FAQ for Parents of Gifted Children

First of all, most students, even psychologically healthy students, do have different (or even sometimes opposite) behaviours at home and at school. Having said that, we do need to understand the reason(s) behind such differences of your child. Sometimes, the differences may be only a kind of adaptation process that the difference may be diminished after you child has successfully adapted to a new environment. Even if your child has already adapted to a new environment and still behaves differently between at home and at school, that kind of different behaviour may sometime be necessary to maintain a desirable balance between the school and the home, for example, the school requires a very strict or proper behaviour for students, e.g., stay very quiet in classes, does not raise ‘unnecessary questions’ in classes, etc. Hence, your child may be just trying to maintain those proper behaviour required by school, and only shows his own personality to be talkative and lively at home. Of course, if your child’s different behaviours are due to other factors that needs to be attended by parents or teachers (e.g., being bullied by people at school), you need to seek help from a qualified mental health professional then.

Every aspect of a student is important, either his academic performance or his affective needs (e.g. interpersonal relationship, emotional well-being, behavioural adequacy, etc.). Under this principle, we encourage you to contact our CAC to make an appointment with our psychologist, so that we could work together with your school or parent teacher association to promote your child’s interpersonal relationship. Of course, before your contact our CAC, you may need to explain to your child that you are not blaming your child of his difficulties in interpersonal relationship. On the other hand, you need to show your child that you will support your child no matter what reasons has caused the situation (i.e. unsatisfactory interpersonal relationship), you will face the situation with your child and you will seek help with your child from an experienced mental health professional so that you child can overcome any obstacles (which to be identified) and can improve his interpersonal relationship in a favourable direction. After telling your child about these, then contact our CAC and we will guide you and your child through the situation!

Yes, this must be frustrating, we understand! First of all, we do not assume that the behaviour of your child is a form of manipulation unless we eliminate all other possible factors behind his behaviour. In fact, there are many other possible reasons that your child would behaviour the way you mentioned, for example, you child had already stressed out after school every day, so his frustration tolerance becomes less functioning at home, and a trivial thing at home may trigger his emotion. If this is a reason, you surely need to give your child a comforting hug with a gentle voice to calm him down other than trying to suppress his emotion as if that was a manipulation of you initiated by your child. Other than this possible reason, there are still a lot of other possible reasons of his emotion explosion at home. But to short, we encourage you to ask your school or parent teacher association to contact our CAC and make an appointment with our experienced psychologist, they know how to help your child out of his emotion management difficulty.

You are a responsible and caring parent as you want to know more about your child’s school life and his friends at school. We understand how frustrating that your child does not prefer to talk about those topics or to let you know those aspects of his life. Of course, there are many different reasons that a child is not easy or unwilling to tell a parent about those topics. In order not to confuse you by giving you different examples of reasons that a child would refrain himself from telling you about those things which may even put you into a great worry about those possible reasons, we prefer you to contact our CAC and to talk with our psychologist, so that our professional could have some idea about what reason(s) may make your child not willing to talk with you about those things and then our psychologist would suggest a possible way for you to convince your child to come with you and meet our psychologist in a consultation or counselling session, so that our psychologist can help to resolve the factors that hinder your child’s willingness to talk with you about those topics.

We understand how helpless you are when your child’s responsibility of his study is transferred onto your shoulders when his teachers keep telling you to pay more attention on his study but in fact your child does not allow you to take this responsibility as he just does not give you a role in his study even as a reminder. In a psychological point of view, you should only focus your role as a caring parent despite of the role for reminder that your child’s teachers want you to take. Only when your child feels that you care about his well-being as a parent, then your child may be able to tell you more about the real reasons of his disliking school or study, or your child may be willing to come with you to meet our psychologist who would be able to help your child in facing or resolving the reasons that made your child disliking school or study. Of course, you also need to let your child’s teachers know that only when you focus on the role I have just mentioned and let your child trust you and tell you the reasons hinder his effort on study, then you can bring your child to seek help for improving his attitudes and eventually improving his behaviour in school or on his study.

We trust your child would want to find someone who can help him out of his current situation (i.e., scare of talking in front of others and being teased or laughed at by others). Therefore, you should talk with your child and let him know that you will do whatever you can to find an experienced mental health professional to help him out of this situation. If you can get his willing to come with you to meet our psychologist, then our psychologist knows how to help your child and promote his self-confidence, assertiveness to express himself, and bravery so that he could have radical changes in his life and then he does not need to keep the situation anymore in the coming days of his school life and also his future. Hence, contact our CAC and make an appointment of consultation or counselling session with our psychologist once your child is willing to seek help from us.

First of all, we trust your child would want to keep his promise that he made for you and he would hope he had the ability or will power to actualize his hope of stopping all those behaviour at school. However, we want you to understand that it is not the fault of your child when he does not have the ability or will power to do so as there is very few people who have that ability or will power to control their behaviour if they have the natural tendency to talk, fidget, move, or walk around when they learn, especially for gifted students who have the typical characteristic of overexcitability that they tend to have all those behaviour before they can activate their brain during learning or lessons. In fact, even though they seem to be so busy to have all these behaviour during lessons, they can answer teachers’ questions accurately and they can follow whatever teachers have taught in class. Therefore, you or his teachers need to understand the special kind of learning ‘mode’ of your child or other similar gifted students during lesson so that teachers and you would not punish your child or give him warning because of his different learning ‘mode’ when compare with other students. Of course, you do need to make an appointment with your child to meet our psychologist, so that we can explain to your child that he is normal and not naughty or inattentive by having all those behaviours but a kind of special mode of learning as a gifted student. Your child needs to know about this before he can see himself as a normal gifted student rather than a problematic student.

We understand how you feel when your good boy’s emotion reaction scares away everyone around him as his classmates would find it difficult to understand him or even think your son is unpredictably scary to them. In fact, we trust your son may also scare of himself as he may also share the same feeling of his classmates that your child also cannot predict his emotion or behaviour which may also scare him as well. Hence, you child needs an experienced mental health professional who knows how to promote his ability in emotion management and how to teach him proper way to regulate his emotion and hence his behaviour. Therefore, you should tell your child that many people, including gifted students or even adults, do need such a mental health professional to help them in improving their emotion management abilities and skills which would make your child feel so normal to seek help from us, then contact our CAC for making an appointment for you and your child then.

We understand how much your child dislikes seeing any more mental health professionals if he feels none of these professionals could help his psychological or emotional problems at all. In this situation, you need to frankly tell your child that the psychologist in CAC has a lot of experiences in helping people who also did not like to see mental health professionals with the similar reason of your child has, and our psychologist did successfully change the feeling of those people after they came to meet our psychologist and they found that mental health professional in fact could help them out of their psychological or emotion problems. If your child still has an eagerness to have a better psychological or emotion well-being, contact our CAC and to make an appointment to meet with our psychologist who know how to restore both your child’s trust on mental health professional services and to restore your child’s psychological or emotional well-being.

You can contact us with our hotline number 3940 0101. We will jot down your name and contact number and some brief information of your child’s situation, sex, age, or grade. Then our psychologist will contact you for further understanding your child’s situation and information.

Psychologists of our Academy usually are very busy and have very packed schedules on their routine or ad hoc duties (e.g. case-related management work, teaching, internal meetings, administrative work), hence they can only contact you whenever they get a chance.

After our psychologists contact you for getting more information of your child, they will arrange an appointment with you on a date and time that suit you and the psychologist.

After an appointment is made between you and our psychologist, our administrative colleague will send you an email about three days before the appointment to state the date and time of your appointment and to let you know our address and how you can settle the payment for the consultation or counselling session before the appointment. For settling the payment, you can either bring a cheque on the date of the appointment or pay by bank transfer through online banking services and then screenshot the payment record and send it back to our administrative colleague by email before the appointment.

In a consultation or counselling session, if you are (or your child is) willing to talk frankly about your (or your child’s) thinking and feeling, our psychologist can gather relevant and necessary information to analyse the situation, difficulties, protective factors, predisposing factors, precipitating factors, perpetuating factors, handling skills, handling experiences, and other relevant information of you (or your child). Based on all these results, our psychologist not only can give suggestion to you (or your child) in ways of facing or handling the current or upcoming difficulties in your (or your child’s) living, or help to resolve any communication or relationship difficulties between you and your child (if any), and also can decide suitable psychological treatment plan to restore the necessary emotional, psychological, or behavioural functioning of you (or your child), to improve the psychological or emotional well-being of you (or your child) in various aspects, or to decrease the obstacles or negative thinking or emotion of you (or your child). After our psychologist give you (or your child) suggestion to face or handling the current or upcoming difficulties in living, you are (or your child is) expected to follow the suggestion given by our psychologist and to implement those suggestion as much as you (or your child) can so that you can expect the implementation of those suggestion could change your current situation gradually towards a positive direction, or could simply lead to a new situation in a positive direction. If our psychologist has proposed a psychological treatment plan for you (or your child), and you have (or your child has) agreed to participate to the treatment plan, you are (or your child is) expected to comply with the requirements set for you (or your child) for the plan to be implemented until the treatment goal(s) is(are) achieved. (Remarks: suggestion or treatment plan suggested by our psychologist is based on the information you have (or your child has) provided for the psychologist’s analysis. Hence, any new situation or information arises afterwards may affect the adequacy or effectiveness of the suggestion given [or treatment plan proposed] by the psychologist, and another consultation or counselling session would be needed for further enquiry with our psychologist.)