At that point, I went full swing into forming clubs to try to attract kids with similar interests. We had a Japanese Language and Culture club; we had a Programming for Kids club. Even though our homeschooling community proclaimed that all of our children were gifted, somehow it was the brainy/thinky kids who found our clubs and became our tightest social group.
When I started homeschooling my younger child, I wasn’t looking for a gifted community.
I was looking for any community at all.
We started homeschooling in crisis when it became clear that we could not continue trying to pound our multifaceted child into the round hole that had been provided for him.
When I learned the term 2e, my first thought was, “Wait, that doesn’t quite get it right. How about 13e?”
In retrospect, my difficult child gave us a gift. We were thankful for any sort of support we could find after a few harrowing years searching for an institution that would work. So when we went out into our homeschooling community, it didn’t even occur to me to try to find local gifted homeschoolers. Beggars can’t be choosers; we took what we could find.
As it turned out, our local area was a pretty darn awful place to build a gifted community. More than any place I knew of, our liberal, hippie-cultured, surf-happy community was hyperfocused on the idea that all children were gifted. The school district that served the area where most of the college professors lived, which would have been a natural place to find gifted believers, hardly even had a GATE program. The one private school that had had gifted in its title quietly changed its name and would only whisper promises that their educators “took giftedness into account.”
And that was our school community.
Our homeschoolers were the inheritors of the Free School movement; many of them were followers of Attachment Parenting and radical unschooling. I knew kids who were never quite sure if they owned shoes, much less where they had last left them! It wasn’t unusual to find out that a nine-year-old couldn’t yet read and didn’t feel a burning need to.
The G-word really was a dirty word in our local homeschooling community. I heard every one of the standard biases about intellectualism: that the G-word was elitist, that we were propping our kids up, that we weren’t giving them appropriate freedom to explore, that we were inflating our kids’ abilities.
So…why am I writing about finding community? Because in the end, that “all children are gifted,” anti-elitist, “I believe in science that confirms my biases” homeschooling community accepted us, took us under their protective wings, and helped us heal the wounds inflicted by schools and the medical community.
Two things came of this unplanned and seemingly un-fortuitous pairing.
First, I found out that the absolutist description I gave above simply wasn’t true. Although the G-word was almost universally rejected, I did know families whose kids were intellectually brilliant and who were educating them as gifted children, just without the label.
Second, I found that people are people, and if we all just start from a place of acceptance, we can build community from our commonalities, while also celebrating and appreciating our differences.
My younger child had taught himself to read around three years old, was obsessed with the number googol at five, and invented a new type of highway off-ramp to discourage drunk drivers from entering the wrong way when he was eight. But he was also unable to take part in group activities, got very physical with other kids, and seldom showed any of his intellectual abilities in institutional settings.
Amongst our homeschoolers, he found friends with children of all sorts. He’d never really been attracted to bookish kids, and amongst our homeschoolers he found active, “wild” kids who fed his soul. I found parents who were completely different from the school parents I’d known. They didn’t worry that my son’s developmental abnormalities would somehow rub off on their kids. They were inclusive and accepting.
Once I started homeschooling my older child as well, I needed to do a bit more work finding community. He was, in fact, one of those little professors that are easily identified as gifted. He loved to read, he loved to program computers, and he had little interest in hanging out with kids who didn’t have similar interests.
At that point, I went full swing into forming clubs to try to attract kids with similar interests. We had a Japanese Language and Culture club; we had a Programming for Kids club. Even though our homeschooling community proclaimed that all of our children were gifted, somehow it was the brainy/thinky kids who found our clubs and became our tightest social group.
My online gifted support groups, including GHF, were invaluable during this time. But there is nothing like locals when you need someone to hang out with IRL, and we had to drive over a literal mountain to get to our nearest gifted group. Perhaps our larger community still bristled at my use of the G-word, but we found plenty of accepting folks.
In the years since I started homeschooling, our local community hasn’t exactly embraced giftedness, but I notice that the way that parents describe their families has become much more varied. It’s possible that GHF members starting out now won’t experience the same bias I did.
But if you do, my advice is to persist in forming friendships with anyone who will take you. Start clubs and see who shows up. Find the common ground and stand in it, smiling invitingly when other families hesitate to join you. You never know: they may be a gifted family looking for community, too.
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