So How do I Parent this Child? - Bill Hendricks & Bev Godby

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Not licensed in Alaska, Hawaii, Georgia, Massachusetts, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah. As a parent, are you responsible for who your children become? You're not the artist that made this art treasure, but you're really receiving the gift of that. If we go to the personhood of the child, that's really the trump card that helps us understand what kind of input this particular individual needs in order to thrive. Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, New York Times best-selling author of "The 5 Love Languages" . Our guests today believe that parents don't determine who their kids become. They steward them into who they're meant to be.

Why is that distinction important? You'll find out today as we talk with Bev Godby and Bill Hendricks. They have co-written our featured resource today at fivelovelanguages.com. It's a book titled, So How Do I Parent This Child? Discovering the Wisdom and the Wonder of Who Your Child Was Meant to Be.

Again, find out more at fivelovelanguages.com. Gary, I think this is the first time we've ever had a brother and sister join us on the program. Well, I think you're right, Chris.

I don't remember that we've done that before, and I'm assuming they had the same father and mother. This is going to be an interesting discussion. I'm excited about it. Well, let's meet our guests. Let me start with Bill Hendricks first.

He's been with us before. He's co-founder and president of Global Center for Giftedness, which seeks to mobilize a worldwide movement of giftedness guides, people who know how to help others discover their giftedness and then apply those insights to the major areas of their lives. He serves also as the executive director for Christian leadership at the Hendricks Center, a leadership development initiative at Dallas Theological Seminary. And right next to him is Bev Hendricks Godbee, a senior associate and change management coach at the Giftedness Center there in Dallas. She focuses on graduating students and women who are navigating challenging life transitions. She serves as a consultant to schools and nonprofit organizations that speaks and writes often on these topics. So together they have written, So How Do I Parent This Child? Discovering the wisdom and the wonder of who your child was meant to be.

You can find out more at FiveLoveLanguages.com. Well, Bev and Bill, welcome to Building Relationships. Thank you, Gary. Great to be with you today.

It's a real privilege. Well, first of all, tell us about your relationship as brother and sister. And if you ever thought you would write a book together.

That's a great question. I'm the older sister. So I get to say, we actually had a very inauspicious kind of beginning. Bill was born on the eve of my third birthday. That meant that from ever after that point, it was our birthday, but his first and then mine. So I had to get over that insult, which I managed to eventually. I would say that I rediscovered my brother right as he was finishing up high school.

I actually was home for a semester from Wheaton, lived at home, not by choice. But Bill was there and we spent a lot of late evenings discussing things. I was surprised almost to find this person was my brother. We had been playmates and had a great relationship, but it was like he was somebody else. He was an adult.

So we kind of continued that on. I was out east in Philadelphia when he went to Harvard. We would see each other often during that time. Then later, he moved back to Dallas. I became very close friends with his wife, Nancy, and their kids. We raised kids together. About 20 years ago, Bill was needing someone to help him at the Giftedness Center.

He had me go through the assessment to see if that would be a good fit for me. It was, and we began our work together. In this book, I don't know that we ever said, like 20 years ago, we wanted to write a book. I'm not sure that was ever the goal, but it was more of an organic thing that came out of the work that we did with people. Well, when it became apparent that we needed to write a book about giftedness and the implications of giftedness for parenting, we're both writers, but we have a very different style. It was obvious that we both needed to contribute to it based on our own different experiences of helping people discover this phenomenon. Bev's raised three girls. I've raised three girls. We thought we ought to join forces, and we'd get a better book out of it.

That's what we did, and we think we do as a result. Well, I'm excited about it. I imagined writing a book with my sibling, and it's hard to do.

I've written books with other authors, and I know that's not always easy either, so let me commend you on successfully writing this book. Thank you. Well, that was all providential, Gary, because we did it during a pandemic year, so we were very isolated, and it was actually an exercise of faith from beginning to end, so this is all God's doing. Yeah. Well, it turned out well.

I'm excited about it. You know, the prevailing idea of many parenting books is that proper input by the parent is going to yield proper output for the child, and you say that that works well with machines but not with people. Talk about that. Well, the prevailing view of parenting in our culture is that a child is a product. The idea is that parents bring this baby home from the hospital or wherever it was born, and they then spend the next 18 or 20 years parenting and educating and socializing the child to, quote, become whoever that child's going to become, and that how that child turns out, which is kind of a mechanical term, at age 18, 22, becomes a referendum on how well the parents did. The problem with that view is that a child is not a product. A child is a person, and there's some truth to the idea that the proper input determines proper output, but we have to determine what is proper, and we submit, if we go to the personhood of the child themself, that's really the trump card that helps us understand what kind of input does this particular individual, this particular person, this little baby person needs in order to thrive. I would also add that I think that to think about the delivery as being that of an art treasure that you have been given kind of helps you reframe this into something is made that you're given.

You did not make it. You're not the artist that made this art treasure, but you're really receiving the gift of that, which gives you a whole different idea, I think, about what you're doing, but also what the child's doing. You know, this is obviously a different slant on parenting. How did you guys come up with this idea and then develop it in this book? Well, the process that we use to discover a person's giftedness is not a test or inventory or questionnaire. It's rather an interview process. It's a narrative-based approach.

The person tells us a set of stories from their life about activities they've done that they've enjoyed doing and done well, and they tell those stories going all the way back to childhood. So over the last 20 to 25 years, between the two of us, we have conducted somewhere around 4,500 of those interviews we estimate, and we've heard thousands and thousands of stories about people's giftedness from when they were children. And it finally occurred to us, you know, this means that parents are seeing in real time the giftedness of their children being lived out.

They just don't know that they're seeing it. But with a little bit of coaching, we could help make parents aware that they could actually observe their children, the right things, and keep track of that. And over time, they'd have a whole lot of really solid evidence from the lived experience of their child that points to a very, very clear pattern of behavior. And that's what giftedness really is.

It's a pattern of behavior in a person's life. So that's really where the idea for the book came. I would also add to that that one of the things that we discovered in hearing these stories from people is that it was almost a magical quality about the early stories, as we call them, things that happened to the person before the age of 10. They didn't always remember a lot of detail, but they remembered a lot of joy.

The satisfaction, the joy of being that person, even at the age of four or five, was really profound. It stood out to us. Sometimes it was almost like a metaphor for the way they did all of life. So this seemed a way to help parents maybe think about paying attention to that. They see it, but do they observe it? Do they spend time with it?

Do they pay attention to it? So we wanted to give them some tools to help them capture it, because the joy is so great in the child. It would be so great for the parents to be able to see that as well. So what I hear you saying is that you took these 4,500 interviews, approximately, with adults who were looking back on their childhood, and you began to see patterns of how the things they really enjoyed as a child fleshed out in their adult life and their careers, and now you're trying to say to parents, hey, what if you check this out early on and then begin to cooperate with that child's giftedness? Have I got the idea? Exactly, exactly.

That's exactly it. And I would add that I had the benefit and Bev did too, once she kind of got into the process of our own children, raising our own children. I mean, I have three daughters, and I was right there in the birthing room for all three of them. And I promise you, right there on the little weighing table, all three of them manifested themselves to the world in three completely different ways, and it hasn't let up since. And so I knew enough about giftedness, even at that time.

The oldest is now in her mid-30s, so that's really at the beginning of my career. I was watching, I was looking for certain things, really around where the child's energy was going. And I noticed all three were very, very different people.

And I sort of went with that. I said, let's honor those differences, that uniqueness. And for each child, it made a huge difference in the way that I and their mother parented them. I had an added dimension that I had identical twins.

And it was very obvious to me from day one, although it was not obvious to anyone else, that these babies were different. And watching them grow up and watching the fingerprints, if you will, of God on them as being different, has just been a profound lesson that I've been privileged to see. I now have six grandchildren, and that is, I don't even have a word for it, but being present to the wonder of each one of them. Now that this is my work, I feel I have this real wonderful opportunity to really see this in a very nascent kind of way, just growing and developing and using that then to help their parents when they see things in their kids, just being kind of a witness to that as well.

It's very fun. This is Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Find out more about our featured resource and our guests by logging on to fivelovelanguages.com. We're talking with Bev Godby and Bill Hendricks about their book, So How Do I Parent This Child? Discovering the wisdom and the wonder of who your child was meant to be.

Find out more by going to fivelovelanguages.com. Bev, you just said something in the last segment as we were ending that you look at the children as they're growing up or memories that people have. What are the questions that you ask of this? Is it like, what's your first memory? Or what do you remember about your childhood home? Or how do you dig into that background like that?

That's a great question. The prompt that we give people is, tell us about a time in your life when you remember doing something you really enjoyed and thought you did it well. I also really encourage them to go back as early as they can remember. It doesn't seem like a very significant story to them to be talking about building a treehouse with your brothers in the backyard. But when you collect that with the other stories, it has profound significance that you're able to see because the pattern shows up. But there is such a joy for the individual in telling that story. That's one of the reasons we really like to capture it.

It's like a pure expression of the individual many times before anyone has come in to tell them, don't do that, or that isn't right, or any kind of way that they might intrude on that story. So it's a very pure picture of giftedness. Yes.

Okay, can we do this? Can we turn the spotlight on Gary Chapman and ask him? Gary, if you were to answer that question, you know, the earliest memory you have of doing something that you felt really good about doing it.

Anything come to mind? Washing dishes. Dishes.

It was early stage, I can remember. I washed dishes one night, my sister washed dishes the next night. And I really felt I was good at it. Acts of service. And that prepared you for your marriage to Carolyn, right?

Absolutely. Because her love language is acts of service. So I've always thanked my mother, you know, for teaching me how to wash dishes. And my dad taught me how to work in the garden. And I really enjoyed that too. You know, the both of those, you know, I was working, I was doing things, I was accomplishing things. And so, yeah, it kind of fits into the work ethic, you know, a strong work ethic. So I don't know, I better not go any further with that, or Bill and Beville and analyze me here.

Oh, we wouldn't dare do that, Gary. But see, the amazing thing is that you actually do remember that. And on top of that, you remember that for you as something, we'll say significant.

I one time asked, it was actually a pastor at a church. And he couldn't remember anything. And I said, Relax, just trust the process.

What do you remember? Believe it or not, he kind of chuckled and he said, Well, you wouldn't be interested in this. And I said, Just tell me. He said, Okay. He said, I remember when I was two and a half.

And I thought, Okay, we've already hit paydirt. How many people can remember something two and a half. But what he remembered was playing hide and seek with his brother and sister until way after dark and their mothers yelling at him to come in. He said, That's all I remember. I said, That's great. That's fantastic.

That's exactly what we're looking for. And he's like, Really? And then he, he said, You know, it's funny, the only other thing I remember about that, he always liked to be the person that they had to find, he never really wanted to be the person had to go find. Now, that sounds totally insignificant.

And in context, it probably was. But you get a whole bunch of other stories from him. And then you do the analysis and you discover that this is an individual who has a giftedness for getting people to respond to him and influencing their behavior.

And you go back to that very, very primitive story at age two and a half. And what was he doing? He wanted to be the one that they had to go find, he wanted to get a response from these people. Now, some people might say, Well, that's a real stretch, Bill. All I know is he's got, you know, 12, 15 stories from throughout his life, that all link up in that way.

And you do have a sense that something was happening very, very early on, along those lines. Yeah, Bill, and I like to refer to this as the good truth about the person. Because it's true, it keeps showing up again and again over time. And we spend a lot of time often with the things that are maybe not so great. We remember those stories. But this allows people to go back and reclaim the part of them that was satisfying, that was memorable. Even people who have had damage or trauma to them, we find that they return to these stories.

They're like home for them. One mentor of ours used to call it who they be. And it is, that's their feeling is who they be.

Wow. So I don't know what the converse of the love language is. If you don't like one thing, you know, that may point you in a direction.

Is it the same with this? If you had an experience where you felt that you didn't do well as a child, and then you kind of retreated from that, does that give you insight, Bill? We tend to stick with the stories where the person gains satisfaction from doing it. The telltale sign that giftedness is activated is that the person takes joy or satisfaction from the doing of the activity, whatever it is.

They gain energy. And yes, if you do this work long enough, you start to discover from people's unpleasant experiences that it is kind of the negative reverse, that there were probably circumstances in the situation that were lacking that they really need in order for the thing to work, or that their giftedness got blocked in some way. Oftentimes people will tell me a story where they kind of get all the way to the punchline. You know, they've done everything that worked perfectly for them, but for some reason they fell short of getting that final thing that would have been so satisfying, and you can see their whole energy washed out at that point. You know, maybe they're a person who, let's stay with that guy who loves to get a response, and he wrote a paper or something in college and put a lot of work and energy into it, bound and determined he was going to, you know, impress the professor. And then just the very day that the grades were supposed to come out, something happened to the professor, and none of the papers got graded. And so he never got to see the fruit of all of that work, and so he's feeling that disappointment. We do see that.

Yeah. Well, let's go back now to the parent who has the child. And most parents would say, my child's gifted. I don't know what they mean by that, but what do you mean by the term giftedness, and why is that important for the parent?

Well, I think they are right about that. Every child is gifted, every person is, but the way that we tend to talk about gifted in our society usually means academic giftedness, some kind of special talent in some way, and those are no doubt part of who the child is. But what we're talking about is a core set of motivation that drives the person. It's what they wake up in the morning wanting to do, and every person has their own unique giftedness. I think that the challenge for parents sometimes is if that does not seem to—what the child seems to be showing them—doesn't conform to their expectations, to maybe what they had hoped for, that's sometimes when the problems occur. But the child is going to irrepressibly be who they are.

They cannot be other than that. This is something that is a core truth about them, and whenever they want to do anything they care about, this is going to be how they do it. Giftedness is essentially what someone is born to do. Everybody's born to do something, whether it's one person wants to solve a problem they never met a problem they didn't want to solve. Somebody else, as I've mentioned, loves to gain a response and influence people's behavior.

Somebody else wants to understand something at a very deep level. Something else, life is all about challenges. Their life is one challenge after another, and they love nothing more than to surmount a challenge. We could go on and on and on about all the different kinds of giftedness that there are in the world, and in fact everybody really is unique in that they have their own unique giftedness that is unique to them. And as Bev mentioned, giftedness is a combination of motivation, a desire, a drive, but it's also ability. In other words, somebody can be motivated to do something, but they've also got to be able to do it. There are many people who are motivated to sing in the shower, but you're glad they don't sing in the ensemble at church or whatever. They don't really have the ability to do that.

Conversely, you have people that have ability, but they don't have motivation. I worked with a guy who was easily capable of being a linebacker for any NFL football team, and I asked him, I said, so did you play football in college? He said, oh no, it broke my dad's heart. I played through high school and he was certain that I was going to go into college ball and then into the NFL, but I didn't go out for football. And I said, well, why not? He said, well, I didn't want to get hit.

He said, I love watching the game, but I hated getting hit. So he had the ability, he just didn't have the motivation. So you got to have both of those to qualify as giftedness. So where does this giftedness come from? Is it inherited?

Well, Bev and I are people of faith. We happen to believe that the giftedness ultimately comes from the creator, that it's endowed, it's inborn. All we know about giftedness really is that it's a phenomenon. When I say a phenomenon, like gravity's a phenomenon.

You don't have to know anything about gravity to take advantage of it. It's just the way the world works. Well, there's this phenomenon about human beings that each of us lives into this unique pattern of behavior. Giftedness has been around for as long as there have been human beings, but nobody's really paid much attention to it in a formal way until about the end of the 19th century.

So for maybe the last hundred years, 120 years, people have paid a little more attention to it. So we actually don't know that much about the phenomenon. But what we do know is that it shows up extremely early in a person's life. And it's not inherited clearly because first of all, there's absolutely no genetic evidence for it. It doesn't seem to dwell in the genes or the chromosomes. Secondly, there's strong evidence, as any parent could attest, and many grown adults would attest, that they are completely unlike their parents.

The apple fell completely in a whole other universe from the tree, if you will. And even as Bev said, you can have identical twins and then you end up with two really different people, even though they have identical chromosomal matter. So it's probably not inherited.

It's more given is how we put it. This is Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, New York Times best-selling author of "The 5 Love Languages" . We're talking with the brother and sister team of Bill Hendricks and Bev Godby today. Our featured resource is their book, So How Do I Parent This Child? Discovering the Wisdom and the Wonder of Who Your Child Was Meant to Be.

Just go to fivelovelanguages.com to find out more. So how can a parent discover the giftedness of their child, and at what age can you begin to see this? We really think giftedness begins immediately when you get to see the child at birth. Some would say maybe even how that child was in utero. They'll say, oh my goodness, he was so busy in there, moving all the time.

As soon as he got out and got old enough, that's who he was as well. So it could even be pre-birth. But for sure, when you take that little one home, or you adopt that child whenever it is, you will see that this person will tell you who they are, if you pay attention. So even early things, but how they're comforted, whether they cry a lot, those sorts of things can be clues.

Bill and I like to think about, especially in these early stages, as collecting data, if you will. This is true about them. It seems to be always true that they start crying at 3 p.m. and cry till seven. But that may not be always what they do, hopefully not. So you hold it lightly, but pay attention, especially to how they respond to things that you do, because this is all about a dyad. It's all about a relationship between you and that child. So it's observable very, very early. Giftedness is really, if I could put it this way, kind of an energy, a motivational energy. I'm not saying it's like the force or some weird exotic thing.

I'm saying it's a motivational energy. It's the way the child engages and interacts with their world. Now, when a baby is a baby, you get in a really primitive form of their personhood.

But there is a personhood there nonetheless. And so, as Bev said, the way they interact with their caregiver, the way that they observe things, they look at things, you pay attention to the energy. What do they focus on?

What do they try to move toward? What sounds seem to be of interest to them? And again, with an infant, you can't, you're only guessing.

You can't draw conclusions. But what you do notice is a pattern. If you pay attention over time, you'll see that the child keeps returning to certain things with a certain similar energy. And then, as they begin to get their motor skills come in, as they begin to even toddle around and ultimately walk, now you start to get a whole lot more possibility to see where that energy inclines.

Like, what toys do they keep coming back to? I have a friend who has a baby that's probably two years old. She was just astounded the other day when she came back. Astounded the other day, this child spent, she said, two and a half hours on their own, taking boxes and stacking them up inside each other and then taking them back apart.

Now, we don't know what that means, but any child who focuses that much energy for two and a half hours, something's going on there. So she can squirrel that away in a journal, just made an observation, and then add to that all kinds of other observations she makes over the next two, three, five, ten years. Over time, she'll have a whole lot of data, as Bev put it, and she'll start to see that the data starts to connect.

There's patterns that start to be revealed from that data. One of the things that's really important that we want to say here, Gary, is that we really want to pay attention to what's right with the child. So often parents are paying more attention to what's not happening, what's wrong with them, how they're somehow being a problem, than to what they are doing. It's when you pay attention to what is right with them that you kind of can see the giftedness. I really encourage parents to try to develop what I call positive language for what they're doing.

One of my twins was what I called at the time, slow to warm up. I look back at that and I think, yeah, that's really not a positive way to talk about that. It would be much better to say she is a person who takes what time she needs to feel comfortable. That's a statement of what she is doing, and it kind of changes the whole way of looking at that.

Yeah, I can see that. Bill, you mentioned the word journal. Are you all suggesting that that might be a method of doing this, of keeping a journal of what you're observing through those early years?

Absolutely. What the journal does is it records in more or less real time and marks your trail. I think what can happen if you don't record some of your observations, the most obvious is you simply forget about them because we all have to keep track of a whole lot of information in our lives. Again, to have a record that you can then go back, and this is real lived experience on behalf of your child.

That's pretty objective data. As a parent, you just want to record what did I see, what did the child do, and not interpret. Here's what I think the child did, or here's, I put some kind of a judgment or a slant on it or an interpretation on it. No, just today, just like the example I just gave. Today, my son spent two and a half hours putting boxes in and out of each other, something that simple.

In the moment, it may not seem significant, but down the road, it may seem very significant. We tell a story in the book, Bev tells a story about a little girl who always liked to put things inside things. One day, she came over and Bev had a doll and the doll, I guess, had a purse. She said, we need to find something to put into the purse.

They hunted around and they found a coin and put it in the purse. Again, you don't know what that means, but the child took extreme delight in being able to do that. But that pattern of putting things inside other things, she found the child was doing that in other contexts as well.

We're not trying to figure out what it means yet, but you know it means something because the child comes back to it again and again with great joy and delight. So the journal, the idea there is keeping track of your observations, capturing it. And we're actually, I was going to mention, we have a little web page that parents can go to where we're setting up an online journal that they can keep at giftedness.co, CO, slash parenting. We can give that link again, giftedness.co, CO, slash parenting. And we're just trying to facilitate parents having a place where they can keep track of this data.

Yeah, I like that idea a lot. Let's talk a little bit about homework, because we all know of past parents that children respond differently to school homework, and I've known parents who do the homework for the children. They make good grades, but I'm assuming you would not advise that. I would advise it maybe only for the parent to learn something, because they will definitely do that if they're doing the kids homework, but it's definitely not good for the child. There's always a danger in what I call over functioning for our kids. We all want to have our kids be the star of the team, the one that shows off well, that makes the great grades. And what we really encourage parents to do is respect the gift that the child is exhibiting, and so maybe school isn't their strong suit.

And I think to be more curious than critical is always more helpful. So we would want to understand why they're not doing their homework. I think that the tool that we want to use most is empathy, trying to understand what the relationship is that this child has with this teacher, with school. It's not to make excuses for them, but it's definitely to be a partner and an advocate, but one that is listening to the teacher but also listening to their child and seeing what could be worked out. There's a lot of ways that one, as a parent, can potentiate what the child is doing relative to homework. Sometimes I found with my own twins, they have a giftedness that we call participate, so they always want to do things together.

No surprise there. But then I recognize that if they came out to the breakfast room and did their homework there, where I'm there, where their sisters are there, they were much more successful at doing that. So again, just paying attention to how that child does it. We have a whole section in the book on education and the implications of giftedness for education. In our culture, we have chosen for the last hundred years or more to educate through primarily an academic form of learning. Certain kinds of giftedness do quite well in those environments, in an academic setting. And people who excel there tend to learn by reading, by writing, by memorizing, by taking tests, to some extent by being compliant. And if you learn in those ways, you'll do really, really well there because they give out these things called grades. And whether the system intends it or not, over time, the kids that make the better grades are deemed to be the smart kids and the kids who don't make such good grades are deemed to be the not so smart kids.

Well, nothing could be further from the truth. If how you learn doesn't match how the instruction is dispensed, you may end up looking and frankly feeling pretty dumb. But we could take the same person and take them into a whole different learning setting where we instruct differently and that person will look brilliant. And meanwhile, somebody who does well in an academic setting will flounder. Bev and I both happen to do well in academic settings.

So between the two of us, we got a bunch of master's degrees and so forth. But we recognize the vast majority of people actually don't learn that way. And it sort of challenges parents to be careful in setting expectations for their child. Are they setting those expectations based on how the child is wired? Or is it more about how the child is going to make the parents look in an academic setting? Now we've been talking about primarily when the child is younger, but in the teenage years.

Is there a difference there? Or what would you add to a parent who has teenage children? I think it gets a little more complicated in those years because the child is especially working on who they are different from the parents often. That's an important thing that they're working on and need to figure out. I think a lot really helps.

I'm now saying someone that's at the early end of this. The relationship you build with them of trust, of respect, mutual respect early on, will usually serve you well in those teenage years. Those of us that have three girls could tell you that it can get dicey sometimes in those teenage years.

But kids will forgive you a lot and you will make mistakes, of course, like we all do, if they know they're loved, if they know that they're received and belong to you. But there are times when they get moody and they'll be exhibiting whatever stress or pressures that they feel. Again, I go back to the curious, but not critical.

The more that you can invite them into conversation, the more you can pay attention to what they are doing and what's right with them and start there. That can be a door of opportunity for them. The thing that I always point out, particularly in adolescence, a child's body is changing dramatically. With that come all kinds of new experiences. Frankly, with that, new feelings. Some of those feelings are quite scary.

Suddenly, people that didn't look interesting three years before suddenly look very interesting now. It's a lot for a child to absorb and even sort out. Probably by the nature of just adolescence and teen years, as young people are trying to come to grips with new emotions and even how to handle emotions, you're going to probably see some moodiness and so forth. Where does the giftedness fit in? Well, the first thing to point out is that even if the child's body is changing, their giftedness is not changing. One of the realities about the nature of giftedness is that it never fundamentally changes.

In other words, the personhood of an individual stays stable throughout their life. Now, many things change about a person. Their body changes, their values change, their beliefs change, their relationships change. A lot of things change, but that core personhood, which is where the giftedness resides, will never fundamentally change.

Here you have an adolescent or a teen. They now are beginning to discover more, at least at a subjective level, about the power of what they've actually got. And they're also able to express that giftedness in more sophisticated ways. Sometimes their giftedness gets frustrated, and when that happens, they get very demotivated. And that can express itself in all kinds of ways. And so sometimes a parent needs to think about the mood that their child is in, because this thing that they love to do, that they gain so much energy from doing, is somehow getting blocked or frustrated or shamed or something else not good for it. And it's doing a number on them emotionally.

And then I would add, there's what we call the burden of the gift. Every kind of giftedness extracts a certain emotional toll on a person simply because that's how they're wired. So you think about that person who wants to gain response from other people and influence their behavior. Well, when they don't get that response, the natural reaction is to feel very defeated, begin to wonder, maybe there's something wrong with me. The person who loves to meet a need, if they don't feel needed, they feel worthless. They feel like they don't belong.

And they're wondering again, what's wrong with me that I'm not needed? So a lot of the emotions that we see will ultimately find their roots in the giftedness of the child. You know, Bill, earlier you talked about the difference in terms of academic settings and some people respond to one and some to another. Let's talk a moment about when they finish high school. I'm guessing that you all would not recommend that everybody has to go to college. Speak to that and tell us why you say what you say.

We would absolutely agree with that. I think that many people that we see are really more set up for what we would call apprentice style learning. They learn by doing, by getting their body into something, watching someone else that may be an expert do it, and then do that. A lot of college is not set up that way. I will say that if a child is really set on going to college, there are so many different ways of doing that now that are really helpful. Oftentimes, a child might start with community college, because that's a little more manageable for them.

We encourage that. Once they're about 16 or 17, you can find out and have them tell you these stories. One of the things that we didn't mention is that people we work with, really, it's about age 17, 16, 17, where they could actually tell you the answer to, so talk to me about a story that you remember, this prompt that we mentioned earlier. If you ask a 13-year-old that, or even an eight-year-old, when you get to the part about what was so satisfying, you're going to get an answer like, I don't know, it just was. They don't have the objectivity yet, being able to stand back and see this, but about 16 or 17, they can. But about 16 or 17, they can. So you now can really find out what kind of educational setting makes the most sense for this child.

What is the realm of possibility for them relative to college? Again, you have to check yourself as a parent. If that's something that you've just counted on, you may have to rethink that.

But this is about what's best for this personhood, and not necessarily for you. But there are enormous cultural pressures. A lot of people assume, I have to go to college. I mean, there's a whole mindset, very deep and very systemic in our culture, that the college experience is the path into the middle class. Now 2008, and now a lot of the wreckage of the pandemic, as well as a lot of the, I would call it, a looming crisis in the funding of education and its fruit. All these factors are coming together to really question that.

And we don't know how all that's going to turn out. But for many parents, we're boomers, and I'm sure there's a lot of Gen Xers out there that have kids now, too, that are getting to be college age. And it's sort of still an assumption, oh, well, of course you're going to go to college.

And we may want to tap the brakes on that. I, along those lines, am increasingly a big believer for many students that they take that gap year, a year or two, maybe to work a real job and see what's out there in the real world and just grow up a little bit. The students who seem to do best in college are always the ones who have direction. They have beginnings of what we call a vision for their life, where they can see how their giftedness would fit into making a contribution to the world in some kind of an occupation.

Those are the students who seem to get the most out of college and for whom that investment makes the most sense. Well, Bill and Bev, this has been a fascinating discussion, and we only scratched the surface on this topic. I really am glad that you guys have put this book out.

I know that a lot of our listeners are going to want to get it because it's just filled with practical ideas along the lines that we're talking about. So thanks for being with us today and investing this time with our listeners. Well, thank you, Gary. I feel like what we've done here is you paved the way with "The 5 Love Languages" , and all we're doing is sort of taking it maybe to another level and saying everything Gary said is absolutely true. It's even more true than you realize, and just helping parents pay attention to that.

Thanks again, Gary. Just being able to help parents be encouraged and restore some of the joy, oxygen of parenting, that's really what we would most love to do. But thank you for giving us this time. That's what I felt this whole hour is looking at our kids. Things are starting to make sense to me, even from my own life. So if you go to fivelovelanguages.com, you'll see the book, So How Do I Parent This Child?

Discovering the wisdom and the wonder of who your child was meant to be. Just go to fivelovelanguages.com. And next week, we'll open the phones and take your questions as we present our October edition of Dear Gary. You can leave a message on our listener line now by calling 1-866-424-GARY. Our thanks to Steve Wick and Janice Todd. And don't forget our website, fivelovelanguages.com. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.