Roald Dahl only wrote so many books.

I love Roald Dahl. I loved his books when I was a kid, and I love them even more now that I'm a mom with kids who need high reading levels with appropriate content. Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of his shorter books, and the reading level that is listed online is 4.9, end of 4th grade.

Kessa is reading it to me. She turned 5 in August. She's not reading it because I'm making her, she's reading it because she wanted to. She's not reading the words without understanding the context - she's reading with inflection, correcting missed words based on context, laughing at the appropriate parts, and can tell me what's going on in her own words any time I ask. She won't usually read chapter books out loud to me, so I was shocked; I had no idea she was capable of this level.

When I talk about how unusually bright these kids are, most people don't understand that I'm not bragging, I'm worried. The ones who do understand THAT I'm worried mostly don't understand WHY I'm worried. We live in a more-is-better society, and so higher achievement = smarter = more-is-better, right? Not always. Here are some of the issues surrounding giftedness (for the kids and for their parents).

1) Appropriate content. Roald Dahl only wrote so many books. It's an ongoing process finding books at the right reading level, with content that is interesting and inoffensive for their maturity level.

2) Another kind of exceptionality. Giftedness is often thought of as the normal brain made faster or bigger, but in reality, gifted children's brains work differently, just as children with learning disabilities are wired differently. (Dual exceptionalities are common - children then have a learning disability in one area and are considered gifted in another.) The difference between a disability and a gift is that the former makes it more difficult to perform a function valued by our society, and the latter makes it easier to perform said function.

3) Ill-equipped public schools. We spend 10 times as much money on children whose exceptionalities make them low-performing than on those whose exceptionalities make them high-performing. On the surface, it makes sense to help the kids who need the most help, but our resources should help each child reach his or her potential. "No child left behind" should never equal "no child allowed ahead," yet it does. Even those districts which still offer programs for gifted kids often do not understand issue #2; their programs are simply fast-track normal programs, which, like grade-skipping, reduces boredom for the accelerated learner but does not allow the gifted child's brain to use its unusual pathways. Programs that truly meet the needs of gifted children are rare.

4) Social difficulties. Gifted kids don't fit in with children their own age. Their brains often don't include a bunch of social graces. They are often more mature in some facets of emotional development, yet highly sensitive, and more able to relate to adults or older children than their own peers. Yet they are often immature in enough ways to not be able to smoothly pass as older. The literature says that gifted children usually do better socially when they skip grades than when they don't; anecdotally it appears that either way, they fare worse than their peers of the same age or of their new grade.

5) Parenting challenges. In addition to the above issues surrounding a child's education and social integration, you get to have deep, thought-provoking conversations. These are usually fun and are the moments that you are proud of your unusual children. Even so, you do occasionally debate whether you might rather your child was content with your initial answers to her basic questions about the birds and the bees when she was five, rather than prodding you into a discussion of vasectomy at the age of six and the "Turkey Baster" conversation at the age of seven.

You can bet that I'm glad these are the challenges for my family. I wouldn't replace them with ill health or an exceptionality on the other side of the spectrum. Yet they are real challenges, and when my 5 year old read me a 4th grade book, I was impressed, and also got tears in my eyes. Tears knowing the difficulties she will face because she is different, recognizing the effort I will need to put in to her education, acknowledging my responsibilities in getting her needs met.