Organizational Skills of Gifted Children

How to Help a Gifted Child to Get Organized and Keep the Room Neat

Mar 12, 2009

Organizational skills are often not among the strongest abilities of gifted and talented children. That's why parents should know how to help them to get organized.

The minds of gifted and talented children are always busy thinking over thousands of things at a time, so very often such children are disorganized. Their rooms, being the reflection of what is going on in their thoughts, are full of all kinds of evidence of the children’s many and varied interests.

Since schools usually do not teach time- and clutter-management skills, it is the parents’ responsibility to help their gifted children to organize their space.

Develop Organizational Skills with Understanding

Parent’s opinion on what is needed and important in the children’s room often does not correspond to that of the young minds. Being active and versatile, gifted children may have a variety of things they might think are very useful and important. They will be able to tell the history of a rock placed on the window-sill, and will for sure explain why they desperately need to keep it.

So, simply throwing away what the parents think is not essential is not the best solution. Gifted child should not be limited in space or resources for his or her activities, no matter how strange such resources might seem to a parent: the child knows why he or she needs each particular thing. Therefore, the only solution at the beginning is to organize all the child’s treasures.

Getting Organized – Choosing the Most Important

Though usually a versatile personality of a young genius will want to keep all of his or her belongings, a weekly or monthly session on “what and how to keep” will be of a great help when trying to organize hundreds of “very important” and “absolutely necessary” things.

Have the child sort through all of the possessions, choose the most important, date them, and place in separate folders or boxes. After some time ask the child to review the collection: the child will on his/her own discover that many things haven’t been used for a while. As a result, some free space will have a chance to appear.

How to Organize the Gifted Children’s Room

Since all of the gifted child’s belongings need to be stored somewhere, make sure the young individual has enough space and resources for it. Provide the child with a number of files and boxes to keep the things in. When they are full, it is evidently the time to sort, reorganize, and again return to the “what and how to keep” strategy. If there are still too many things that require space, provide it.

It takes time for the child to realize that some things are not as essential as they seemed. So, be patient, and have the child sort the belongings regularly. Something will be definitely going away each time, since the interests and priorities of gifted and talented children change and develop quickly.

Organizational skills of gifted and talented children are often their weak point. That’s why parents should devote time and effort to their development. The children should be provided with appropriate resources for storing their treasures. Parents' understanding, ideas, and help in organizing the child’s regular and methodical sorting of own possessions will both add to the child’s organizational skills, and help to keep his or her room neat and clean.

Yahnke Walker, Sally, and Pernu, Caryn. The Survival Guide for Parents of Gifted Kids: How to Understand, Live With, and Stick Up for Your Gifted Child. MN: Free Spirit Publishing, 2002.

The copyright of the article Organizational Skills of Gifted Children in Parenting a Gifted Child is owned by Alla Kondrat. Permission to republish Organizational Skills of Gifted Children in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.