What is it like to be the parent of a gifted child? featuring Nancy Zaccagnini

Welcome to the Vanguard Gifted Academy education channel. This is episode number two of our new exploration series, What is it like to be a parent of a gifted child? I'm Nancy Zaccagnini, and I am the parent of a gifted child. 

Raising a gifted child can be both an extreme joy and an extreme challenge.

One of the things that I recognized early on about my son was that he was very alert as a baby. He had a very intense focus. He also started doing things very early. He sounded out the alphabet at 11 months old; at 16 months old, he could say his alphabet both forward and in reverse. He taught me how to do it. I, at the age of 40, had never known how to do it. He could count endlessly in many different languages. He could skip count all the way up to twelves by the age of two. 

It was his decision to learn different languages; I was blown away. I just thought that he was intrigued by a lot of different things, and I didn't understand giftedness. At first, I thought he had a photographic memory; then, I started doing some research. I knew nothing about giftedness. I began reading a lot of books, Raising A Gifted Child by Carol Fertig and Living with Intensity by Michael Marian Piechowski and Susan Daniels. I also started researching Facebook pages. I found one that was extremely helpful, Parents of Gifted and High Ability Children. I also started delving in and just eating up every article I could find because I wanted to know more to help my son. 

I began noticing other moms noticing that my son was different. They started noticing that he was more advanced than the other kids in his social groups. I even had moms say things to me like "wow, you have a genius there" or "you must spend a lot of time with him" or "boy, I'm a bad mom because my kids don't know those things". 

I would say, "Oh no, every child has a gift. This happens to be his gift. He's advanced in this area, but behind in this area." But then I started noticing that they thought I was bragging about the things he was achieving. I started noticing that we weren't getting invited to certain playdates or getting invited to outings. I even had a neighbor start avoiding me, and I later found out that she was feeling very uncomfortable because her child, who was a bit older, had not reached the same milestones or obtained the same skills that my son had. So I started hiding the fact that he was gifted, and I started making up excuses for why he knew the things he knew. We even had a child psychologist tell us that we needed to focus more on him playing with his social group, his age group, that we shouldn't worry so much about the education part. 

So we did just that, and what we noticed was that our son became frustrated and anxious. He started begging for us to do school. We decided to give him what he wanted. So I started homeschooling him at the age of three. He very quickly started consuming all of the information I was giving him. He was flying through a series of books. I could not keep up with what he wanted to learn. He was asking me at the age of three to do multiplication and division. Then he started asking me questions about the body. He wanted to know how everything worked, and then he would go to parties and gatherings and tell everyone all the information he had acquired. Then he started asking me things that I didn't know the answer to, things that I had no knowledge of, and that's when I realized that I needed to do something different. 

I started talking to family and friends who work in the public school district. One of the things that kept coming up from all these folks was that the public school arena was not the place for him. He would become bored, not challenged, and he would be that kid that got in trouble. I also heard, "Don't do that to the teachers. They don't have the time or the resources to foster his education or what he wants.” So I started researching Montessori schools, public schools, STEM schools, private schools, and then my research brought me to Vanguard Gifted Academy. I sent an email immediately, and I received a response very quickly.  Within a week, I was visiting Vanguard. 

The one thing I can say is the moment I left that school I knew it was the place for my son. I knew that there was finally a place that my son would not be different. He would not be the odd kid out, and he would have a world of opportunity opening up for him. I was so happy, I was so relieved, and I couldn't wait to start him at Vanguard. He now had teachers that understood him and what he was going through. I had someone that I could rely on to talk to and get advice. So I'm very grateful that we found Vanguard. 

This is our journey, and if this resonates with your journey, we'd like to start a conversation with you. We want to be a resource for you, so feel free to contact us.