Developing a Feeling Vocabulary
This post explains why emotionally intense people benefit from developing a broader feeling vocabulary and offers family activities to build it, including posting feeling words, choosing a word of the day, acting out or drawing feelings, finding synonyms, and ordering words by intensity to improve communication and emotional understanding.
Elementary Lessons for Mom
A mother recounts her gifted son’s early elementary struggles—behavioral and writing difficulties—leading to psycho-educational testing and a sensory integration diagnosis. Sensory therapies, accommodations, and advocacy helped him thrive academically and emotionally. She emphasizes collaboration with schools, flexibility in solutions, and adjusted expectations for gifted children’s needs.
Supporting Self-Esteem
Using George Mason’s Final Four experience, the post reflects on helping gifted children cope with competition and loss. It emphasizes balancing achievement with fun, fostering supportive environments, countering perfectionism, and teaching resilience so young people value effort and recover from failure with pride and perspective.
Young Gifted Children
Beverly Shaklee outlines common concerns about young gifted children, emphasizing reasonable expectations, distinguishing advanced cognitive knowledge from age-appropriate social competence, and supporting children through balanced parenting and schooling decisions. She advocates evidence-based, long-term planning, play and literacy-rich experiences rather than premature formal schooling.
Adolescence and Gifted: Addressing Existential Dread
Discusses how existential dread affects gifted adolescents and how adults can help. Advocates team approaches—parents, teachers, and peers—to provide social nourishment, emotional acceptance, and philosophical guidance, recognize developmental ambivalence, teach social skills, and offer mentorship to reduce isolation, depression, and suicidal ideation.
The Affective Side: Emotional Issues of Twice Exceptional Students
Twice-exceptional students face emotional challenges—anger, fear of failure, control, low self-esteem, and fear of success—that can impede achievement. Early identification, accommodations, and strong support systems help them use strengths, learn compensatory skills, and develop competence, resilience, and academic success.
Why We Homeschooled
The author explains why homeschooling suited their gifted son and family, offering ten reasons: control over labels, tailored pacing, better sleep, managing perfectionism, travel opportunities, introvert-friendly learning, lifelong growth, mixed-age socialization, mentoring, and family time. Concludes that families must decide if homeschooling fits their child.
Diagnosis Questions
Discusses how giftedness can be mistaken for disorders and offers guidance for parents and professionals. It outlines how gifted children’s intensity and uneven abilities can resemble Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Non-Verbal Learning Disorder, mood disorders, or ADHD, and stresses individualized assessment, proper challenge, and tailored interventions.
The Gifted Identity Formation Model
Mahoney presents the Gifted Identity Formation Model, a counseling framework linking identity theory to practical interventions. He defines four constructs—Validation, Affirmation, Affiliation, Affinity—and twelve systems influencing gifted development, offering assessment and guidance to support healthier identity formation and tailored counseling for gifted individuals.
Teaching Gifted Learners to Manage Stress in High School
This article outlines stress risks for gifted high school students balancing rigorous academic programs and adolescent development. It recommends curriculum and home guidance, presents effective coping strategies (positive appraisal, time management, supportive actions), warns against ineffective approaches, and lists further reading and references.