It becomes easier if you adopt a proper mindset. A proper mindset gives advocates the courage, confidence, and emotional support to pursue appropriate services for their children. It turns concern for gifted children into a logical and more easily understood position, and it provides advocates with easily understood, powerful analogies to draw on when speaking to those less knowledgeable. A proper mindset protects gifted children from decisions that are made for the wrong reasons. Too many parents allow friends, relatives, siblings, and even the children themselves to make important educational and life-long decisions they should not be making.
Many gifted children refuse services because they want to be with their friends.
Many gifted children are given the choice by parents of whether or not to get involved in a gifted program. Following are two mindsets that can help you become a better, positive, more confident advocate for gifted children. When you are in the sports mindset you think of your child's or student's giftedness as an extreme athletic ability. In sports we all know and understand that an athlete's ability, no matter how gifted, will not grow without proper coaching, training, and equal or greater levels of competition. Playing mediocre teams produces stagnant, unmotivated, overly confident, sloppy athletes who will begin to lose games even though they may possess superior talent.