Guide to Supporting the Gifted Child
Gifted children think, feel, and learn differently – and that can come with both immense potential and unique challenges. Whether your child is curious, creative, a high-achiever, or quietly intense, this guide is here to help you understand what giftedness looks like, how gifted children learn best, and how to support their growth – especially if they have learning differences.
Drawing from leading experts and educational models, this resource covers everything from recognising signs of giftedness to advocating for your child at school, navigating twice-exceptionality and fostering emotional resilience at home.
Whether you’re just beginning the journey or looking for ways to better support your bright child, this guide aims to inform, reassure and empower.
Select the headings or icons below to explore each section.
Giftedness is about potential and abilities that significantly exceed typical expectations for a child’s age. It may appear in intellectual domains (like problem-solving or reasoning), creative expressions (art or innovation), emotional intelligence, or physical talents.
It’s important to distinguish between children who are gifted and those who are high achievers – gifted children might not always perform exceptionally in traditional settings due to various factors.
Signs of Giftedness to Watch For
Gifted children often display unique combinations of traits, making them stand out. Some signs include:
Cognitive Indicators
🔹 Rapid Learning: They grasp complex concepts quickly, often requiring little repetition or review.
🔹 Early Mastery: Skills like reading, maths, or creative expression may emerge earlier than peers.
🔹 Curiosity: They ask probing, insightful questions and have an insatiable desire to learn.
🔹 Problem-Solving: Gifted children often find innovative solutions to challenges.
Social and Emotional Characteristics
🔹 Emotional Depth: They may exhibit intense feelings and deep empathy for others.
🔹 Justice-Oriented: A heightened sense of fairness or morality is common.
🔹 Preference for Older Peers: They might seek out older friends who share their interests or maturity level.
🔹 Complex Humour: They enjoy wit and irony beyond their years.
Physical or Creative Talent
🔹 Exceptional ability in sports, art, music, or dance.
Challenges and Needs
While their potential is vast, gifted children often face obstacles:
| Obstacle | Manifestation |
|---|---|
| Social Struggles | They may feel isolated or misunderstood, particularly if their peers don’t share their interests or maturity level. Camouflaging abilities to “fit in” can lead to underachievement. |
| Emotional Intensity | Their deep empathy and heightened reactions may cause them to feel overwhelmed in challenging situations. Gifted children often experience perfectionism, fearing failure or criticism. |
| Underachievement or Boredom | Without appropriate challenges, they can disengage from learning. |
| Twice Exceptional (2e) Traits | Some gifted children also have learning disabilities (e.g., dyslexia or ADHD), complicating their educational needs. |
What Parents Can Do
Supporting a gifted child requires a mix of advocacy, encouragement, and understanding.
At Home:
🔹 Foster Interests: Provide books, tools, and experiences to nurture their passions.
🔹 Encourage Emotional Resilience: Teach them to embrace failure as part of growth and to manage intense feelings constructively.
🔹 Balance Activities: Allow them time to explore creativity and relax, avoiding burnout from over-scheduling.
🔹 Connect with Peers: Seek extracurricular programs or online communities where they can interact with like-minded individuals.
At School:
🔹 Communicate with Teachers: Share observations about your child’s abilities and needs to advocate for tailored support.
🔹 Ask About Differentiation: Explore enrichment programs, ability grouping, or curriculum compacting to challenge them academically.
🔹 Monitor Engagement: If they seem disengaged or underperforming, discuss adjustments with educators.
For Twice-Exceptional Children:
🔹 Work closely with specialists to create strategies that address both their strengths and challenges.
In the Community:
🔹 Leverage Resources: Seek gifted education programs or mentorship opportunities.
🔹 Find Support Networks: Connect with other families of gifted children for advice and camaraderie.
Gifted children have unique learning needs that standard classrooms may not always meet. Curriculum differentiation and compacting are key educational strategies that teachers in schools and other settings can use to help address these needs, offering tailored learning experiences to maximise your child’s potential.
What Is Curriculum Differentiation?
Curriculum differentiation is an approach to teaching that adjusts the content, process, product and environment to suit the diverse learning styles and paces of students.
For gifted students, this means:
🔹 Challenging Content: Lessons are designed to be abstract, complex, and varied to match their advanced understanding.
🔹 Flexible Processes: Activities promote higher-order thinking, creativity, and problem-solving.
🔹 Real-World Applications: Tasks connect to real-world problems, making learning more engaging.
🔹 Independent Learning Opportunities: Students can explore topics in depth at their own pace.
🔹 Differentiation ensures that gifted children remain engaged, reducing boredom and frustration while fostering a sense of achievement.
What Is Curriculum Compacting?
Curriculum compacting streamlines what your child already knows, eliminating unnecessary repetition. This frees up time for:
🔹 Enrichment Activities: Diving deeper into topics of interest.
🔹 Acceleration Opportunities: Learning content designed for older students.
🔹 Independent Projects: Encouraging exploration of complex, self-chosen subjects.
For example, if your child excels in maths, they might pre-test out of basic units and spend that time working on advanced concepts or projects like coding or statistical analysis.
Effective learning environments for gifted children
Gifted children thrive in environments that:
1. Challenge Them: They need tasks that stretch their abilities, such as problem-solving and analytical thinking.
2. Offer Depth: Opportunities to explore topics deeply rather than just skimming the surface.
3. Encourage Creativity: Activities that involve invention, design, or open-ended outcomes.
4. Promote Self-Directed Learning: Giving them autonomy to pursue interests builds motivation and independence.
Models used to plan activities for gifted learners
Gifted learners often excel when teaching is framed around models like Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Williams Model.
Understanding Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Williams Model
1. Bloom’s Taxonomy:
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework for developing higher-order thinking skills, organised into six levels:
🔹 Knowledge: Remembering facts.
🔹 Comprehension: Understanding information.
🔹 Application: Using knowledge in new situations.
🔹 Analysis: Breaking down concepts.
🔹 Synthesis: Creating something new.
🔹 Evaluation: Making judgements or decisions.
Activities based on this taxonomy encourage progression from basic understanding to complex problem-solving and creativity. Teachers may use this to plan appropriate activities in a differentiated learning environment. An implication for the teaching of gifted students is that the emphasis should be on activities at the higher levels of the taxonomy such as Synthesis and Evaluation. This ensures that the learning environment and activities remain challenging and stimulating.
Implications for Parents:
🔹 Advocate for learning activities that encourage your child to think critically and creatively rather than just memorising facts.
🔹 Look for and encourage teachers to include tasks at higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, such as projects requiring analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
🔹 Support your child at home by engaging in discussions or activities that promote these skills, such as designing experiments, debating ideas, or writing reflective essays.
2. The Williams Model:
The Williams Model focuses on developing creative and divergent thinking skills in students and lists 18 strategies teachers can adopt for this purpose, such as for example:
🔹 Analogies: Making connections between unrelated concepts.
🔹 Provocative Questions: Encouraging deep and reflective thinking.
🔹 Skills of Search: Teaching effective research methods.
🔹 Tolerance for Ambiguity: Helping students navigate uncertainty.
These type of strategies engage students meaningfully, challenging them to think deeply and explore ideas beyond surface-level understanding.
Implications for Parents:
🔹 Ensure your child has opportunities to engage in activities that challenge their thinking, such as solving complex problems or exploring new perspectives.
🔹 Encourage schools to implement creative thinking strategies from the Williams Model to enrich your child’s learning experience.
🔹 At home, foster an environment that values curiosity and exploration by introducing open-ended questions, creative projects, and opportunities for independent research.
Educational Strategies That Work
In summary, here are some key principles of educational strategies that work well for gifted students:
1. Pre-Testing: Helps identify what your child already knows, ensuring they are not held back or discouraged by repeated material.
2. Tiered Assignments: Provides tasks at varying levels of complexity.
3. Independent Research Projects: Allows your child to dive into topics they are passionate about while developing critical thinking and inquiry skills.
4. Creative Thinking Models: Frameworks like the Williams Model and Bloom’s Taxonomy promote exploration and mastery of advanced concepts.
What Should Parents Consider?
To support your gifted child effectively:
🔹 Advocate for Differentiation: Work with teachers to ensure your child’s learning needs are met.
🔹 Encourage Enrichment Outside School: Look for programs, competitions, or online courses that challenge your child’s interests.
🔹 Foster Independence: Help them learn how to manage time and projects effectively.
🔹 Monitor Progress: Regularly check in with teachers and your child to ensure they feel challenged and supported.
Gifted children need educational experiences tailored to their unique abilities and interests. By understanding and advocating for curriculum differentiation, compacting, and proven educational models, you can help your child thrive both academically and emotionally.
Further specific reading and information about gifted children and their educational needs can be found with GERRIC, the gifted education centre at the University of NSW. Thank you to GERRIC for their many resources that were used to compile this guide.
Recognising giftedness in children can be surprisingly tricky. Many parents picture gifted kids as straight A students or early readers who breeze through school, but giftedness takes many forms – and it doesn’t always show up on a report card. Some gifted children may struggle with boredom, social issues, or even behavioural challenges in a typical classroom setting. Others might blend in so well that their exceptional abilities go unnoticed entirely!
Schools and parents sometimes rely on IQ tests, achievement scores and teacher referrals to identify gifted students in primary school. But IQ tests are imperfect, and many teachers receive little to no training in gifted education. That’s why parents’ insights are so crucial. You know your child best, and early signs of giftedness can often be spotted long before formal testing begins.
Gifted children may show advanced language development, strong memory, deep curiosity, or intense focus on specific interests. They may also exhibit unusual emotional sensitivity, leadership skills, or creative problem-solving abilities.
But not all gifted kids look alike. Some may have hidden gifts that are masked by learning differences, anxiety, or perfectionism.
Being informed and observant allows you, as a parent, to better advocate for your child’s needs and ensure they have access to the right challenges and supports.
Questions Parents Can Ask Themselves to Explore Giftedness
1. Does my child learn new things quickly and with little instruction?
2. Do they ask deep or unusually insightful questions for their age?
3. Have they shown early development in language, reading, or memory?
4. Do they focus intensely on particular interests or hobbies?
5. Are they emotionally intense or highly sensitive to others’ feelings?
6. Do they prefer the company of older children or adults?
7. Do teachers, family members, or other adults often comment on their abilities or behaviours?
8. Do they get bored, frustrated, or act out when not intellectually challenged?
9. Have they ever struggled in school despite appearing bright or capable at home?
10. Do they show leadership qualities, creativity, or enjoy solving complex problems in their own way?
If many of these questions resonate with your experience, it may be worth discussing with educators or seeking an evaluation. Remember, giftedness isn’t about labels – it’s about understanding how your child learns and experiences the world and making sure they’re supported in becoming the best version of themselves.
Further reading
If you are keen to learn more about giftedness, the article above was informed by the work of David Palmer, educational psychologist specialising in giftedness assessment and consultation. On our website we also provide a helpful Education Support Centre with links to other places where you can find inspiration and information about how to identify and support a gifted child.
How The Swot Shop can support your gifted child
At The Swot Shop we have over 30 years of experience in working with bright, high potential and gifted students. Our programs are developed to provide the stimulating and engaging learning environments that help gifted children learn and thrive. Our teachers and programs aim to stretch, challenge and nurture the natural curiosity and interest in learning that gifted students bring, helping them to develop their high order thinking skills and translating natural gifts into talent.
Many parents are surprised to learn that some gifted children also have learning disabilities or difficulties. This is also known as “twice-exceptionality,” and is more common than you might think. Research indicates that around 14% of gifted children also have a disability, including ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Specific Learning Disorder and Emotional Learning Disorder.
These children have a unique combination of strengths and challenges. They might impress with their creative ideas or problem-solving skills while struggling with things like focus, managing emotions, or social interactions. Recognising this mix is key to helping your child thrive.
Signs to Watch For
If your gifted child has additional needs, you might notice some of the following:
🔹 Strong abilities in one area, struggles in another: They may be advanced in reading but find writing or organising their work very challenging.
🔹 Sensory sensitivities: Bright lights, loud sounds, or certain textures might bother them more than other kids.
🔹 Big emotions: Your child may get very frustrated or anxious over things that seem small to others.
🔹 Difficulty focusing or staying on task: They might get distracted easily or struggle to finish things they start, even if they’re interested in the topic.
🔹 Social challenges: They could have trouble making friends or understanding social cues, sometimes preferring to play alone.
🔹 Avoiding tough tasks: If something feels hard, they might avoid it completely, often out of fear of failure or frustration.
Practical Tips for Parents
Supporting your twice-exceptional child can be challenging but there are ways to help – and these are good tips for parents of all children, not just those with disabilities.
🔹 Focus on strengths: Celebrate what your child does well. Encourage them to spend time on activities that bring them joy and confidence.
🔹 Break tasks into smaller steps: Big assignments or chores can feel overwhelming. Helping them tackle things one step at a time makes it more manageable.
🔹 Create a calming routine: Predictable routines can help reduce stress. Try adding regular quiet time, deep breathing, or relaxation techniques into their day.
🔹 Use positive language: When they’re struggling, frame challenges as opportunities to learn and grow rather than failures.
🔹 Seek professional advice: If you suspect your child may have a learning difficulty, talk to a teacher, psychologist, or paediatrician. Early support can make a big difference.
🔹 Collaborate with their school: Share what you know about your child’s strengths and struggles with their teacher. A united team approach can create a more supportive learning environment.
🔹 Encourage social skills: Help your child practise skills like taking turns, sharing, or expressing emotions in positive ways. Role-playing tricky social situations at home can help.
You’re Not Alone
Parenting a gifted child with a disability can feel like a rollercoaster, but remember, you’re not alone. Many parents face similar challenges, and there’s support available. By recognising your child’s unique mix of abilities and needs, you can give them the tools to shine in their own extraordinary way.
We have compiled this information for general insight into the topic for parents. Please note it is of a general nature and does not replace specific healthcare or other expert advice.
Parenting gifted children can be both rewarding and complex, particularly when they face learning difficulties or disabilities such as ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Understanding their unique needs and adopting evidence-based strategies can empower parents to better support their child’s growth and development.
Understanding the Challenges
Children who are both gifted and diagnosed with ADHD or ASD often face distinct challenges:
🔹 ADHD: A neurobiological disorder affecting approximately 1 in 20 Australian children, ADHD can impair executive functions like planning, focus, and emotion regulation. Symptoms may include impulsivity, difficulty sustaining attention, and challenges in managing frustration.
🔹 ASD: Affects about 1 in 70 Australians, influencing how individuals interact with others, process sensory input, and manage change. Executive function challenges such as flexibility and self-monitoring are common, alongside heightened sensory sensitivities and a preference for routine.
Both conditions can mask and complicate the identification of giftedness, making a holistic approach essential for their support.
What is Positive Behaviour Support?
Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) is an evidence-based, person-centred approach aimed at improving the quality of life and addressing challenging behaviours. Key principles include:
| Understanding Behaviour Functions | Recognising whether behaviour stems from sensory needs, avoidance, or communication difficulties |
|---|---|
| Teaching Alternative Skills | Encouraging functional communication, problem-solving, and emotional regulation. |
| Environmental Adjustments | Creating supportive, predictable settings |
| Proactive Strategies | Preventing challenging behaviours before they arise through consistent routines and positive reinforcement |
Practical Strategies for Parents
🔹 Model Desired Behaviours: Demonstrate appropriate ways to express emotions and interact with others.
🔹 Teach Coping Mechanisms: Help children develop techniques like deep breathing or creating an “escape plan” for stressful situations.
🔹 Modify Expectations: Adjust goals to suit your child’s strengths and challenges, ensuring they remain achievable.
🔹 Collaboration: Work closely with educators, therapists, and support teams to ensure a unified approach.
The Power of Perspective
Parents’ beliefs about their child’s behaviour significantly influence outcomes. Viewing behaviours through a lens of understanding rather than frustration can fosters a more constructive response. This is not always going to be easy, but by focusing on prevention and fostering their child’s emotional and cognitive strengths, parents can help gifted children with disabilities thrive in both school and life.
Further information about learning difficulties and disabilities in children can be found through Learning Links, an expert not-for-profit organisation specialising in supporting children with learning difficulties and disabilities.
Thank you to Learning Links for their professional development and learning resources that have helped to inform the information in this guide.
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