Professional programs to help gifted children to deal with the challenges of life

Abstract

Gifted children typically show advanced cognitive abilities and tend to be socially and emotionally more mature than their age mates. Because of this, gifted children have different needs than other children of the same age, both in terms of intellectual challenges and personal development. However, many gifted children experience a big mismatch between these needs and the characteristics of their (learning) environment, and so may become unbalanced or struggle with a number of barriers from an early age onwards (Kieboom, 2015). At our Belgian expertise center ‘Exentra’ we have more than 18 years of experience with helping gifted children to cope with these barriers and provide the necessary guidance to help them grow up to happy and balanced individuals. For this purpose, we have developed a series of remedial programs for toddlers, children, teenagers and adolescents with the aim to strengthen the personality characteristics of these kids and help them to develop the necessary confidence and skills to cope with the challenges of life. In many primary schools in Belgium, for example, the level of complexity of the curriculum does not accommodate the (cognitive) abilities of the gifted child, so that many gifted children tend to get bored and do not develop proper learning attitudes which are essential in their further academic career. Hence, many of these children become (severe) underperformers when faced with complex material in high school, college or university. To prevent this from happening, we have designed a part-time educational program to confront gifted children with challenging exercises in groups with other gifted peers. Working in group helps these children to realize that other gifted children struggle with the same barriers, such as fear of failure and the tendency to give up when things do not come easy. To overcome these barriers, the children are taught for example how to set realistic expectations for themselves, and how to deal with the frustrations of not being able to complete an exercise ‘in the blink of an eye’. The details of the programs that we offer at Exentra will be presented during the conference and the preventative and curative effects will be discussed.