Product Description

Raising happy, successful children is a goal of every parent of gifted children. In this book, the nation’s leading authority on the psychology of gifted children offers advice and encouragement for both parents and teachers. In a thoughtful, conversational style, the author offers an in-depth look at the complex social and emotional issues faced by gifted children.

Completely revised and updated since the popular first edition, The Social and Emotional Lives of Gifted Kids tackles important and timely issues dealing with the social and emotional needs of today’s gifted children. Dr. Cross uses personal insight with current research to address the experiences of gifted students, how they cope with mixed messages in a constantly changing society, how they manage their way through school and home, and how parents and teachers can help them cope.

The book contains practical suggestions and ideas for guiding and supporting the development of gifted children. This concise, sensitive look at gifted children and their social and emotional world offers unique insights for both teachers and parents who support these special children.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #113560 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 207 pages

Review
Cross writes this book for a broad audience including counselors and parents of gifted kids. The value of the book is not limited to the insights of one with tremendous experience on the topic but also includes the subtle suggestion that rather than chase the elusive list of characteristics and needs that distinguish gifted students, our field should spend more time studying the lived experiences of the gifted and ask how can we work together to help these children develop into healthy and happy adults. --
    —Dona J. Matthews, Roeper Review

Cross writes this book for a broad audience including counselors and parents of gifted kids. The value of the book is not limited to the insights of one with tremendous experience on the topic but also includes the subtle suggestion that rather than chase the elusive list of characteristics and needs that distinguish gifted students, our field should spend more time studying the lived experiences of the gifted and ask how can we work together to help these children develop into healthy and happy adults. --
    —Dona J. Matthews, Roeper Review

In The Social and Emotional Lives of Gifted Kids, Tracy Cross offers a collection of essays drawn from his columns appearing in Gifted Child Today. With this collection, Cross shares ideas that are helpful for understanding the social and emotional development of gifted students. Additionally, Cross hopes to provide examples of how teachers, counselors, and parents can work together for the development of gifted kids. This book is a great read for teachers and counselors, but it seems particularly well-suited for parents as well. I recently recommended it to several parents in our local gifted parent organization, and they have found it to provide interesting useful insights into the daily challenges of parenting gifted kids. --Todd Kettler, Roeper Review, Vol. 29, No. 3, March 2007

Many parents of gifted children are realizing that the social and emotional needs of their children are not being recognized or addressed in today’s classrooms. Dr. Tracy Cross, one of the nation’s leading experts on the psychology of gifted children, tackles this issue head-on in the completely updated and revised edition of his book. Combining personal insights and experiences with timely research, Dr. Cross presents practical suggestions and ideas for guiding and supporting the development of gifted children. Parents and teachers alike will find this to be a valuable resource as they strive to help gifted kids cope with the social and emotional challenges they face in today’s changing world. --Gifted Child Today, Vol. 29, No. 1, Winter, 2006

About the Author
Even as a child, Tracy L. Cross was a psychologist. When not worrying about things psychological, he was a philosopher. His earliest philosophical writings were published (Cross Publishing Company) when he was 8 years old. His fierce competitiveness and lack of talent ended his sporting days in time for college. These combinations of qualities and interests led him to value the work of Erik Erikson, Albert Bandura, and later Edmund Husserl. The not fitting in, identity formation, human agency, and lived experience of gifted students are issues that consume him four decades later.

As a consequence of these background variables, a confluence of events has led to his appointment as the Executive Director of The Indiana Academy of Science, Mathematics, and Humanities, a state-supported residential school for academically gifted adolescents, and Professor of Educational Psycholgy in Teachers College at Ball State University.

In addition to his work at the Academy, some of the other hats Dr. Cross wears today are father of four young children, husband of 20-plus years, editor of the Gifted Child Quarterly, and soccer dad. Although his research interests have not changed significantly since he was a child, the nature of his intellectual hand-wringing has become increasingly nuanced over the years. His Ph.D. and other degrees are from the University of Tennessee where he met Larry Coleman, his friend and mentor.

Customer Reviews

When you're ready to read a serious book about gifted children
For short I'll use the tilde sign (~) to denote the phrase "The social and Emotional Lives of Gifted Kids".

There are many books about gifted children out there. Advice books, research books, general books, and they're all intended for the layman. I've read many of them, and I can testify that it wasn't always easy to find a good book. However, this one, on this somewhat neglected subject of social and emotional development (opposed to academic development), is definitely one of the best out there.

This relatively short book is a collection of the author's articles published in "Gifted Education Today". It has 22 chapters divided into 4 sections.

The first section is called "About Gifted Children: Who they are and Why". Its aim is to refute many common myths about gifted children and prepare the background for the other sections. In my opinion, the two chapters titled "Competing with myths about ~", and "How gifted students cope with mixed massages", are exceptionally good and everybody should read them. Instead of the disproved myths, the author would introduce a set of "axioms", based on years of research, on which he'll draw later in the book.
In "Gifted children and Erickson's theory of psychological development", the author introduce us to Erickson's theory, on which he'll rely in the other sections of the books.

The other two main sections are "Guiding Gifted Children" and "Gifted Children Today". Three articles especially, are some of the best I have ever read on the subject. They are "The many faces of bullies" - with a surprising definition of "bully", "~ in the 21st centaury" - talking about the generation gap and modern technology, and "Gifted students and the adults who provide for them: lessons learned from terrorism" - maybe one of the most insightful articles in the book, about extreme stress and the Social & Emotional implications of it upon the gifted.

In the end of the book you'll find a detailed bibliography and an extensive list of resources - more than 40 pages covering journals, centers and associations in the US and Canada.

I consider the short time it took me to read the book (and the long hours I ponder on it) definitely well-spent. Find it and read it.

Enjoy!

G.G.

Not useful for me
This is a compilation of the author's columns from the education journal "Gifted Child Today", a publication which seems to be targeted to teachers and administrators. Much of the book is presented in the form of lists, which look like bullets of powerpoint slides. Perhaps because the chapters are just reprints of the columns, no chapter seems to go in to any depth. Almost all of the material deals with the gifted child in the context of public schools.

The cover blurb states the the book offers the tools need to "understand your gifted child", "support your child's talents", "guild their development" and "encourage their success and happiness". I didn't see much of this in the book, other than a suggestion that your child might appreciate an e-mail account to correspond with children he or she met at camp. (Duh!) I did see quite about about how people of typical intelligence see gifted people, for instance, the story of the reporter who thought that perhaps the Unabomber came to commit his crimes because he was grade skipped! But, what I was really hoping for was more insight into the my child's thinking and feeling, perhaps an improved and updated version of Alice Millers "The Drama of the Gifted Child". This book wasn't even close.