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Global awareness and gifted children: its joy and history.

Article Excerpt
In 1986, Linda Silverman, Constance Smith (formerly Constance Shannon), and I became aware that whereas the characteristics of gifted children had been studied rather thoroughly (even at that time), how the gifted view their world and their own role in it was less well known. So it was that at that time we organized the Global Awareness division of NAGC. In writing this article, I've realized that even the term Global Awareness is too limiting--it is really Universal Awareness with which we are concerned.

During the time that George and I were running the Roeper School, from 1941 until 1980, history was punctuated by world events and catastrophes. Soon after retirement, I opened the Annemarie Roeper Consultation Service for Gifted Children. My practice gave me an amazing overview of how these often highly gifted children react to and cope with world events. It is to be expected that their sensitized feelers pick up any nuances of emotion from their equally sensitive parents. Whenever something occurs that is of global significance, gifted parents react with strong emotional responses, which draw expanding circles in their surroundings like a stone dropped into a body of water.

Having spent at least 60 years of my life working with gifted children, I am able to observe the manner in which certain behaviors among the gifted are repeated in tune with the surrounding emotional waves. During those 60 years, a number of world-shaking events occurred: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, the attack on and collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the tsunami at Banda Aceh, and the flooding of New Orleans. After every event, like clockwork, my office would begin to fill with more parents, more teachers, and more children of all ages showing a myriad of reactions.

For instance, at such times there were more children who had nightmares or difficulties...

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