Common Fears: What about my gifted child?

It always surprises me when parents tell me they’re thinking of putting their gifted kids back into school because they think they will have more opportunities for gifted children in school than in home. Nothing can be further from the truth!

One of the greatest benefits of homeschooling is the ability to customize your child’s education to their specific educational needs. For a gifted child, a homeschool parent can easily accelerate coursework at home. We know many homeschooled children who graduated two or three years early and who took college courses while in school.

I was a gifted child who made my way through the public high school. Yes, I took honors and AP classes, but when I looked back over the notes and papers from my beloved AP European history class that I had saved in my mom’s basement for the past 25 years, I quickly realized that while I did learn a lot in the class and had a delightful teacher, all of the readings were pre-digested excerpts. I read a page from Machiavelli’s The Prince. My son read the book in its entirety twice in high school—both in his Great Books class and in his early modern history course. I thought I was being challenged, and I proudly scored a 5 on an AP exam that gave me some meaningless credits in college. But my son has written papers engaging deeply with Machiavelli’s assertions and could do more than just regurgitate bullet points about him for a standardized test. Who actually learned more?

Of course, a homeschool parent is going to have to work to seek out challenging coursework for a gifted child, but there are many resources readily available, from the Well-Trained Mind Community forums to curricula like Art of Problem Solving math to extracurriculars like Future Problem Solvers that provide an intellectually stimulating community for your gifted child.