Advocacy is a process

Advocating for your gifted child is an ongoing process. There is no ‘quick fix’ despite the temptation to cling to the idea that there is. Each day brings new challenges, new opportunities and decisions to be made.


Armed with a clear understanding of what your goal is and some sound (research based preferably!) information, you can set about making decisions that will align with your goal.

Knowing what the goal is, is often the easy part. Almost without exception, when I see parents, their goal is above all else, to have a child who is happy (see a previous post about this here). It is the process of getting to the goal which is more difficult to define. The path will be different for every family.

Working out what to advocate for, which things will move you closer to your goal is an ongoing challenge. Life is a changeable landscape and it is worth remembering that the advocacy process almost never proceeds along a direct path from where you are now to your goal. Even if have managed to get things working well and feel able to breathe in relief, you can find that the situation suddenly changes. What worked well just last week, is not a good match any longer. And so you start again.

Sometimes I work closely with families for a period of time, usually near the beginning of their journey as they work out what they need to know, then don’t hear from them for quite some time. Then something changes, a change of teacher, of school or an intellectual growth spurt perhaps which brings some new challenge to the fore.

The more you know about your child, the way they prefer to learn, their personal strengths and any weaker areas, their personal passions and what excites them, their achievement levels or performance in different subjects (as well as the degree of potential they have if you have access to this information), the more able you will be to fine tune your goal.

And it doesn’t matter how much you have learned, there is always more to learn. It is likely that you will continue to advocate in various ways for your child for many years. Even when they can advocate for themselves, they will probably still need you steering gently in the background.