For several years I was one of a group of volunteers who counselled gifted children and their families for what was then the UK National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC), before its Counselling Service closed in 2005. The Service's counsellors and its manager all had first-hand experience of having being gifted children ourselves and/or of being the parents or grandparents of gifted children. After the Service closed, we collaborated on a book - Gifted Children: A Guide for Parents and Professionals - which grew out of our discussions of how we might continue to share what was, for some of the group, several decades' experience of working with gifted children, young people and their families.

Many parents feel unsure whether their children are gifted and afraid to admit they might be. In the light of conflicting advice from family and teachers, parents may even struggle to believe that they really know their own children best. What they do know is that their children seem different from most others, and that this makes them as parents feel different, too. In their isolation they may have no idea that their experiences are quite normal for the families of gifted children: that they are part of a scattered community of people-like-them. It is the companionship of this community that we hoped to provide through our book: the reassurance that the parents, grandparents and other carers of gifted children are not on their own; that they do know their own children best; that it is possible to find a comfortable place for giftedness in their families' lives.

Although elements of this book (concerning e.g. the education system, websites and resources) are inevitably now out of date, I believe that its core text still has much to offer to the parents and teachers of gifted children, and indeed to those children themselves when they become adults.

I also wrote a couple of articles on the subject.

Helping teachers idenitify the gifted in their class, Prep School Magazine, No. 58, Spring 2007

Bright Sparks - Nursery World, January 4th 2007