The Everyone is Gifted Manifesto

What is a Brilliant Child?

Brilliant children are adventurous, curious, creative, and kind.

(No evil geniuses, please.)  

They view the world as a fascinating place. 

Adults enjoy talking with them and may often remark on their sophisticated vocabulary.

With help from their parents, brilliant children develop deep passions and interests, which will lead them to people and places where they feel they belong. Where they feel that they have a tribe.

Whatever they choose to pursue, brilliant children are self-driven and self-motivated...which is also a fantastic perk for busy parents! 

What About Grades and Test Scores?

Brilliant children often do extremely well in school and on standardized tests, although this will be a by-product and not something you stress as a goal. 

(You will stress to your children that the love and pleasure of learning for its own sake is the true goal.) 

At our house, where we used the strategies that I can teach you, both children achieved extremely high scores on the PSAT and SAT. They both became National Merit Scholars, something achieved by fewer than one percent of their high school peers. 

(One child even had a perfect score on the SAT reading section, but hey, remember, test scores are not the primary goal. I'm just mentioning all this here because these results helped convince me that I really should share the strategies we used and not just keep them to ourselves. They work too well!  More people deserve to know about them. And I know that some people are only convinced by test scores. I don't even like test scores as outcomes but I feel it would be a mistake not to let you know that we saw these results without paying for test prep or elite private schools.)

One child scored a perfect 36 on the ACT (something achieved by only one-tenth of one percent of students), and the other child didn't take the ACT because he didn't feel like it and knew he had done really well on the SAT.

(I repeat, test scores are not the primary goal. Though I have to admit the college scholarships that came with them, in one case a full-ride for the child who didn't feel like taking the ACT, were another fantastic perk!)

(You can skip over the following paragraph unless you want more reasons about why I have become convinced of the power of the strategies I can teach you. I hesitated about including this information but decided it's worth doing if it helps you believe that researchers in the science of learning have actually uncovered powerful information that needs to be more widely known.)

Early on, in second and third grade, results from reading ability tests given at our children's public school declared that they were reading at a "post-high-school level." After we moved to the test-obsessed state of Florida, both children scored perfect scores on the state's reading achievement test in three different years. After the first year it happened, a university researcher told me she had never seen anyone get a perfect score on that test. Both children also qualified to take the SAT in 7th grade as part of a university talent search, and both scored better than 90% of that year's high school seniors. Your results may vary, but please be assured that I will be sharing with you all my secrets as a learning scientist and a mom, holding nothing back.

What about books?

I do have strong opinions about the role of book-reading in raising brilliant children, even for children who go into STEM-related fields.

(Our son, for example, grew up as a voracious reader and is now an aerospace engineer.)

I firmly believe you will have a much easier time raising a brilliant child if you and your child both love books and read them in enormous quantities.

(And yes, there are many research-based tricks and strategies for raising a child to love books. There are also many research-proven approaches for preventing or overcoming reading difficulties.)

However, I also believe that passion and fascination in a topic can absolutely come first and lead to enthusiastic and skilled reading. For example, in a study of 65 successful adults who were once labeled dyslexic, for example, researcher Rosalie Fink discovered that they overcame their problem mainly by pursuing a deep and passionate interest through their reading.

As a learning scientist, I am also fascinated by what science can teach us about what it means to be a brilliant painter, athlete, or musician---or similar successful person whose skills may not seem to be closely linked to book reading. As of yet, I have not discovered any evidence that would lead me to downplay the importance of books for any parent and child, though I remain open to learning otherwise. Until then, you can expect that I will promote book reading as a powerful ingredient for raising a brilliant child of any kind. So if you are truly a book hater, the Everyone is Gifted Movement may not be the best parenting resource for you at this time.