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Problem Analysis |
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Over the past 10 years working with families, I find that I've learnt a lot about analysing each individual situation as it presents itself. For the people within the situation, things may appear puzzling, frustrating and worrying, partly because that tends to be the nature of family life, and partly because giftedness and other possible issues can distort and exaggerate other factors in the situation. As parents, the ebb and flow of issues in our lives regarding
our children and parenting them, is difficult. From the first few days
when we realise that this new baby is not going to be such a straightforward
factor in our lives as we thought, and that we're going to have to rack our
brains constantly to try to understand what's going on with her or him,
parenting continues in that way. We may find it natural to meet our children's
needs, or almost impossible; they may seem happy, they may seem unhappy.
Events happen in our lives, and impinge on them: money problems, family
disputes, frequently separation and divorce, sometimes death in the extended
family or within our own nuclear family. Some of our children seem to
match our own personality well, and we have an instinctive understanding of
them; others seem almost to have come from a different planet, and we feel we
have hardly any idea what makes them tick. Into this changing complex comes the possibility that a child may be gifted, introducing a huge body of new information and issues to be learned, and raising for each factor and problem concerning that child, the question: is this in any way due to the fact that he or she is gifted? How has the fact that she or he is gifted been affected by all we've done, the choices we've made, and all that's going on around the child now? And above all, where do we start now, and what should we do? I've found in recent years that with the knowledge I bring from various academic areas, together with a great deal learnt from the many families I've worked with over the years as a volunteer for Australian Mensa, I can mostly help. Analysing the tangle of family and gifted issues, making recommendations to deal with problems and meet the child's needs, and in many cases working with the parents and the child, negotiating with schools if necessary until those recommendations have become as close as possible to a reality, has become the area of my work which I find the most rewarding. If you have a tangle and chaos of problems, I can probably help you: helendowland@senet.com.au.
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