World Ready Kids

Preparing kids, especially gifted kids, for the global future.

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Parenting World Ready Kids

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A Global Future
World Ready Kids are prepared for a future where they compete globally.

Parenthood is thrilling, painful, anxiety-filled, challenging, and the most rewarding experience . . . often all within the same hour. The task of raising other human beings from scratch is difficult, because they come with minds and personalities of their own. Sometimes you have to deal with “nature” and “nurture” battling it out. What society now deems as “good” parenting has evolved. At the risk of dating myself, when I was growing up we didn’t use car seats or even seat belts, spanking was still acceptable, cigarette-shaped gum was cool, and my eight-year old friends and I could roam the streets to the playground or store without any adult supervision. These days, the rules have changed and all these things that I did growing up are now reasons a neighbor with good intentions would report me to Child Protective Services. Today’s parents have to be on their toes because we cannot, or do not want to, use many aspects of our own childhood upbringing as a guide to good parenting. We raise our kids in this hyper aware environment where the internet and social media, at any unexpected and vulnerable moment, can call us out for raising entitled and teacup-fragile, snowflake children. Furthermore, we have to raise our kids, not for today’s work environment, but for tomorrow’s. The cliche is apt: parenthood does not come with a manual. As with most parents, I have had to muddle through, figuring it out as I went along, writing three manuals for three different children.

So what to do when you don’t have the definitive manual for child-rearing? Well, if you are a Type-A planner and organizer like me, you raise your kids with a lot of intentionality. I read books and articles on raising kids. I attended Love-and-Logic workshops and attended day-long conferences on gifted children. Am I Tiger Mom? Free-range Mom? Authoritative Mom? And then I learned some things worked, some things were failures, and some things were wretchedly difficult to implement. Often, I had to go back to the drawing board or my efforts fell short of my intentions. Occasionally, I surrendered . . . and my kids are still okay (at least I think so, crossing my fingers here).

Over time, my husband and I came up with a child-rearing philosophy. I call it, “World Ready Kids.” Essentially there are three goals to the World Ready Kids philosophy. First, I want to raise children who are decent, kind, and compassionate. No idiots, jerks, or buffoons, please, God! Second, I aim to raise kids who are responsible, independent, and self-sufficient. This means that they should be able to cook, do laundry, keep house, handle finances, advocate for themselves, and solve their own problems by the time they leave for college. They might still have to come live at home after college to pay off their student debt, but they will actually pay it off in full and help with the housekeeping. Third, I endeavor to prepare my children to succeed and thrive in a world that looks very different from what it is now, a world that is fast-changing and full of innovation.

The last goal of World Ready Kids, preparing them for a fast-changing world, needs some elaboration. Technology, such as artificial intelligence and robotics, will change every aspect of our lives in the future. In addition, despite our country’s current pursuit of isolationist policies, globalization is a reality. Even if our country wants to put blinders on and believe that globalization will stop if the US doesn’t participate, globalization will continue and it will just leave the US behind. Therefore, to be prepared for a technology-filled, global workplace, World Ready Kids need both the hard skills and the soft skills to succeed. I believe that the soft skills, such as the flexibility to handle change, creativity, a problem-solving mentality, being proactive, and resourcefulness, are the skills that will be most helpful to future-proofing my kids.

So this blog documents my research, as well as my trials and tribulations implementing my ideas about raising kids. One thing I know for sure is that there is no one “right way” to child rearing. I talk about the things that worked and didn’t work for our family. What works for your family will depend on your kids, your needs, your history, and your values. I share my ideas so you can pick and choose if something might work for your family. I hope you can find some value from my journey.

Gifted Kids And Dealing With Their Intense Emotions

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Gifted Kids Have Tantrums and Meltdowns
Understanding how gifted kids are wired helps parents to deal with tantrums, meltdowns, and intense emotions. Photo by Marco Albuquerque on Unsplash

From outward appearances, it would seem that our family was blessed with healthy, very bright, and well-behaved kids. What others did not see is that, at home, I often had to deal with epic meltdowns and intense tantrums. My kids’ emotional outbursts seemed bigger, more intense. As a Type-A mom, I read articles and books on child-raising and implemented all the advice on getting kids to behave. The advice seemed to work only marginally. The examples the child experts gave made it seem all so easy to get kids to calm down, or comply with directions. That was not my experience. I was overwhelmed and I began to think I was a flawed parent. Then, I went to a workshop about gifted kids and my whole world changed.

When my kids were in elementary school, they were tested and identified as “highly-capable.” In Washington State, where we live, school administrators use the term “highly-capable,” but in other states they use terms like “gifted and talented” to identify kids who exhibit advanced academic abilities, as well as kids who see the world differently, in a more out-of-the-box way. Other parents and many teachers often see these gifted kids as ones who do well in school and are, very generally speaking, better-behaved. However, these other parents and teachers do not see the battles and struggles we parents have with our gifted kids at home.

I had many of the usual struggles other parents had, but some of my struggles seemed unique and more challenging than other parents’ struggles. My kids’ seemed to take things harder, react bigger, feel deeper, and be more persistent. For example, when my son was in second or third grade and played soccer, when he realized that time was running out for his team to tie or win the game, he would start crying on the field DURING the game in huge disappointment that a loss was imminent, and he would be inconsolable. When my older daughter was in early elementary school, there was a time when she refused to wear pants and many types of clothing, so we had many battles about what was appropriate for her to wear to school in the winter, and we often arrived late to school because of the arguments. When my younger daughter would learn about earthquakes or overhear some plot of a scary story, she would become afraid such an event would happen, so afraid she would cry, or need to sleep in our bedroom at night for weeks. As I mentioned previously, the standard parenting advice in articles that I poured over during my internet searches only worked marginally, if at all. Then one day a few years ago, after my two older kids had already been identified as “highly capable,” I learned about a workshop for gifted kids. Attending that workshop changed my life, it changed my parenting, and it improved my relationship and interactions with my kids.

The workshop was put on by the Northwest Gifted Child Association and presented by Austina De Bonte. During that workshop, I learned that gifted kids often have asynchronous development, so that their academic development does not match their social and emotional development, which often does not match their chronological age. So an eight-year old in 3rd grade could have 6th grade math abilities and 4th grade reading abilities, but also have the social expectations of a 5th grader and the emotional abilities of a 1st grader.

In addition to asynchronous development of their social and emotional skills, gifted kids often have traits, like perfectionism, and other traits such as what Kazimierz Dabrowski, a Polish psychologist, termed “overexcitabilties” or “supersensitivities.” The short-hand for overexcitability is OE. Dabrowski identified 5 overexcitabilities: psychomotor, sensual, emotional, intellectual, and imaginational. A child with psychomotor overexcitability possesses a high level of energy and is often moving and may even speak quickly. A student with sensual overexcitability has 5 senses that are heightened. This OE described my older daughter who, for a time period, required us to remove every tag on all her clothes, wouldn’t wear pants that felt too constricting or socks with seams, and would refuse to take out the kitchen composting bag to the compost bin outside because the smell was overwhelming to her. A kid with intellectual overexcitability is always thinking and looking for answers to deep questions. My children can spend hours having serious discussions on topics ranging from whether alien life exists to the consequences of multiple timelines in the Marvel Cinematic Universe based on the latest Avengers movie. My youngest child has imaginational overcitability, which means that her imagination is so intense and vivid that she genuinely feels fear when she thinks of scary events. The last overexcitability is emotional, which is a child who feels emotions in a more intense way than others, such as my son who was overwhelmed with disappointment when he knew that it was likely his soccer team would lose a game. A gifted child may express multiple overexcitabilities, but he or she usually has one dominate one.

Lastly, there are gifted kids who are identified by the term, “twice-exceptional” or “2e” for short. These are gifted kids who have a disability or special need, such as a learning disorder (e.g. dyslexic), an emotional or behavioral disorder (e.g. social anxiety, selective mutism), ADHD, or are on the autism spectrum.

Understanding how my gifted children’s brain worked and which overexcitability each one was dominant in helped me to comprehend why they behaved as they did, and I was able to provide the appropriate response as their parent, as well as help each of them to learn the skills to cope with their emotions. An example of how I changed how I parented is when dealing with my middle child who had a sensual OE. In 1st grade, my oldest daughter became very picky about which clothes she would wear. She and I would have big, screaming fights because she routinely wore summer dresses and sandals to school when temperatures were cold enough that it would flurry. I tried everything, including allowing her to buy new clothes, but she was defiant and refused to wear even the new apparel she had picked out, saying they were uncomfortable. After I learned about her sensual OE, we had a long talk about what she found comfortable and I was able to identify her issues. Part of the problem had been that she herself, due to her young age, could not fully articulate why she disliked a piece of clothing. After determining that she disliked seams and clothes that constricted her waist area, we changed the way we shopped for her clothes, and we figured out the styles that were truly comfortable for her. After completely changing out her whole wardrobe, we stopped having arguments over clothes, and our relationship improved dramatically.

If you have a gifted child, consider finding and attending workshops or reading books about their giftedness. Having a better understanding of their brain development and their needs just might help you find the insights and tools that will help you deal with their intense emotional outbursts.