you also just want to help your child. I remember one night on the internet trying to learn what I could because I didn't understand what it meant to be the parent of a gifted child, what we had to do, how this was going to go. I found this fantastic website called Crushing Tall Poppies. One of the blog posts is the Gifted Child's Checklist for Teachers.  It lists 10 things that the parents of gifted children wish their teachers understood about their child.  For each item on the list, you can click on a separate article about that particular subject. I remember reading it and thinking, this is my child. This is what we're dealing with. This is the fear, this is the awesomeness of having a child with this unique learning path. I would highly recommend that you look that up if you're a parent who thinks you might have a gifted child or have been told that you have a gifted child. 

The one thing that worked for us was getting our son into the right environment. We decided to pull him from the school he was at. It was not the right environment, and he had spent four months in a very distressed state at school. He was anxious about going to school. He was crying at school. He was not participating in the curriculum. He was not engaged. He was upset. He was becoming socially withdrawn. He came to Vanguard Gifted Academy, and within 24 hours we started to see him come back. Clearly this was a big change. 

We moved him midweek, we moved mid-trimester, we moved him in the middle of the month. We had to get him into a new environment with teachers and other students who understood him, who understood what he needed, who understood where he was coming from. Elizabeth Blaetz called me after his first day and said, “I want you to know he did get a little teary-eyed at one point, a little overwhelmed, and he just wanted me to call you and have you come get him.” It was very overwhelming.  He had just started a new school! But she went on to tell him, “Your mom trusted me to take care of you today. I'm not going to make you do all the assignments all these other kids are doing, but I'll sit here with you. We can talk about it.” And I will never forget. She said it didn't even take five minutes and he had pulled himself together and he was right back in and I think he wound up doing everything he was assigned to do that day.

He just needed some validation. To know that it was okay to want to learn a little bit differently than perhaps he had been taught in the past. Connor has been at Vanguard Gifted Academy for the past two years now, and he's back. We have our son. He is happy, thriving, learning, all the things we knew he was before. I'm just a mom. I don't have any educational background. I don't have any expertise that I can share other than what our experience was. You're not alone. You just have to find the resources. You have to find the right environment for your child. Then, your child will have an opportunity to reach their potential that you know they have, that you know is in there. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to, comment and share your story with us. For me, it helped me to be able to talk to parents of other gifted kids. It helped to go to some of these resources that we will have available for you. Thank you so much for reading.