For parents of highly intelligent and talented children, the daily shift between extraordinary intellectual depth and overwhelming emotional intensity often defies standard parenting advice.
Raising the Gifted Mind is for parents of children who learn fast, go deep, and feel things harder than other people do, whether or not anyone has ever tested them. It needs no background in child development or giftedness. Every chapter starts with something a parent has already seen at home and builds from there, one step at a time.
The book gives you two things. The first is a simple map, built a piece at a time: your child's Mind, Heart and Body; the different speeds those parts grow; how loudly each one runs; the steadiness of the adults and the home; and the wider world of friends and school. Once you can read a moment with it, the brilliant days and the hard ones stop looking like contradictions. The second is a set of practical moves for the moments that tend to go wrong, each with the words to try, what to watch for, and what to do if it backfires.
Inside you'll find
- 15 chapters in five parts, each following one family through one kind of situation
- 51 Try This boxes, and more than 120 moves gathered in a full toolkit at the back
- A "When This Happens, Try This" index for the hard weeks: meltdowns, a child who won't listen, sibling fights, worries that won't go away, a lie
- 10 worksheets to fill in and print, from strength spotting to a calm-down plan written in your child's own words
- 24 simple diagrams that make the ideas easy to see
- Clear signs for when to talk to a pediatrician, a psychologist or the school
- A plain-words glossary
You'll learn how to
- Tell a bright child from a gifted one, and see the whole child instead of half
- Answer the youngest part of your child in a hard moment, not the cleverest
- Stay steady when your own temper is rising, and repair things when it isn't
- Get through a meltdown stage by stage, and talk about it afterward
- Make requests that land with a child who argues every point
- Shape the day so changes and bedtimes stop being battles
- Feed curiosity, find the right amount of challenge, and loosen the grip of perfectionism
- Help with friendships, siblings, school meetings and big worries
- Hand over independence one step at a time
- Use five questions to read any problem no book covers
None of it requires a perfect parent. The aim is a parent who reads the moment in front of them a little more accurately each month, and comes back to repair things on the days that go badly.
