Product Description

The Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children: What Do We Know? offers an examination of the essential topics teachers, parents, and researchers need to know about the social and emotional development of gifted children.

Instigated by a task force convened by the National Association for Gifted Children and written by leading scholars in the field of gifted education, the book includes chapters on peer pressure and social acceptance, resilience, delinquency, and underachievement. The book also summarizes several decades worth of research on special populations, including minority, learning-disabled, and gay and lesbian gifted students.

Concise, comprehensive, meticulously researched, and wide-ranging in its coverage, The Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children: What Do We Know? is essential reading for those who wish to enable gifted students to develop their strengths and encourage them to make the contributions of which they are capable.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21665 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

About the Author
Maureen Neihart, a leading authority on the talent development in children, is a licensed child psychologist with more than 25 years of experience working with talented young people and their families. A former teacher and school counselor, she now is an internationally recognized leader on the psychological aspects of talent development, addressing between 20,000 and 40,000 people each year in her many talks and workshops throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, and South America.

Customer Reviews

Not a Whole Lot, Turns Out!
Do you enjoy "academese"? A page like a minefield of footnotes! (And the writers want more! More research! More funding!) To me, it's like listening to politicians seeking office, max gyrations, min substance. Do you enjoy the careful pleasures of political correctness? I never did. If you can substitute a word like "supermodel" for "talented youth", and a paragraph still works, what does this mean?

How I long for a unified work on giftedness by one brilliant consciousness, instead of the short-sighted, contradictory, cobbled-together chapter mode. Let me ask you something: If you are a high-I.Q. person, do you accept "research" from non-gifted "experts" as relevant to your life? Does it not exacerbate one's existential sense of irony? I suppose this book, like all the rest, is not intended for the high-I.Q. parent of the high-I.Q. child, but rather for, say, the average public-school counsellor of the mildly-gifted kid.

On the other hand, I never regret reading anything, and I particularly liked info on Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration. Next time, I'll pick up something by Dabrowski.

Here's an example of the fun to be had within these pages: "What are needed are controlled studies that compare depressed gifted children with gifted children who are not depressed and studies that compare quantitative and qualitative differences in the course and outcome of depression between gifted and nongifted youth."

Fun, fun, fun!

The Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children: What Do We Know?
It's a good book, but rather dry in its presentation. However, being primarily a bringing together and summarizing of published research in this topic, it is an invaluable reference for anyone wanting to really know what are the substantiated findings with respect to gifted children's social and emotional development. I bought it to better understand my daughter, and I am glad I did. But if someone is looking for straightforward parenting tips in dealing with these kids, then some other book may be more to the point. Overall, for me, it is an excellent book with some useful info not commonly found elsewhere.

Helpful Data
This book contains a wealth of information about numerous studies done on various facets of gifted education. For those who are data driven (and that certainly is the world we are living in these days) they will find a glut of statistics - many usable and even more of them quotable - to back up theories about what is effective for gifted students. For those trying to come up to speed on gifted education, this offers a crash course in the available research, but as with most books of this nature, it's pretty dry.