How does a parent realistically provide for the time and energy to develop a super-talented child?
On the one hand, you might be concerned about ripping the family apart because 15 year old Susan needs to be taken every night to her training and taken every other weekend out of town in order to progress to the next level of her talent. If that’s the case and you are more tender-hearted, then you are likely to abandon the effort in order to save the family. If you are more ruthless, you might decide it is in fact worth ripping the nuclear family apart and spend every spare moment of the family’s normal rest time to go all out for it. If you do go that route, you have to be aware that parents might divorce over the toll that it can take. I’ve painted extremes ends of different types of reactions can have to the presence of real emerging talent in their son or daughter’s life. Nevertheless those dangers are common enough occurrences that could become a reality in your family if you don’t have a strategy in place.
So is there anything you can do that still allows you to not be quitters with regards to your child’s talent and still allows you to keep the family harmony intact? Yes, yes, and yes!
One of those yeses is because you can take advantage of the fact that you are homeschooling your child and are therefore in charge of your normal school curriculum. So for example, if your child’s long-term talent has music as its core skill, then you should seriously consider choosing a history curriculum that will study the time periods through the expression of the lyrics and songs written during that time. This means that if you are studying history one hour a day through the music and lyrics of that time, then you will automatically be turning that hour into one of pushing your child’s talent deeper into his intellectual understanding. If you also should choose to have your child practice in the next hour, composing new lyrics in the style of that era on the topics of concern in that era, then you would be combining her English writing time with talent development. Again, her art would be pushed deeper into her mind and broaden her musical abilities.
If you really pick-up the spirit of dovetailing school work with talent time, then you could also focus on the science of sound and mathematics of sound when you realize that you can choose to focus on an aspect of science and math that supports your daughter’s talent growth.
Once you start dovetailing your school time with your child’s talent development time, the stress of trying to be like everyone with normal school and the stress of trying to find a separate, additional time for talent will evaporate. Harmony in the family will be restored and your daughter will be compounding the benefits of what were previously completely unrelated skills.
If you sign up for my newsletter, the first thing I will send you is worksheet to help you evaluate your current school time against one of how it could look if you leverage it to develop talent at that same time. So forward this post now to a friend who’s looking to get ahead with their child’s talent. Have them sign-up for my newsletter of weekly tips and I will immediately send them that worksheet too.
