Gifted Children who are a Gift to the World, Part 4
by Jeannette Webb
We’ve spent the last three weeks looking at how to successfully raise gifted kids. The final thing to consider is that they need to spend most of their time in the adult world.
Intellectually gifted children will totally outdistance other kids in their peer group. They know more than the others and have a quicker wit. They are often bored with the usual “teen” interests and this can lead to either underachievement or egotism. We decided to help our children keep life in perspective by having them spend most of their time in the adult world. One example of this is their attendance in adult Sunday School.
Instead of being in class with teen dramas, cliques, crushes, and self-centered prayer requests, they were with intelligent adults studying hard things. Their class of treasured older friends contains the brilliant university provost as well as a line-worker at the local factory. They gain from both perspectives. Learning by example to truly search out scripture during hardship has kept my kids grounded.
My children are in constant fellowship with these adult friends. We have faced together job loss, death, cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, Huntington’s Disease, agonizing months waiting for an organ transplant, and teenagers gone astray. Because they watched these adults daily living out their faith in a pain-filled world, friendship evangelism was an easy step in college. My children’s faith is not based on emotion or dependent on hordes of friends backing them up during a planned “outreach” event. They are comfortable walking alone for Christ.
I’m convinced that we lose so many Christian kids in college because we send them off with a weak, emotion-based, borrowed faith that has never been tested by fire. We have made life too comfortable and easy for them. They don’t know how to wrestle with scripture or with hard things. Worse yet, we often just expect a carbon copy of what we profess. We give them lists of rules. We do not tolerate a different opinion. Tough questions are viewed as rebellion. Only when they parrot back the right verbiage, do we consider our job well done. Be forewarned that this style of parenting will backfire. If your children do not own their faith, college will make short work of them.
The unnerving thing about parenting a gifted child is their ability to see past our pretense. If we would bring them outside themselves to help them lead a balanced, complete life, we must be willing to go first: to be uncomfortable, to fail, to recognize our own weakness and have the courage to confront it.
More than anything else in the homeschool lifestyle, this issue of spiritual maturity requires first that we be mature as parents. We must live with a transparency that gives our children insight into how to overcome their own personal and spiritual struggles. They can’t learn this from their youth pastor or their coach or their peers. It can only come as you journey along the Deuteronomy road together – when you sit, when you walk, when you lie down, when you rise up. We cannot talk at our kids (especially gifted kids). We must roll up our sleeves and do life together. There must be a constant dialog with them, learning together, working together, suffering together, and crying together. If we offer them anything less, we deserve their cynicism.
This side-by-side lifestyle allows me to hold up my gifted child when he stumbles. But the miracle is that it also allows him to catch me when I falter and thus develop his own muscles. Rather than fostering contempt, it creates a deep respect and tenderness in my almost adult child. It gives him the courage to face hard things. After all, he has seen me do it time and time again.
Walking the Talk
God has entrusted us with much when he gave us a gifted child. The responsibility is incredible. Just think of the temporal and eternal implications of parenting an exceptional child well. This child could use their gifts to literally change the world – finding the cure for cancer, building an organization to relieve world poverty, or writing a concerto that touches our hearts.
They say children don’t come with an instruction book, but I beg to disagree. It’s all right there in the Gospels: how to teach, how to lead, how to parent. Jesus did not hand his disciples a papyrus scroll and expect them to learn by memorizing it. He did not send them to youth group meetings at the synagogue. He walked in front of them sometimes and beside them sometimes, constantly talking, teaching, saying . . . .
See?
Watch me.
Do as I do.
Let me explain.
Here is the secret of what you do not understand.
And then, he washed their feet.
Christ did life together with this rag tag group of immature young men and then turned them loose to change the world.
So there you have it – a method so very simple and yet so uncomfortably radical. This paradox requires us to lose our lives in order that our children find Life. If we persist in our selfishness, we risk losing our gifted children altogether. Eventually, a character flaw will overwhelm their gift and the loss will ripple throughout eternity.
We are the adults. It’s time to start acting like it.
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Copyright 2008 Home Life, Inc., PO Box 1190, Fenton, MO 63026-1190, (800) 346-6322, www.home-school.com. Originally published in Practical Homeschooling # 82. A Practical Homeschooling subscription is $19.95 for six issues. Used by permission.
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