Rethinking Gifted Child Counseling: A Critique and a Proposal

Abstract

Most researchers and practitioners have treated the findings from studies addressing gifted children’s presumably unique social and emotional needs as reasonable, verifiable, and theoretically sound. This review took a more skeptical approach. Following Ricoeur’s (1970) “hermeneutics of suspicion,” an interpretive strategy which, by definition, is biased toward the negative—biased in favor of finding problems—this review sought the disguised, suppressed, and disavowed meanings underlying the field of gifted child counseling and, as a result, identified five problem areas: (a) the absence of clarity in definitions of gifted children, (b) the absence of confirmation that gifted children possess unique psychosocial needs, (c) the proliferation of single-case studies in gifted child counseling research, (d) the practice of treating children’s giftedness as independent of culture and the conditions of its discovery, and (e) research biases supporting the need for gifted child services. This led to the conclusion that there is little or no empirical or theoretical support for a counseling approach geared specifically for so-called gifted children. Counseling and therapy with children labeled gifted should be treated no differently from counseling and therapy with children not so labeled.