Back-to-School and Gifted Children: What Every Parent Should Know

The first few weeks of school can bring excitement, anxiety, big emotions, and a lot of questions—for children and parents alike.

In this episode, I explore why the back-to-school transition can be especially complex for gifted children. We talk about asynchronous development, perfectionism, emotional intensity, goodness of fit, and the many different ways stress can show up during this season.

Instead of feeling like you have to solve everything immediately, you'll learn how to slow down, observe patterns, and better understand what your child may be communicating beneath the behavior.

In This Episode You'll Learn:

•  Why the transition back to school is a process—not just the first day. 
•  What asynchronous development really means and why it matters. 
•  How perfectionism often shows up in gifted children. 
•  The difference between externalizing and internalizing stress. 
•  Why "goodness of fit" matters more than finding the "perfect" school. 
•  A simple three-step approach as you navigate this transition

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES & LINKS

• Take the quiz: Are You a Gifted Woman in Hiding?
• Follow me on Instagram: @dr.andrealein
• Learn more: andrealein.com

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Transcript

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It's a second week of school, and the child who was counting down the days all summer is suddenly telling you she hates school. Or maybe your child comes home looking completely fine, the teacher says the day went beautifully, and then the blue folder is missing, or a sibling chews too loudly at dinner and everything falls apart. Or perhaps bedtime has become difficult. There are new stomach aches, headaches, your child wants to know every detail about tomorrow and then asks the same questions again. Or your child is talking with enormous excitement about a new science unit and 10 minutes later worrying that the teacher or the other children will think she's strange. If you are raising a gifted child, back to school can hold all of these things at once: excitement and anxiety, curiosity and exhaustion, high hopes and very real fear. And when the intensity is high, it's easy to wonder is this a normal transition? Is the school a poor fit? Is my child struggling? Am I missing something? Do I need to act right now? Well, today, friend, I want to help us slow that moment down, not because we should dismiss what we're seeing, but because we want to understand it accurately. One of the most helpful shifts we can make as parents is this curiosity before concern. Concern makes sense. It's part of loving our children, but curiosity helps us see the child who is actually in front of us. I cannot wait to dive into this topic today. Welcome to the Power to Flourish podcast, where science meets the art of a beautiful life. I'm Dr. Andrea Lyon, positive psychologist, giftedness expert and coach, and modern-day spiritual godmother to brilliant, deep-feeling women. This isn't just another self-help podcast, it's a sanctuary, a sacred space to come back to yourself. Each week we'll explore the emotional experience of gifted, sensitive women and what it means to live a life that feels as beautiful as it may look. And your life is waiting. Well, welcome back. We are doing a little mini-series this month. I realized that even though I have been working with parents and I actually still do parent coaching, specifically for parents of gifted or twice-exceptional kids or sometimes young adults. Um I don't talk about that much. And I haven't really talked much about parenting on this podcast as of yet, even though I've gotten requests, plenty of women who are parents, and they say, Will you please do some episodes on parenting? So I thought, what better time to kick some of that off than August, when most families are either actively getting ready to get back to school or they've got a few weeks and we're we're in process. So if that's you, if you've got a family and you're getting ready, there's so much attention, right, on getting new supplies and getting all the schedules worked out and getting everyone out the door and figuring out how you're going to do that. But for many gifted children, this is more than just a simple routine change. It is a full system transition. There are new people, new expectations, new sensory experiences, new social dynamics, intellectual possibilities, and a great deal of uncertainty. That's true for every kid. But a gifted child can genuinely go into the school year like loving learning and still find the return to school very demanding for lots of different reasons. So today I want to give you a way to think about what you may be seeing. I have been working, studying, researching gifted children, oh goodness, for over 20 years now. We are going to talk about transitions, asynchronous development, perfectionism, emotional intensity, the different ways stress can show up, and goodness of fit. We've talked a lot about these things from the perspective of being a gifted woman. But today, if you are a parent and you suspect your child is gifted, or you know they are, this is the episode for you. Then at the end, I'm going to give you a simple way to respond without feeling that you have to solve the whole school year in the first few weeks. Can I get an amen? All right, let's dive in. The first thing I want to talk about is the idea that the transition back to school is longer than the first day, right? We talk about back to school as though it's a date. And yes, there is a date on the calendar when school starts. And, you know, we we have this deadline. We got to buy the supplies and take the pictures and wave goodbye and all these things by this date. And we think on that day the transition has happened. But if we are wise parents, we know that a transition is just a process. And for some children, depending on the age, too, anticipation begins weeks before school. Do you have a kid like this? They may ask a bazillion questions, they might become more rigid about certain routines, they may have trouble sleeping, or they might seem unusually emotional, or all of the above, right? Other children may sail through the first several days and struggle later once the effort accumulates. You may have a child who they may be doing well at school and still be working incredibly hard. And this distinction matters because if the teacher says, she is wonderful here, and you are seeing tears or anger at home, neither observation has to be wrong, right? Your child may be using, and probably is, using a great deal of energy to manage the school day and releasing that effort in the place that feels safest. And I'm sure you heard that before, and you're probably like, yeah, I wish that wasn't the case. I have worked with so many kids. It does not matter whether they are five years old, eight years old, or 17 years old, honestly. I have worked with so many that had this pattern. I personally think I was a kid like this. Maybe not too extreme, but I do think I was the kind of kid who I loved school and there was a structure in school, and I wanted to please a teacher and be easy for everyone. And so I held a lot of it together at school. And then if there was unraveling that was going to happen, it was going to happen at home, right? You may have one of these kids. I have seen many, many kids. And again, they don't have to be gifted to have this pattern, but a lot of gifted kids do have this pattern, or they can show that sort of like intense the intense, intense, intense behaviors when they come home because they're working so hard when they're at school. And one thing that I often have to help parents sort of see differently, depending on how they're doing with all the intensity, is we've got to not jump to assuming that this is some sort of manipulation or even defiance. A wise parent will begin to ask things like, is my child hungry? Like these are the basics, right? Are they hungry? Are they overstimulated? Are they socially depleted? Are they trying to maybe regain control after a day where, especially for younger kids, but even teenagers, right? They can have a day where they have had very little control. The adults are telling them minute to minute, hour to hour, exactly what they're going to be doing. So maybe the question is: does my child need 20 minutes of quiet before answering all of my questions that I want to ask them, you know, when they get off school? And sometimes the most psychologically wise response is also the simplest. My goodness, I I could hand this little note card over to my husband because even though I am not a child, this be very true of me, which is this is what is needed a lot of times in these transitions. A snack, less conversation, probably a little movement, depending on the kid, more or less, some some psychological warmth, and some time. Right? Let's make sure they're not hungry or dehydrated or tired and overstimulated from sitting all day or whatever the case may be. All of this is important. So once we see back to school as a whole season, like this whole transition process that could very well take weeks, and for some kids longer, because every kid is different and how they handle transitions. But once we see it as this season and process rather than a single day on the calendar, another piece becomes easier to understand. And that is gifted development is often most of the time uneven. So we call this in the field, if you've never heard this before, asynchronous development. And what that means is that, you know, all kids develop like physically and socially and intellectually, emotionally, right? And most kids don't just develop all this in the same rate for all those things, right? That's that's pretty normal because there's variation. But in gifted kids, those differences across as various domains can vary widely, right? Because gifted children, especially the highly verbal ones, they can sound much older than they are. And if you have one of those, you know what I'm talking about. I had one of those, I think I was one of those. And these kids can use very sophisticated vocabulary. These are the ones that are like six going on 16. And they may ask you existential questions, maybe political questions. They may understand complex ideas or, you know, notice moral contradictions that honestly many adults overlook. And that same kid who seems like light years ahead of all the other children when it comes to certain cognitive areas, they may sob because their handwriting does not look the way they imagined it. I mean, honestly, that that was me. I I would sob sometimes when it wasn't looking the way I wanted it to look, right? They may understand a complicated classroom discussion and lose every permission slip. And they may speak, like I said, they may speak like a teenager, but they might need comfort like the seven-year-old that they really are. And that is what I mean by asynchronous development. There's different capacities along different developmental domains and they develop at very different rates. So you just have to remember that advanced thinking or complex reasoning does not cancel ordinary developmental needs. And I think this is especially important for parents because language can fool us. And when a child can explain a situation brilliantly, we may assume that same child can also or should also be able to regulate their feelings that come with it. And we may offer more logic when what the child needs first is co-regulation. So again, I have worked with so many parents in scenarios like this. And it is very common, even with teachers that I've worked with, very common to see a child who is super bright. And the perspective of the adult is they should know better, right? Like when a child or a teenager is very, very bright, and then they do something that feels inconsistent with whatever their IQ might be, right? Or their verbal ability. Especially under stress. So this is not a moral failing. This is just pure development. And this unevenness becomes especially visible when high ability meets high standards. And so we have to be really mindful of this and be on the lookout for where our own assumptions about what a child should be able to do isn't matching up with what they actually can do. So the next thing I want to talk about is perfectionism. And this can definitely ramp up at the beginning of a school year. You know, a new school year includes so many opportunities to be, you know, new at something, right? There's a new teacher, there are oftentimes new routines, there are new peers, and there are new expectations. And for a child who is accustomed to learning quickly, not immediately knowing what to do can actually feel surprisingly threatening. So healthy striving says, I want to do this well. And a perfectionistic threat says, if I cannot do this well, something is wrong with me. Now you may able, now you may be able to relate to that, even if it's not something you actively think now, but most likely if you are listening to this podcast, you have struggled with some form of that at some point in your life. And this just have some compassion for your child. This can be very, very real for a gifted child when they're starting back in a new school year. Even if it's the same school, even if some sometimes, you know, kids have the same teacher year to year, it's still a new experience. There are still new things, right? And so that perfectionistic threat, what can that look like? That can look like erasing a paper until it tears, right? It can look like avoidance or refusing to start something. Um, it can look like calling an assignment stupid or boring, like these are very common things, right? It could be over-preparing or it could be procrastinating. Like all of these things are different forms of how perfectionism can play out with a gifted kid. And as a parent, it can be really hard when we've got a kiddo that struggles with this. And it's it's hard because you, on the one hand, you don't want to dismiss their very real feelings. And our goal is not to make them care less, right? Caring about their work, craftsmanship, excellence, those can be just beautiful things about our kids. But the goal is to help caring that that sense of like this matters to me, feel less threatening, right? Feel a little bit more manageable and a little safer. So we can say, you know, you don't have to feel confident before you begin. Or it's okay, you know, that this is your first attempt, you know, and it's okay if it's not perfect. It's okay if you're going into the school, you're feeling a little anxious and wanting everything to be perfect. It might be like picking out their clothes for the first day, or whatever it might be, but just acknowledging and validating it for them and naming it can be really helpful. And we also have to be really careful, I think, about promising that something will be easy. If it is not easy, the child may very much feel even more defective, right? So instead of like, especially if you know your kid is really good at something, right? It can be easy to say, like, oh, it's gonna be fine. You don't need to worry about it, it's it's not gonna be as hard as you think. And we think we're we're helping by saying like reassuring things like that. But I want to offer just a slight, you know, more nuanced response when they're struggling like this, which is to say, it may be hard. You know, it may really be challenging. Sometimes that happens. And you will not be alone while you figure it out because we can't control whether something is going to be perceived as hard, right? But we can control whether we are by their by their side as they walk out this process in school learning, especially in this transition into the new year. And we just have to remember that confidence grows from surviving those imperfect attempts for for, you know, surviving the rocky first days of a new school year or figuring things out with a new teacher or peers. Um, the confidence grows from like dealing with it, even when it's not perfect, instead of avoiding them. So the next thing I want to talk about is that stress can move outward or inward. So when gifted children are overwhelmed, the intensity that we often see in them does not always look the same, right? Every kid is different, no two gifted children are the same. Some children externalize and their stress just moves out in the world. And if you know those kiddos are like, they're the ones who are like arguing and refusing and yelling and you know, just maybe becoming a little controlling, or if it gets really, you know, big, they might have those more like explosive reactions. Whereas other kids, and I've worked with tons on both sides, the externalizers and the internalizers and the internalizers, these kiddos, their stress moves inward, and you might even be someone who's more like this, right? So they're more the type to worry. You might not hear a peep out of them, and they they might even be like quote unquote perfect, you know, on the outside, but they're so anxious on the inside. Maybe they're withdrawing in in different ways while still participating, but like internally they're still kind of like withdrawing from the world. They might develop headaches or stomach aches. Um, you might notice that they're criticizing themselves. They might cry maybe more privately, or when they get home again, like it kind of starts to come out. Or, andor they become extremely compliant. And, you know, these kids, unlike the externalizers, you know, they they can sometimes go a really long time without being noticed, their distress not being noticed. But quiet distress is still distress. So as a parent, we want to, you know, we typically know our kids, you know, pretty well if we're paying attention. And so just make sure that it's not the just the loud ones that are getting your attention to what's going on. Like those little, those quiet ones, those anxious ones, the ones who that negative tape is running through their head, they need a lot of support. And again, you might be able to relate to this, right? Because a lot of gifted women, I think, not all not everyone, but many of us struggle with this part, where a child like this, who causes no trouble, like no, you know, external trouble to the parents or or tends not to anyway, they are most likely using enormous amounts of energy not to need anything or to not be perceived to need anything. And on the other hand, the child who is very dysregulated is not necessarily choosing to be difficult, right? And this is where curiosity, your curiosity becomes very practical. It is extremely normal and human for parents to be thinking, how do I stop this behavior? Right. Especially again, when you've got a kid who is more like acting out and maybe they're yelling or they're throwing a temper tantrum or whatever it may be. If they're older and they're teenagers, maybe they're, you know, cursing at you or whatever the behavior might be where their stress is coming out, it's very normal to think, how do I stop this? I want this to end. I do not like this. This is unpleasant, right? But if we can take a step back for a moment and pause and ask, I think the more effective question, what which is, what is this behavior helping my child communicate? What are they trying to communicate? Because if they could do it in a more effective way, I believe they would, right? But these are kids, they're learning and growing. And so we cannot assume that they've got all of this down, even when they sound like Einstein. Right. So this is where it gets so tricky. So we have to ask ourselves like, what changed? We got it, we have to be the detective. What changed? When when does this behavior tend to happen? What patterns do we notice? Where does it not happen? You know, or like what tends to happen right before? This outburst or the negative thoughts, right? And also importantly, what helps recovery and to take a step back and see if this is going on for a while. This pattern, is the pattern improving? Is it staying the same? Is it getting worse? These are a lot of the things that as a parent coach, I'm often helping a parent kind of step back from whatever what feels it can often feel like a crisis in the moment. You know, if they're working with me, there's usually things that are going on at home or at school. And so part of the work that we do is being able to take a step back and say, like, what could be going on with your child? How can we understand them? Because if we can figure out what's going on, then we can better support them, right? So your curiosity, first of all, is a huge skill as a gifted parent. And it's not at all passivity. Sometimes we feel like, I think sometimes parents feel like if we're not like dealing with the behavior right away, you know, like somehow we're being an irresponsible parent. But being curious doesn't mean we don't set limits, right? Being curious and understanding doesn't mean we don't make certain decisions to protect the siblings or to expect repair after maybe some hurtful behavior, whether that's some to someone else in the family or to us. But limits and natural consequences are much more effective when we understand the need underneath the behavior, because then we can have an ongoing conversation with our kid and come up with um strategies and interventions. I say interventions, that's a very, you know, psychological, like professional word to use. But even if you're just home and you're not working with a therapist or a parent coach or something, just figuring out how do we structure the environment and nurture the relationship that we have with our child so that we can support them in order to help them deal with all these feelings in a different way so they can communicate them in a more effective way. And I and I want to pause right now just to say that if you are a parent and you're dealing with a child or a teenager who is really exhibiting like severe patterns or like persistent patterns that you have just not been able to figure out. So whether that's anxiety or, you know, physical symptoms or school withdrawal or aggression or sleep disruption or um school refusal, right? Or if things are, like I said, persistent or maybe they're escalating, or even just not just, but you notice that they're beginning to really interfere significantly with daily life. And definitely if you think there is a safety concern, I highly recommend that you bring in the school and an appropriate health professional. And if you're not sure where to start with that, you can almost always go to the school and talk with one of the either the school psychologist or guidance counselor and bring those concerns to someone so that they can help you find the right resources there in your community. We do not need to choose between compassion and action. In fact, hopefully, ideally, those two things always go together. Next, I want to talk about goodness of fit. So, goodness of fit, we use this phrase to describe how well a child's needs, temperament, strengths, pace, vulnerabilities align with the environment. Sometimes we also use goodness of fit to talk about a parent-child relationship, but right now I want to talk about the educational environment. And for gifted kids, this is a really, really, really important matter and something a lot of parents I know think about as their kid is starting a new school year, whether it's a new school or a new teacher. Um sometimes it's going from elementary school, and now you're starting in middle school or high school. There's a lot that we're constantly like thinking about for our gifted kids. And this it just matters. Um, but I want to also be careful not to make it the answer to everything, okay? Because sometimes the work is too repetitive and, you know, or too basic for a child. Um, and so maybe the child is disengaged. And sometimes the work is appropriately challenging and then perfectionism is being activated in a gifted kid. So sometimes the intellectual fit or the cognitive fit is very strong for a kid, while the sensory or the social environment is exhausting for them. And sometimes a child who needs more depth in one subject, say, you know, in literature or science, they may need more support with things like organization or written output, or maybe it's math that they really struggle in. So fit is not about finding a perfect school in which your child is never uncomfortable. Because as far as I know, and I've worked in lots of different school settings and different um, you know, elementary and middle school and high school and private schools and public schools, I've been in lots of them. I haven't found a perfect school yet. And that's just the world we live in, right? So it is actually about just overall creating enough alignment for growth and making sure they're getting most of what they need. Because challenge without support can overwhelm any child, right? And we want gifted kids to be challenged. Usually, in a lot of situations, at least in my experience working with families, is there can be a frustration that they're not being challenged enough. So that challenge without support can, you know, be really hard for kids. But like I said, a lot of times they may be getting enough support, but they're just not getting enough challenge. And that can really be demotivating for a lot of kids. I know for my my daughter, when she was very young and started kindergarten, by like the first and second day of school, she was already coming home crying that her perception, which was accurate, um, was that it was not what she expected and it was not challenging because they were teaching things that, you know, she already knew coming in as a kindergartner. So we have to make sure that there's a good enough balance so that they don't get demotivated and not want to go to school, right? Because if you're going to school and you're spending all those hours every day, day after day, week after week, uh, all of us, I think, would feel this if we had to be in settings where we literally knew all the material or just was it just we got it, you know, in five minutes and then we spent the whole rest of the day like going over it over and over again when we got it the first time. That can be a hard thing to want to go back to every day. I have so much compassion for kids because I definitely felt that way in school. So you want to gather specifics before drawing a large, overwhelming conclusion, right? So ask your kid, what part of the day feels energizing? What's fun, you know, what's engaging, what do they enjoy the most? And and maybe depending on the kid, depending on the window, you know, of the day and the conversation, you can get to things a little more specific around, you know, are there parts of the day that feel lonely or rushed, or is there something anything that feels too easy or maybe feels confusing, right? So we're trying to get a little more data before we rush to any major conclusions. And then we want to ask the teachers what they see across different tasks and times of day, because we we do want to get a nice, full, comprehensive picture. There can be so many different things going on for a gifted kid. And especially if they might have another unidentified issue going on, like executive functioning difficulties, ADHD, maybe there's some kind of mood disorder, depression, anxiety, especially as they get older, maybe it's a very specific learning disability, maybe reading or math. So all of these things can get complicated if we don't know that they're options and we're not collecting the data along the way. So if you ever have a question about that, I would say go and have a productive conversation with someone at the school, ideally, the teacher. And maybe sometimes a school psychologist or a guidance counselor can be helpful too. And lastly, as we wrap up, I did want to try to make these a little bit shorter, but this one's getting long. There's so much to go. I could, you know, really honestly say so much more about Gift to Kids. And I we're not going to be able to squeeze everything into this episode. So maybe I'll do a few more later if there's interest in that. But I want to leave you with a simple three-part response that you can begin this week. So whether your kid is already transitioned back into a new school year or you're getting ready to go there, right? We want to do three things. So first regulate, then observe, and finally collaborate. So regulate. Before you begin a conversation with your child, I want you to notice your own urgency. Gifted parents, I have found, are often very good at seeing like five or 10 million steps ahead. But when we race five steps ahead, our child may actually experience our fear or our anxiety before they experience our support. So before you do anything, I want you to take a breath and I want you to offer connection first. Make sure their beast basic needs are met, right? Like, are they hungry? Are they thirsty? Are they sleepy? All those things. But you do not have to solve right away anything that you may not yet understand. Okay. Second, we're gonna observe. So for one week, and again, if you've got a kid who usually struggles with transitions, this is gonna be really helpful during this beginning of the school year transition. So for one or two weeks, I want you to keep a very simple, we'll call it like a curiosity log. Okay. So you notice maybe they're shutting down, maybe they're getting quiet, maybe they're withdrawing more, or maybe they're that other kind of kid who's getting real loud and in your face, whatever it may be, maybe they're getting into it with their siblings. But I want you to notice like what happened before that difficult moment. What exactly did your child do? And then think to yourself, what might your child have needed? Now, you're not gonna necessarily be able to do this right in the moment every time. This is why first we regulate and then we're observing. You might have to come back to this later. But I want you to start acting like a little detective. This is gonna help you and your kid go through this transition as you notice things like what helped with the their recovery from whatever that hard moment was, right? And what strengths do you notice in your kid when they do recover? Maybe, you know, certain kids are really social and they lean into that strength to get through something hard. Or maybe they are just like, they're so cognitively advanced and understand things at that level that they can like have a conversation with you or someone else that helps them have insight into the moment, even though you know they they could be very young. I've I've worked with um parents of actually quite young kids who still had a lot of, you know, emotional and social skills that they needed to develop, but they had incredible insight and like could grasp things and and say things and understand things that in my experience, like some adults don't even get when it comes to um, you know, managing like our emotions and relationships and things. So it's amazing. You you gotta know your kid and what their strengths are. And it's important, I think, always to include these strengths because we certainly don't want our attention to train itself only on the problems. And we don't want our kids to also think that that's all we're paying attention to, right? Okay. And then the third thing is collaborate. So we're gonna bring our observations, not verdicts, just observations, your curiosities, the data points, depending on what it is, you're gonna bring it to your child and then put, you know, potentially a teacher, or if there's a therapist involved, again, depending on what it is, you might want to involve a therapist if there is someone like that in place for your kid. So for example, you might say something like, I'm noticing that on Sunday evenings, you often get headaches or you complain that you have a headache. Um, and I'm noticing that you have a lot of worry or you're expressing a lot of worry about unfinished work. Right. And so again, depending on the age, maybe your kid can reflect on that. You might want to also notice, you know, check in with the teacher to see what they're noticing in the classroom. And then from there, you want to choose some kind of support, like, and you can start small and just try it. This is like you're experimenting and decide when you'll revisit it. So, for example, if you have a kid who you notice is coming home really depleted on days where you realize there was like a lot of writing assignments or or there it's like really heavy, depending on maybe there's a it's a new grade, they're getting into middle school, you know, it's just like the expectations are more challenging. That may be a data point for you to inquire, for example, with the teacher, could can we compare and look at what the task is actually requiring with what you're seeing in your child, like what she's experiencing, right? So if she's coming home and she's just like depleted, like that might be an indicator of something. And it might be that the task is age appropriate, more or less. And so then we might want to look for a way we can support it, or maybe if they're bigger concerns, get to a point where we're actually doing an evaluation to really look at something, but that's down the road. I don't want you to jump. Right now, we are talking about small experiments, right? Our curiosity, noticing patterns, and then going from there. These small experiments, especially in the beginning, are often more useful, I think, than you know, jumping to huge big interventions and discussions and conclusions, which in in some cases we need to get to, but sometimes it it can be a really simple shift. So this was a lot of information, and I brought up a few different things. As you think about your own child today, I want to offer just a few questions for you to reflect on. First, what behavior have I been treating as a problem before understanding it as information? This is big because sometimes we jump really quick to wanting to solve a problem before we really take the time to step back and be curious about it. Here's one that I find is a really useful one for parents of gifted kids, which is where might I be expecting emotional or social maturity to match intellectual ability? This is a biggie. We can often fall into this trap. I certainly even have, even though I know better, I can, I definitely have fallen into this trap. And teachers can struggle with this too. And then finally, does my child's stress tend to move outward, inward, or both, right? Are they more externalizers, more internalizers? And it's not black and white, they can do a little of both. So you just want to know your kid. And then finally, what does my own back to school anxiety bring into the room? If you are the anxious type, you might want to answer that question for yourself. You do not need perfect answers, my friend, but it's just important to notice what opens up for you when you ask these questions. So to wrap up summary, this week, you're gonna create that curiosity log. You can do that for a week, maybe two weeks, depending. And you wanna keep it short. You want to keep it short, easy, again, before, behavior, possible need, what helped, one strength, right? We're just collecting the data if we feel like we're noticing patterns in our kid. And again, you might have a kid who transitions beautifully, and you don't need to do this. But if you have a kid that who and you know they kind of struggle with transitions, then I want to invite you to be really intentional as they go into this new school year. And at the end of the week or two weeks, look for the patterns and then choose either one small question or support that you want to explore, whether that's simply just with your child, or maybe if you feel like it's necessary to bring it to the teacher or someone else at the school. That's what I want you to be looking for. Because again, the goal is not to be like a crazy surveillance helicopter parent, but the goal is to try to understand what might be going on for your child. And once you understand, you're gonna be more effective typically, even if you don't know what to do, but you could give that information to someone who might be able to help you. And again, that someone could be, you know, someone like me who works with parents and does parent coaching. It could be a school psychologist or the teacher at the school or the principal, so many different options, but you don't have to feel like as a parent you're trying to figure it out all by yourself. And I just want to encourage and remind you that your gifted child, their back to school intensity does not automatically mean something is wrong. Intensity is a hallmark of giftedness. So you don't have to jump to the conclusion that something is necessarily wrong. It could very well just mean your child is stretching, they're adapting, they're growing, which is what we want them to do, you know. Um, and they simply could be trying to find, you know, a new workable place and rhythm and routine in a brand new environment. That's a lot of what it can be. And so your job as a parent is not to eliminate every hard feeling that they might feel. Your job is to become a steady enough presence that your child can bring you the truth of their experience, whatever that might be, and to respond thoughtfully when the pattern tells you that more support is needed. Gifted children do not flourish because every environment is perfect and every school is like meeting their every need or every transition is perfectly smooth. Like this is the real world, right? And this is every child has to deal with this. Gifted children are no different, but they flourish when the adults around them remain curious and responsive and willing to keep learning who this particular child is and who they are becoming. So I hope that this was helpful. I know I threw a lot at you. Uh, next week, I am really excited because we're gonna turn the lens back towards mothers, and we're gonna talk about what happens when you recognize yourself in your gifted child and how understanding your child can become an invitation to understand and heal parts of your own story. Until next time, keep flourishing. Thank you for listening to the Power to Flourish podcast. I hope today's conversation left you feeling more seen, more supported, and more deeply connected to yourself. If this episode resonated, would you take a moment to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with a friend? It's one of the best ways to help this work reach the women who need it most. You'll find show notes, links, and resources from today's episode at powertoflourish.com. And now just a quick reminder: this podcast is for educational and informational purposes. Okay, not therapy, medical advice.