Gifted children are often highly sensitive to their surroundings and are able to readily identify potential solutions to challenges that imperil the environment in which they live. Many gifted children are strong advocates of sustainable living, caring deeply about the world around them and its health in the future. For this reason, parents and…

Many teachers and parents of young children with disabilities, particularly autism spectrum disorder (ASD), are familiar with young children who engage in repetitive and restrictive behaviors such as flapping, spinning, and rocking. This type of restrictive and repetitive behavior, or stereotypy, can be common, over time it can become problematic…

Why encourage children to play board games? In the increasing disconnect of our digital lives, playing games provides a way to connect and relate with others on a human level. Strategy and role-playing games provide intellectual challenges and stretch creativity to keep the gifted mind engaged in solving problems. At the same time, the players…

When students earn good grades and high praise without having to make much effort, they may not learn the values and skills needed in order to be productive, caring citizens who contribute positively to the world. Some of the most important concepts for a successful life may not be taught to gifted children early in life because they are not…

In the past several years, there has been an important movement to reduce the utilization of restraint for individuals with developmental disabilities. Legislatures, local and national, are taking on the task of shaping the way that our culture supports people who, up until now, have been often treated in a punitive manner rather than truly…

While partnerships including meaningful, two-way, parent-teacher dialogue about young children during early childhood program and school meetings are critical, linguistic differences between bilingual parents who are immigrants and early educators can impede communication and lead to inequitable services. In this article, we focus on one aspect of…

Objective: Children with Tourette syndrome and other co-morbidities (abbreviated hereafter to TS+) experience significant learning difficulties. We wished to identify educational strategies that these students, their parents and teachers considered useful. Design: An "educational toolkit" was compiled of 84 strategies identified by…

Many young children engage in challenging behaviors that could have short- and long-term negative effects for both the children and their families. Challenging behaviors refer to "any repeated pattern of behavior, or perception of behavior, that interferes with or is at risk of interfering with optimal learning or engagement in prosocial…

Challenging behavior is often a source of frustration for parents. Challenging behavior is defined as any behavior that interferes with children's learning and development, is harmful to children and to others, and puts a child at risk for later social problems or school failure (Bailey & Wolery, 1992; Kaiser & Rasminsky, 2003). Children's…

The normal developmental challenges experienced during early childhood as well as more significant emotional and behavioral problems require that parents and caregivers communicate effectively. The manner in which parents and caregivers communicate with each other about children's behavior can have a significant and lasting impact on children,…

The long awaited blessings of having a child bring simultaneous bouts of confusion and uncertainty regarding the vast parenting responsibilities that come with raising that child. When the child has a disability, sometimes the tasks can seem especially daunting. In this article, the authors aim to guide parents of children who display challenging…

Whether or not it is conscious, parents, caregivers, and teachers are looking for indicators that a child is not "fitting in" with peers. In most cases, teachers and parents are looking for problems or learning difficulties that need to be addressed because the earlier a problem is discovered and diagnosed, the more likely an intervention or…

Parents of gifted children play a powerful role in expanding their world and helping them discover what they love. When gifted children have impassioned, open-minded, and creative family members, they are free to discover what they love and who they are as people. For gifted learners, curiosity, passion, and interest are absolute essentials.…

Gifted children crave meaning through learning experiences, and they are naturally inquisitive. This article provides a teaching framework that parents can adapt for use with gifted children to help facilitate STEM knowledge and skills. The CReaTE Framework, adapted from an evolving lesson plan framework, can promote learning in a nontraditional,…

Time out has been widely advocated as an effective parental discipline practice to reduce disruptive and oppositional child behaviour in young children. Despite evidence showing that the procedure is effective when used as part of a comprehensive positive parenting strategy it has not been uniformly accepted and critics have questioned its…