Gifted Resource Council
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How can my gifted child make more friends?
by Dennis O’Brien

Making friends can be difficult for gifted children. Often they are not in class with other gifted peers and do not feel comfortable with children who do not share their intellectual focus. As a result, some gifted children fail to develop age-appropriate social skills, and this makes the task of forming friendships even more difficult.

Adults sometimes make it more difficult for gifted children to acquire the age-appropriate social skills and same-age friendships by encouraging a child’s intellectual growth at the expense of the child’s social development. As a result of these factors, many children who excel in academic areas are developmentally arrested in their psychosocial growth.

Here are some proactive things parents can do.

• Instead of focusing solely on intellectual prowess and achievement, make being well-rounded a goal for your child.

• Don’t fall into the trap of serving as an approving audience for your child’s one-dimensional focus on his or her intellectual abilities. Gifted children tend to seek adult companionship, attention and approval for their intellectual abilities and achievements. Parents and teachers who respond to this inappropriate approvalseeking unwittingly contribute to the arrested social development of a gifted child. This adult approval makes it less necessary for a child to communicate with sameage peers and to acquire appropriate social skills.

• Recruit your child’s teacher to partner with you in promoting your child’s psychosocial growth. She is probably aware that your child needs help in learning to interact with other children. But she is probably busy and may be reluctant to take it upon herself to help him improve. If she knows that helping your child develop the social habits he needs for success and happiness in life matters to you, she will be much more likely to help. Encourage her to not give attention to your child when he inappropriately seeks her approval rather than interacting with classmates. Ask her to keep you informed of how well your child interacts with classmates.

• Explicitly teach your child basic social skills. Teachers and counselors who work extensively with gifted children remark at how often these children do not make eye contact with others, fail to smile at others or say good morning, use other children’s names, praise others, ask "How was your weekend," or make intentional efforts to be pleasant.

Teach these skills explicitly. Roleplay them with your child. If you feel that you have taught your child how to do these most basic skills, don’t take it for granted that she is using them. Ask your child how frequently she uses these skills each day. How do other children respond? Stay on top of your child until he or she habitually uses appropriate social skills with peers.

• Make it clear that you expect your child to learn to get along with all his classmates and to form friendships with some of them. There are many ways to do this. Tell your child how important being wellrounded, having social skills and making friends are to you. Look for opportunities to praise the character traits, skills and behaviors of other children. Avoid references to their intelligence. Instead, focus on traits like their ability to get along with others, their honesty, kindness, perseverance, cooperation, and their athletic, musical or performing skills.

• Push your child to form friendships with children who may not be her intellectual peers but have other things to offer. For some children, encouragement may be enough. For others, parents may need to arrange social occasions with other children at least once each week. You may need to coach your child on how to behave before these occasions and to follow up by discussing how she did behave. Gifted children can be so self-absorbed that they are unaware of how their behavior affects others.

• Involve your child in extracurricular activities that promote teamwork and cooperation. Team sports are excellent, as are activities like theater, band or Scouting. Avoid intellectual competitions unless they are the rare kind like GRC’s Academic Challenge Cup which promotes teamwork and does not recognize individual winners. Activities which stress cooperation with teammates and fair play with opponents will help your child develop social skills.

Insist that your child be involved in at least one such activity year round. If your child complains–as many gifted children do–that he is not good at the activity, so much the better. Participating on a team in which his performance is average or below average will help a child develop empathy for others who do not excel at school.

• Examine your own social skills. A disproportionate number of parents, much like their gifted children, lack social skills and fail to model healthy social development. Parents like these value the intellectual development of their child above all else, are highly critical of teachers and programs, belittle other children, and insist on getting special advantages for their children. Often they micromanage their child’s academic progress. Does this describe you? How often have you complained that your child was being held back by others, not challenged enough or not recognized by teachers for his academic prowess? How often do you thank teachers for the good job they are doing? How often do you encourage teachers to promote the psychosocial development of your child?

• Make use of Gifted Resource Council programs. Gifted Resource Council only sponsors programs which go beyond academics to promote growth in interpersonal skills.

Not only are GRC programs themselves designed to do this, but GRC teachers are hired with this in mind and then given further training in inservice workshops to enhance their abilities to promote this type of growth.

Even the academic approach of GRC programs is special: the process is not only based on teamwork, but creativity, and a focus on the process rather than the result, along with an interdisciplinary approach, are built into every class. In short, the academic challenge is broadening rather than restrictive, the approach is based on cooperation, and the goal is to strengthen the interpersonal skills of students while challenging them with an enrichment program unlike those in their home schools.

Parents who intentionally use strategies like these can help a child with the social skills and peer friendships so essential for being well-rounded and successful in life.
Dennis O’Brien is a licensed clinical social worker, experienced educator and therapist, and
executive director of KidzLink, an organization serving medically fragile children.
For more information regarding Gifted Resource Council, please call the GRC office at 314-962-5920.