Customer Reviews

Raising Gifted Kids: Everything You Need to Know to Help Your Exceptional Child Thrive

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Raising Gifted Kids starts off well, describing the support it will offer us later. Sounds good. But the book goes off track quickly.

Klein talks about test scores, describing scores, standard deviations, and descriptions from various tests and test versions, apparently as old as 1970's versions, interchangeably. But they're not interchangeable, and mixing them up this way will confuse parents who don't have another source of testing information, and don't understand the differences between old and modern test versions, and between one modern test and another.

Klein then offers a number of vignettes, which vary from predictable to extreme. These are not supportive because no matter what, the parents are the bad guys. After the introduction talking about all the help and support Raising Gifted Kids will offer us, this chapter tells us how awful we are, and all our good intentions are wrong. Pick a specific gifted school for your child? Wrong. Send your gifted child to public school? Wrong. Live in an isolated rural area and homeschool your gifted child? Very wrong. And lots more. Throughout the vignettes, the psychologist knows the single right answer for each child after only an assessment.

The rest of the book seems more positive, but has it's confusing moments. All gifted kids are not alike educationally or emotionally, and the sweeping generalizations are too grand. More mistaken impressions left behind, especially among parents who are reading for support.

Parents are, for the most part, doing a good job raising their gifted children. Those who aren't, aren't going to read a book about what we need to know - they already know they're doing a perfect job. Good parents need understanding and support. That's why we're buying a book called Raising Gifted Kids: Everything You Need to Know to Know to Help Your Exceptional Child Thrive.

Like our kids, we parents of the gifted don't need someone to tell us how bad we are, how all our choices are wrong. We need someone to point out what we're doing right, and what we can do better. That's the kind of support we need. That's what Raising Gifted Kids should have given us.

Although I was able to find some good information in this book, overall I found it frustrating.

The author makes sweeping generalizations like, "All gifted kids are ____" or "All private schools are _____." I was left with the feeling that she thinks she, personally, is the only person qualified to make decisions about gifted kids. There was just no faith that parents know what is best for their kids or that schools genuinely want to help.

Her chapters on school selection did not reflect my experience at all. (My kids both attend a terrrific public "Gifted Center" school, and we have found the people there responsive, warm, and very very good at what they do.)

Some of the advice is painfully obvious. Don't, for example, say to your child, "Your weird questions are going to send me to an early grave." (I bet you already knew not to do that.) There were also some problems with the writing and some typos or oversights that gave the book an amateurish feel.

Having said all that, I must admit that there were times when a paragraph seemed to be talking about my child or my experience, and a few things were astute enough that I read them aloud to my husband. Thus the second star.

But overall, the author, while clearly very bright, came across as bossy and inflexible with very clear prejudices. Why, for example, did she feel the need to point out what high-powered careers and high-status backgrounds all the parents came from? Does she believe gifted kids are only born into wealthy families? It almost felt like name-dropping.

Bottom line? I'm very glad I didn't have to buy the copy I read. I've definitely read other, better books on this topic.

Pick a different book.

There is much to like about "Raising Gifted Kids". The author offers some very helpful advice for those of us facing the challenge of raising an intellectually gifted child. I particularly appreciate her focus on being a "good enough" parent rather than trying to be a "perfect" one.

The biggest issue I had with Dr. Klein is her elitist tone. She is an educational consultant who obviously has a well-heeled clientèle. The impression she gives in her book is that all gifted kids come from affluent families, which is not the case. She describes each of the parents profiled in the book as "So-and-so, a successful/prominent/stellar/up-and-coming/etc. investment banker/attorney/surgeon/executive/etc." The parents' occupations are not relevant to the point she's trying to make, so why even mention them? She also has a tendency to mention luxury items in passing as if they're a normal part of everyday life. Perhaps everyone in Dr. Klein's social circle has a housekeeper and a gardener and takes travel "adventures" and enrolls their kids in multiple enrichment classes. But I personally found her elitist tone very off-putting.

The author surprisingly is not a know-it-all but rather an astute observer of "high-potential" or "gifted" children. If you are a gifted adult you may find yourself wishing you had this kind of astute parenting! This book will enable many mothers and fathers (and grandparents) to help give the children in their care rich and rewarding lives. Your kids don't have to be geniuses for them to benefit from the author's experience.

It was a decent book, but not a lot of new information for me. For the most part, it simply confirmed some basics I have long believed in - not living out your dreams through your children, encouraging exploration without forcing achievement, the need to provide for additional means of learning, etc. A lot of time spent on selecting schools for gifted kids, which really doesn't apply in small towns like we live in. Some good chapters on different kinds of gifted children and some scattered teaching methods. A lot of "real life" examples stretched across several chapters that in my opinion became a scattered approach.

Probably the most novel idea that came across was that it's better to be a "good enough" parent than a perfect one. By Klein's opinion, if you manage to be the perfect parent, you set a standard so high that your child will have anxieties trying to live up to your example. Not sure I'm 100% with that, but it is an interesting take on parenting.

The author uses her expertise in the area of child devlopment and her vast experience working with gifted children and their families to present a reader friendly guide to parenting gifted children. This book is an excellent resource for parents, teachers, school psychologists and principals.

I found this book extremely helpful in identifying ways to help my gifted twins, one of whom is a traditional learner and the other is not. The book has great insight and information, plus plenty of real-world examples of how parents deal with issues unique to gifted children. One puzzling thing, though, was the notion that there's an anti-gifted bias and that parents of gifted children are somehow seen by educators as meddlers or pushy parents. The author also seems to have the idea that public schools don't know how to deal with gifted children. That hasn't been my experience so far (our public school has an excellent GT & HGT program) and don't expect it to be as my children get older.

To me the main value of this book was its advice about dealing with the perfectionism of a gifted child. Gifted-parenting books frequently bring up the problem of perfectionism, but I have not found much useful advice for dealing with it. Dr. Klein offers some practical suggestions and the insight that former gifted children may have their own perfectionist tendencies to reckon with.

This is an excellent resource for parents of gifted children. Klein provides some great examples of the errors parents too often make when dealing with gifted children such as over emphasizing the child's one area of intelligence, and she provides examples so that parents can avoid these mistakes.

She has an excellent section on the traps or myths society has about what giftedness means, especially within the educational system and how to address or avoid these.

She provides an excellent chapter on how to talk to your gifted child so that the conversation is open, honest, and real. Finally, she emphasizes the need for balance and variety for gifted children and how to achieve that.

I strongly recommend this book.

This book is for anyone who has ever wondered if a child under their care might be gifted, and what to do about it. It's full of affective approaches to a wide range of puzzling, exhausting, and endearing behaviors, and important considerations for educational options. The author has a friendly writing style and is a great source of comfort, confirmation, and inspiration; I will be referring to this book often in the upcoming years.