Customer Reviews

Gifted Children Grown Up (Nace/Fulton Publication)

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I expected to read a book of the calibre published by Dr. Freeman's American rival, Dr. Silverman. I was horribly dissapointed. This book is short, dry and non-compassionate. There is a particularly smug character to it that I found offensive. Adding to this is contradiction - Dr. Freeman believes there is no such thing as Gifted people, but she writes a book on them. Forgive my confusion. I strongly advise anyone interested in the Gifted to look elsewhere.

I had the privilege of meeting the author of this book at her invited talk at the Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted (SENG) conference in suburban Minneapolis, MN in 2002. What a breath of fresh air! Freeman, whose articles on the development of gifted young people are in all the better anthologies on giftedness, used a rare research design with two control groups--a group of gifted young people (by IQ test) who were not identified as gifted, and a group of matched controls not selected by IQ. This experimental design ought to be used more often in studies of giftedness in the United States. Freeman has also followed her subjects more closely, and for longer, than most other current authors of books on gifted childen as they grow up. I can tell from meeting her that she is very intelligent herself, and her book makes a great contribution to the literature, refuting the mythology found in many other books on the subject. Freeman's book is definitely worth reading for any parent of an identified gifted child.

Half-way through the book, I had to remind myself what it was supposed to be about.

As a teacher, I am very concerned about the gifted youth in our world. I was dismayed to see Freeman was more interested in promoting herself, than promoting the gifted. Sometimes, she seemed to have consistent idea about giftedness, while other times in the book, and in most of her other work, she does not accept giftedness exists. She advocates peculiar ideas about working with gifted children. One is called the "Sports Approach," which, in her convoluted reasoning, will turn her abstractly-defined and supposedly docile gifted kids into David Bekhams. For the PG child, the "Sports Approach" is degrading and wasteful.

People I know have contacted her and found this attitude to be her main strength. Considering the work done in America on the gifted, it is unfortunate that Britain lags so far behind.

I tried very hard to like this book, and to find positive aspects to it. But in the end, it was only a bizarre self-important book containing theories and ideas obsolescent by degree of generations, I am sad to say, compared to work on the same subject from the other side of the Atlantic.

I would endorse this book as a demonstration of how "not" to understand the controversial issue of Gifted children.